Composed Leesiders not carrying baggage of past teams - O’Sullivan
the situation again. ‘We’ve asked them to be different over the last 12 to 18 months. Last year was an interruption obviously and we couldn’t get to where we wanted to get to last year. So we took the winter to prepare and to talk about that resolve and our strength in depth and bits and pieces. ‘It’s ultimately down to what’s inside the dressing room, it’s the heart, the willingness and that want. Any person who wants to climb Everest has to go through it. Our guys, we are extremely proud of them because maybe 12 or 24 months ago, even take the Tipperary game last year, we had Tipperary on the back foot but we couldn’t see it out so today was very pleasing from our point of view.’ Maybe it was wrong too that old assumptions about Cork teams were attached to this present group of players, many of whom carry none of the baggage of past defeats. ‘We had nine lads who had never played in Croke Park before today, before we came up,’ said O’Sullivan, who performed the media duties instead of manager Kieran Kingston. ‘Yeah, look, they have no baggage. There’s one or two lads who have been unsuccessful here in an All Ireland but they know those are days they are never going to get back again, so that’s history, we can’t change that. ‘Those games against Clare (in 2013), they can never get them back and it’s like today, there were moments in that game like Tim O’Mahony’s one we would have loved to get back again but we can’t change it. It’s not going to be an issue for us, we are not going to dwell on the past.’ The O’Mahony episode O’Sullivan referenced was the Cork defender’s failure to clear the danger before Adrian Mullen’s goal for Kilkenny which forced extratime. ‘That’s the way we play the game,’ shrugged O’Sullivan, noting their short-passing style. ‘We will accept mistakes because in the game we try to play, there will be mistakes. We as a management team are quite willing to accept them, once they are happy to play the game we want them to play. ‘Mistakes happen. Tim put it to bed before he got to the dressing room, he came back out and he had an incredible 20 minutes after that. The mistake didn’t trouble him, it didn’t trouble our team so that was the important factor. Before, it might have but this team is different.’ Kilkenny boss Brian Cody engaged in a brief post mortem that lasted precisely five questions. ‘It was one of those games where we had chances at different times in the game, they had chances as well, it kind of ebbed and flowed a fair bit,’ said Cody. ‘It looked coming to the end of normal time, that they were going to win it in normal time but we scored a very good goal to bring it to extra-time. ‘It was a huge, huge score for us to get and it kept us in the game and it brought us to extra-time, which we did experience already this year (against Wexford). But that’s not enough, you still have to go out and win it on the pitch and that didn’t happen for us.’