REBEL ROUSING
New year, new boss – but Cork hoping it’s not the same old story
IN ESCHEWING the niceties that usually inform a player’s comments about a departed manager, Patrick Horgan revealed some of the shortterm tensions that have stressed Cork hurling – but which are only another symptom of a much longer-lasting frustration.
Horgan has been the one player whose class and application have withstood those tribulations but also the pervasive mediocrity that explains why the county is facing into its 19th season without a senior hurling title – extending its longest wait between senior All-Ireland titles, which before this fast had stood at 16 seasons.
Yet Horgan was sucked into the miserable vortex that constituted the county’s summer last year, dropped for the matches against Antrim and Galway. Of all his comments on 2022 this week – he said he felt he had been treated unfairly, and that ‘the year was kind of a failure before it kind of even happened’ – it was another line that packed most power. ‘I just think there was stuff going on all the time that really is not supposed to happen on a team,’ he claimed. ‘Everybody is supposed to be positive and everybody is supposed to be driving each other, exactly the way it is happening now.’ Without mentioning the name of Kieran Kingston, Horgan’s comments were a pungent take on the squad he oversaw in what was the final season of his second coming as Cork manager.
If the squad now under the direction of Pat Ryan is a happier environment, as per Horgan’s experience, that upbeat mood will do well to survive exposure to the All-Ireland champions tonight.
Kingston’s second term ended following weeks of confusion, with reports he was offered a one-year extension following the widespread support of the players. Shortly after, it was announced he was leaving the position, and Ryan was the favourite to succeed him from the start.
He had been a selector for the two seasons of Kingston’s first time in charge, and he had an advisory function in 2020, the debut season of his second spell.
It was as coach of the county’s Under 20s that
Ryan’s reputation took national flight, and he ascended to a management role that comes with constant expectation, with a name for excellent man-management.
Those personnel skills could be more necessary than outsiders may have presumed, given what Horgan said. Ryan’s own record of working with Kingston, and the presence of Shane Kingston in the squad as one of Horgan’s teammates, introduces further complexity.
Tensions such as those revealed by Horgan are not uncommon, but in the case of a faltering superpower like Cork, they can appear magnified by deep-set frustrations.
Relief seems, on the surface, an improbable outcome tonight, yet there is the consolation wrought by how well Cork fared in last year’s league. But then that bright start to the season, which culminated in a league final defeat to Waterford, begot a summer of fleeting form and some sound beatings, and which eventually foundered with defeat to Galway in an AllIreland quarter-final.
Previews of the hurling league have repeated the view that this is a competition with no real-world consequences. That is true when it is compared to the football version, and the repercussions for the championship that league form will have on teams in Divisions 2 and 3.
Division 1 of the football league is distinguished by high levels of fitness and competitiveness, already evident in round one, and the result of the shortened season and the small break between league and championship that obliges counties to peak earlier.
Against that comparison, the hurling fare will struggle for meaning, but for individual counties, inspiration will be sourced from their own circumstances.
And Cork need the nourishment that comes from encouraging performances and good results.
Their 2022 championship started in heavy defeat to Limerick in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, before they lost to Clare in Semple Stadium.
Their summer teetered on the lip of abject embarrassment, but they were reprieved by the wretched form that left Waterford and Tipperary in even more helpless states.
It was wins over those two in their final matches that saw Cork scrape through to the All-Ireland series, where they beat Antrim in a preliminary quarter-final.
Galway stopped them shortly after, and amid the recriminations that followed their exit, the fact that they looked way off the standards set by Limerick was inescapable.
Optimists insist there is the talent to resurrect a fresh rebel force, and Ryan should be ideally placed to nurture these fledglings. He brought Cork to successive Under 20 titles in 2020 and 2021, and his knowledge of the rest of the senior panel through previous involvements with Kingston’s terms will be useful, too.
They won the Munster hurling league in a final against Tipperary, with a one-point win over Limerick part of their route to that pre-season success.
The value of that win against John Kiely’s side is close to nil, given the AllIreland champions were not long back from their team holiday. That didn’t prevent a crowd of over 4,500 streaming into Páirc Uí Rinn in mid-January for that fixture, which is another indication of the environment in which Pat Ryan now coaches.
The Cork hurling constituency expects. It always expects.
Ryan has talked about the complications that the Fitzgibbon Cup present for his plans for tonight’s game, while Mark Coleman and Alan Connolly are significant absentees owing to injury. Mark Keane, on last year’s panel, has been lost to the AFL, too.
There appears a wariness in some discussion of whether to invest too much in the league, given how progress to last year’s final did them no good in the longer run. They won their first four matches in last year’s competition, including a win against Limerick, but the optimism of spring was gone before summer had barely begun.
Little wonder, then, that Ryan talks of first principles in preparing his team for this year’s league.
‘We haven’t a lot done tactically and we’ve been concentrating on effort and attitude and physicality, that we’re trying to raise inside in training,’ he said after the win over Tipperary in the Munster league.
‘I think that that has been questioned in Cork an awful lot at times and we’ve been trying to make sure that fellas play until the final whistle. You could see here, with the Cork crowd, that we want to play silky hurling and show off our skills and all that, but we need fellas that are dying in the effort for us and I thought that lads did that in the end.’
That sounds like building from a modest base, but wherever he starts, Pat Ryan will have to contend with expectation, no matter how good the opposition or how much ground needs to be made up.
As always, Cork expects.
“Tensions are magnified by deep-set frustrations”