Lehane delight at victory over the All Ireland champions

HE has been involved with the Cork seniors since 2011, but Conor Lehane admitted that last Sunday’s win over Tipperary against the odds gave him as much satisfaction as anything he has previously experienced in the top flight.

“It’s a great feeling at the moment, because we’re not used to beating Tipp of late, so to come out on the right side of things today is fantastic, especially since they are the All-Ireland champions,” said the Midleton clubman, whose brilliant display at centre forward was a major factor in Cork’s shock win.

While he was satisfied that Cork went into the game in a positive frame of mind, he revealed they were a bit apprehensive about their chances at the same time.

“You have to back yourself if you are going to compete, and we did, but obviously you’d have it at back of your mind that the odds are stacked against you. Nobody was giving us a chance, and people had good reason to think that with the way we performed last year.

“I suppose you could say we’ve been just going through the motions for the past number of years, and you can only do that for so long before you become a bit disillusioned, so we knew we really needed to haul ourselves up this year.

“We knew we had the skill, but we didn’t have the right frame of mind, so we just had to zone in on what we needed to do, and that was the big difference,” he suggested.

Lehane also felt the rookies on the team were a big help, describing their contributions as unreal.

“Playing against the All-Ireland champions meant they were thrown in at the deep end today, but they really rose to the occasion, and that gave us a big boost. You had Shane Kingston scoring an important goal early in the second half, and Michael Cahalane got another after he was sprung from the bench, which swung the game for us near the end.”

In between those two goals, John McGrath bagged one for Tipp, and Lehane agreed it couldn’t have come at a worst time from Cork’s point of view.

“We were enjoying a bit of a purple-patch before it arrived, but the way we reacted to it was the key thing for us. I’d say people might have thought we’d struggle to respond, and it would have been easy to lose our focus having given it a good rattle up to that point.

“It’s always going to happen that things will go against you at some stage in any game, however, and we had prepared ourselves for that, and maybe Tipp weren’t prepared for the way we reacted, which possibly had a vital bearing on the outcome,” he suggested.

Looking ahead, Lehane accepts that expectation-levels have risen as a result of the win over Tipp, pointing out that they couldn’t have been much lower before the game.

“It was a great win today, and we always felt there was a performance like this in us, but we’re not deluded, it’s only a Munster quarter-final, so we have nothing to boast about yet. “There’s a tough semi-final to be played against Waterford, and, while we enjoyed beating Tipp, we’ll put this performance behind us straightaway, because it would be wrong to lose the run of ourselves after just one

victory.”