BY JOHNNY CAROLAN
CROKE Park, Sunday, July 21st. A million different things happened – among them one of the best-ever hurlers scoring one of the best-ever goals and an unpunished jersey-pull – and, at the end of 90 minutes of pulsating hurling, Clare had logged a solitary point more than Cork had.
The narrowest of margins brought the widest chasm in terms of what followed. Tony Kelly, scorer of that wonder-goal, collected the Liam MacCarthy Cup as Clare celebrated and looked forward to a winter of warm memories. For Cork, 19 years without the All-Ireland senior hurling title became at least 20.
That’s not to say that there weren’t memories of their own to be enjoyed – the epic win over Limerick at SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoimh in May will forever be recalled by all who were there while the semi-final win over the same opposition, ending their five-in-a-row dream, had a coming-of-age feel to it.
Unfortunately, while Clare have the All-Ireland and Limerick’s pain is eased, ever so slightly, by making it six straight Munster titles, Cork ended the year without silverware – the 2018 Munster SHC the last trophy won.
Halting that statistic is a keen aim as 2025 comes into view. Of course, the tough part is that Cork are starting from the bottom of the mountain like everyone else but, though the run to the All-Ireland final did not yield ultimate success, it can be put to educational use.
The 2024 season was the second of the three-year term that manager Pat Ryan was given when he succeeded Kieran Kingston – but he readily admits that failure to emerge from Munster for the second year in a row would have brought the end-date forward.
‘From my point of view, in two years you have to be making the thing better,’ he says.
‘We didn’t get out of Munster the first year – not getting out of Munster again, what would that have meant?
‘You’d have people saying, “Pat Ryan’s term should be over,” and then you’re going into a third year with negativity around the place. Don’t get me wrong, you’d try to fight through that if you thought it was the right thing to do, but we’ve lots of very capable people in Cork that can manage the senior hurling team.
‘I’m a big believer that you don’t monopolise it if you’re not making it better and I feel that going into next year, too – we can’t be taking a backward step.
‘Not putting pressure on myself, what’s a backward step? It’s probably not getting out of Munster. Getting to an All-Ireland semi-final again is a prerequisite for us, because I think that that’s the standard we should be getting to.
‘Trying to win a trophy – we had a good year last year and fellas could take a lot out of it but we still had no trophy. Limerick still went home with the Munster title, Clare obviously had the All-Ireland. That’s a huge thing for us, going forward.’
Cork manager Pat Ryan.
In the last minute of extra time in July, Robbie O’Flynn had his shirt pulled by Clare’s Conor Leen as he attempted to score an equaliser. The shot went wide and no free was called but there have been no complaints from the Cork camp – ‘Dónal O’Grady used to always say that the best team wins,’ Ryan says.
Equally, Ciarán Joyce feels that it’s more worthwhile to look at other areas in terms of finding the extra few percent.
‘Obviously, everybody’s talking about the Robbie O'Flynn incident,’ he says, ‘but, to be honest, if that happened in the first few minutes of the game, no-one would have been talking about it.
‘That’s the way hurling goes, that’s the way every sport goes, there’s the small margins. On the day, I suppose you could say that Clare were the better team and we can’t have any complaints.
‘We’ll use it as motivation for next year too as well, that’s the other way of looking at it. We took a lot of learnings from that match, particularly, and the semi-final – even all year, we took a lot of learnings, so we’ll definitely use them for next year as well.
‘We can take a lot of learnings from this year, especially after the first two games, that’s where we really kick-started our year. We hopefully want to take that momentum into next year now.
‘There’s a good team there, hopefully we’ll have another few days ahead of us. There’s no point dwelling on things – what happened happened. Hopefully, there’s a good future ahead for us.’
And what has Ryan learned about himself in the two previous years?
‘I think I probably focus on the things that need to work better,’ he says.
‘Instead of trying to do 101 things, it’s about looking at the things that can make us better. I think that I try to be consistent in my demeanour and the way I come to training and I try to be consistent in my talks with players and with what I’m doing.
‘As a manager of a team, you mightn’t always realise what an impact you’re having and that’s something I learned from Gary. People are looking at you to see how you manage a situation and everybody reacts off you.
‘Being consistent in my demeanor, consistent in the way I’m coming down and carrying a good enthusiasm for what I want to get out of it – that kind of culture ties in with how my biggest thing all the time is that it’s all about the players.
‘That hasn’t changed since I started managing teams, even minors and U21s when I was still playing.
‘Once you understand that it’s players win matches – I try to take ego out of it as much as I can, we all have a bit of an ego and we all like to be told that we’re doing a good job, but I’m under no illusions that I win if the players are good, I win if the players are motivated.
‘It’s like [racehorse trainer] Aidan O’Brien – and I’m not comparing myself to Aidan O’Brien – but you need the players, you need the people. You try to put the right things in place to reach that standard. I’m very lucky, we’re very lucky, we have brilliant players in Cork at the moment. Unfortunately, so do Limerick, so do Clare, so do a lot of other teams!’
