BY KIERAN McCARTHY
JOHN O’Rourke was so eager to get match minutes into his legs that he returned to Carbery Rangers training two days after Cork were knocked out of the All-Ireland football championship.
He wanted to get back on a pitch playing football after his inter-county championship season consisted of two substitute appearances in Cork’s six games. In the Munster SFC quarter-final with Limerick on April 7th, O’Rourke was introduced after 66 minutes. His next taste of competitive action was on May 18th when he was brought on in the 74th minute away to Clare. That was it. Two brief appearances.
Returning to his club, O’Rourke just wanted to play football.
‘With Cork I didn’t really get any game time apart from a couple of minutes at the end of two games. You spend all year training really hard but then you end up not playing a lot of games and with very little game-time,’ he says.
‘I hadn’t played a whole pile of football this year but had done a lot of training so when we were knocked out with Cork I was straight back in with Ross on the Tuesday night, eager to get games under my belt.
‘It does take time to get back up to speed. Even though you play training games, playing games is different so it did take me a while to get going fully. The more games I played, the better I feel, and I had to catch up because I hadn't played a lot of games with Cork.
‘I was happy enough the last day (against Clonakilty) to make a contribution that was significant and I am hoping to kick on again on Sunday.’
O’Rourke’s worth to Carbery Rangers was in evidence in their last McCarthy Insurance Premier SFC game – he was named the Star’s man of the match in their 0-12 to 1-9 draw against Clonakilty that saved their season. O’Rourke was a central figure as Ross rallied from six points behind to snatch a draw. He’s finding his rhythm after a frustrating inter-county season.
John O'Rourke made two sub appearances in the 2024 championship for Cork.‘For a man of John O’s talent, he’s been written off too easily but he loves coming back to the club. He’s a different player when he comes back to us and gets time on the pitch. He got no game time with Cork and that baffles me. You saw what he could do out there today,’ Ross boss Seamus Hayes said afterwards, and he will hope O’Rourke is in top form for Sunday’s crunch clash with Castlehaven in Leap (4pm). The Rosscarbery team knows what they need to do to stay alive in this championship: beat reigning Munster and county champions Castlehaven, who are already guaranteed a spot in the knock-out stages. Even if Ross win, they must hope Clonakilty beat St Michael’s, but it gets tricky then with scoring differences. Before it even gets to checking calculators, O’Rourke and Co need to beat the Haven. Easier said than done.
‘It has to be the best performance we can give on the day,’ O’Rourke stresses.
‘We have to be very accurate in what we do, we can’t give them easy scorable frees, stuff like that. They are a team that will punish you if you make mistakes, just look at their inside forward line.
‘We will need to be as accurate as we can with everything, from our conversion rate from scorable opportunities, and also defensively we need to make sure we don't give away easy scores.
‘We have to lift ourselves up to a new level that we haven't found yet this year. If we do that, hopefully we’ll be competitive.’
O’Rourke saw signs in their comeback against Clonakilty last time out that suggest they’re primed to challenge a Castlehaven team that hasn’t put a foot wrong in this campaign. Clon led 1-8 to 0-5 entering the last quarter but battled back, point by point.
‘We were happy with the response; it showed there is character within the team, that we weren’t willing to give up even in a difficult position so they are positive signs that we are moving in the right direction,’ O’Rourke says, and he knows they needed a response after their opening round loss to St Michael’s, 1-8 to 0-8, that left them playing catch-up from the start.
‘Even in the Michael’s game there was no shortage of effort but our execution, our skills and our finishing just wasn’t good enough and we didn’t deserve anything from that game,’ he admits.
‘Against Clonakilty, 15 minutes of the first half went against us, but in both games we would be happy with fitness levels and character shown within the team. We would prefer to have two wins but we are where we are, and if you make a mistake at this level you’ll be punished big-time.
‘Castlehaven is another challenge, and it’s up another level, they are the best team in Cork right now, so that’s the challenge we have now, to prepare as best we can and see where that takes us.’
O’Rourke knows what Castlehaven will bring on Sunday. These two know each other well.
‘We seem to have played Castlehaven more than any other team,’ he says.
‘The first time we met was in 2009, that was my first year being involved. Before that Carbery Rangers had to build up through the grades and we were always looking up, whereas Castlehaven were established at senior level then and had already won counties.
‘The rivalry has developed because we’ve played each other so many times since 2009, and most of the time there is nothing in it. We played each other a lot at the start of the last decade – we had semi-finals in 2011 and 2012 and they were a good bit over us. With the group stages coming in we’ve ended up in the same group a few times now, so it’s a rivalry that has built naturally over the years.
‘Look at the locations too, we’re not too far from each other and both sets of players would know each other from playing underage up.’
The next installment of Ross v Haven is on Sunday, and if Carbery Rangers are to stun their neighbours, they’ll need O’Rourke to lead by example. He scored the equalising free in their group draw against Castlehaven last season. That and more is needed on Sunday.
