IF I WAS TO GIVE IT UP TODAY WOULD IT BE A FAILURE? NO, I LOVED EVERY MINUTE
But sharpshooter Horgan still dreams of claiming that elusive Celtic Cross
PATRICK Horgan is in contemplative mood. The manner in which Cork’s season in 2022 unravelled clearly hurt. The manner in which he lost his own place along the way only poured salt on the wounds of losing the Allianz League final to Waterford and then losing an All-Ireland quarter-final to Galway, a match in which Cork spurned a whole host of chances.
As the game’s all-time top championship scorer, passing a Cork icon in Christy Ring along the way to that mantle, he admits it was ‘very tough’ watching on that day at Thurles. Conor Lehane came into the game with some hot form to his name but had an offday from play and from placed balls, with Cork also spurning three good first-half goal chances.
Horgan’s direct replacement Tim O’Mahony was the new target man in the inside line but, by half-time, Horgan was on and gave his county a new focal point in attack. In the wake of Cork’s single-point defeat, manager Kieran Kingston walked, and Horgan has strong views on where it all went awry.
Cork’s barren run without a senior All-Ireland is unprecedented – it’s heading for 18 years now since 2005 and the last of what was back-to-back successes.
New manager Pat Ryan has quickly declared his intentions after stepping up to take over from Kieran Kingston, putting it on the record that the year would be a failure if Cork don’t deliver the game’s ultimate prize.
Horgan carefully ponders the question as to whether the same is true for himself.
‘Obviously the goal is to win an All-Ireland. That’s everyone’s goal.
‘Myself, I answer that question in a way that if I was to give it up today, would it be a failure, would it be something I would be disappointed with?
‘Yeah, obviously I would have been freaked out of my head not to win an All-Ireland but, at the same time, I answered that question in a way that I loved every minute of it.
‘I loved being involved with Cork and the amount of players I have played with, and the savage players I have played with, legends of the game.
‘That’s what I love and I enjoyed all of that, and was all of that a failure? No.
‘The only thing I can look back on and, I wish, I wish, is win an All-Ireland.
‘And it happens, only one team can win it every year and we will certainly be trying anyway. That’s all we can do.’
He admits to a level of surprise at being dropped for the All-Ireland qualifier against Antrim, with regular defender Tim O’Mahony coming in as a new target man in the full-forward line.
‘Ah, a small bit yeah, a small bit. I was surprised I wasn’t because I thought I was training really well, I felt really sharp at the time. But they obviously had different ideas and we’d to go with that really.’
Of his benching last year as the summer came to a boil, he said there wasn’t much by way of explanation. ‘No, funnily enough, I wasn’t given much of that.
‘Every player goes through these situations at some stage in your career. I probably went through something similar in ’17, early on. These things happen.
‘People come in with different opinions, different mindset and different things they want.
‘Different things from different fellas and you can’t do anything about that.
‘All you can do as a player is turn up every day and try your hardest to be a better team-mate and a better player yourself.
‘I don’t think of “How do I cover my back there now in all of this?” and “How do I cover someone else?”
‘It’s not something I think about because when you buy into something with a group you are all in it forever, and whatever comes out of it comes out of it, but the main thing is supporting each other.’
The Galway game was a hard one to take, especially looking on from the sideline for that first half as chance after chance went abegging.
‘It was tough to watch. I suppose my friends going through a situation like that, when I know the effort that they are after putting in, and leaving scores like that behind, they would have been disappointed themselves.
‘We were all disappointed obviously but those games come, and on another day we would have been out of sight.’
Pat Ryan is his sixth different manager with Cork, a testament to the longevity of a player whose senior career now stretches across three different decades. Married to Ashley in late 2019, the couple had a first child last April, baby Jack. This May, Horgan himself turns 35, though he isn’t about to get sucked into retirement talk.
‘Sometimes, when people ask me my age and I haven’t thought about it, I think about it when they ask me and I say, “No, that can’t be right!”
‘I feel fresh, I feel fit, probably fitter than ever before. I just have this drive for continuous improvement and any player in the country who has that, you don’t want to give it up when you’re thinking those things.
‘You’ve a lot of fellas coming on to every county panel at the moment and they’re phenomenal athletes and they’ve speed – they don’t need to think because they’re really fast, they’re really skilful – everything comes easy to them.
‘When you get a bit older, you need to do a bit more thinking and experience counts for a lot.
‘It gives you a half a yard – of course I’m going to say that, but you feel like you know what works for you.’
“Every player goes through these situations”