LEHANE HAILS
KILKENNY, Cork and Tipperary. Hurling’s roll of honour reads 34, 30 and 26 for the game’s traditional ‘Big Three’. Except Conor Lehane isn’t hung up on the past. Cork’s bright, young, talented forward watched Kilkenny and Tipp contest last Sunday’s Allianz Hurling League final, safe in the knowledge that the same pairing shared centre stage in the same fixture 12 months earlier only for both to exit the Championship in July.
Clare’s victory over Cork last September, along with a summer of shock results, is proof to him that the All-Ireland race is wide open and that history is bunk.
‘There is no big three anymore,’ he insists, preferring instead to widen the group to, if anything, a ‘Big Eight’.
He believes that 2013’s Championship showed real change in the amount of counties who can compete for top honours, with Limerick and Dublin making long-awaited provincial breakthroughs.
‘Definitely. Last year more than ever. Every single game that every team played there was a majority of five points in it? It was crazy that way.
‘Back when Kilkenny were dominating there were huge gaps between teams. Now that it has gone so professional and teams are working so hard during the winter to get themselves fit, fast and strong, it’s incredible how competitive it has got. That brings the best out of you.’
So he’s not overly worried by the fact that Kilkenny annexed their eighth League crown under Brian Cody and a three-in-arow for the county.
‘The way Kilkenny played they deserved it. I’ve no doubt they’ll be there in some way shape or form. But you can’t ignore last year and how it changed come the summer. It is always different for the Championship. It’s just a higher level again – there is so much more at stake.’
After a League campaign in which Cork clinched promotion from Division 1B and only lost out to Tipperary in a quarter-final thriller, he feels the Championship is anything but a foregone conclusion. He points out that last year’s top-flight relegation battle was fought out between Cork and Clare – and look what happened after that.
‘It’s the exact same as it was this time last year after we were relegated. We had to deal then with driving on from there. This year is the same. We’re starting from the very bottom; everyone is on a level playing field.
‘People can have predictions but who would have thought that ourselves and Clare, who were in the relegation final, would have both got to the All-Ireland and have two great matches at the end of the year? You can never know for sure.
‘Last year we built great character from losing a relegation final, a Munster final and just missing out on an All-Ireland. It was a diamond in the rough at the time.’
BUT THIS year it’s all about s i l v e r ware. ‘There is only so much learning you want to do. You’ve to see yourself as a team together, make sure something like that won’t happen again, that you won’t panic in a big situa- tion.’ It has to be remembered that Cork were within seconds of continuing that dominance of hurling’s Big Three. Until Domhnall O’Donovan’s injury time point, Patrick Horgan’s score looked to have been the winner, a result that would have ensured the last 15 All-Ire- lands were shared between Kilkenny, Tipperary and Cork.
Instead, Shane O’Donnell (left) made a hero of himself in the Clare goal rush in the replay, the margins still so close that Cathal Naughton’s late chance for Cork could have altered the script.
‘You can’t pin-point just one thing,’ says Lehane, who scored a screamer of a goal himself in the drawn game. ‘If you keep thinking like that it will wreck your head. The game went the way it went. You just have to accept that and learn from it, even though it might annoy you. The sooner you learn from it the better because you’ll become a better player.
‘It was tough at the time trying to watch over it. In the first game, especially, we thought we had it. Domhnall scored an unbelievable point. I’ve seen both games now. As
It’s incredible just how competitive it has become
a neutral they were unbelievable.’
It hasn’t needed manager Jimmy Barry-Murphy to forensically analyse where it all went wrong.
‘He knows we’re intelligent enough to pinpoint what we have to improve on. Individually as well, we have to make sure to go the extra step.’
It helped that the months that followed were a blur of success and exotic travel. His 2-10 haul for Midleton in the Cork county final against Sarsfields became a YouTube hit and he finished the year in the surreal surrounds of Shanghai rugby club as a late call up for the All-Stars hurling trip.
It all helped him to move on from the events of September. ‘After the All-Ireland we had a club match the following week so we didn’t have too much time to moan about it. When I look back on it now it was disappointing but to be a part of the whole thing was fantastic– I’d never been a part of something like that before. It was a surreal kind of time. We drove on then with the club.
‘That made it a bit easier to get over the All-Ireland in a way, to have that success with the club. Because we haven’t had it – it was 22 years.