Cork players don't look to blame others anymore

Irish Examiner

a day ago

'Donal O'Mahony, he's a good friend of mine, he's in the coaching ticket there. We have huge regard for each other.' – John Kiely, May 30.
In the skull and crossbone, Donal O'Mahony and John Kiely were kindred spirits. Thickest of thieves. One of the few things they didn't share in UCC was a Fitzgibbon Cup. Kiely finished up a year before O'Mahony was part of the 1996 winning team.
Full of affirmations and convictions, it's easy to see how they gravitated to each other and continue to remain pals despite their obvious differences. The respect Kiely speaks of is indisputable.
O'Mahony considers Limerick 'a generational team' but Pat Ryan's Cork beat them twice in the space of two months last year.
Since then, there has been the 16-point payback but the Cork selector approaches Rd 2 in this Munster final brimming with belief.
'I've been involved a couple of years now and your natural inclination is you want to win every game, and when you don't, you get really disappointed. But like Pat's language is very good this year. It's a marathon, it's not a sprint. You just need to stay in there, and then when the time to make a move comes, you make it.
'So for us, making a move is from now on. We're in the Munster final, we're going to the All-Ireland series, so like this is happening. While we lost the game against Limerick and drew a game against Clare the first day, we're making finals whether it's by a circuitous route or a straight line route.'
To draw a line under what happened on May 18, there had to be a bloodletting. A round of genuine mea culpas. Management and players owned up.
'If the lads are waiting for us to tell them to do things, I think we're in difficulty,' says O'Mahony of the fall-out from the game. 'There's a real sense that they let the group down, ourselves, they let the backroom team down and, yeah, we let the supporters down.
'It's not just the players, it's the management as well. We're in charge of setting up, we're in charge of the tactics, so we're all in it together, and that's a real positive for us, that the players hold their own meetings, and take responsibility, and they don't look to blame the coach, or the selectors, or the physios, or the doctors.
'That's, I think, a shift in the last couple of years. Before, maybe it wasn't that way, whereas now they take ownership of the performances, and don't look for excuses, don't look to blame people.'
O'Mahony has obviously heard the yarn that Cork took a dive last month but he dispels that theory completely. At the same time, there are priorities. 'We always define that the big players play when it's needed the most.
Is it needed the most in a round-robin game in Munster or an All-Ireland semi-final? You kind of go towards the latter there.
'This narrative that we kind of took the foot off the pedal and trained really hard for last week is incorrect. Our job all the time is to go out and try to win games, and we didn't achieve that outcome, but it wasn't a fatal blow-up, we weren't knocked out of the championship, and it put us back into an environment that we've been dealing with well in the last two to three years when our backs are to the wall.
'I think that's becoming our defining character. When we need to deliver, we're getting better at it. We're not there yet, but we're definitely getting better at it.'
Although it was at times a fraught performance, beating Waterford last Sunday week was a case of mission accomplished and reaching a third consecutive competition final.
O'Mahony didn't need the outside world for validation. 'The same fellas patting you on the back the week after Waterford were the same fellas kicking your ass after Limerick, so you don't get carried away with it. Our focus is getting the best out of our fellas, because we do believe that if we get the best out of our fellas, as we proved last year, we're a match for anyone.
'Our philosophy is a general psychological set, you have to keep the outside out, the noise that we can't control, but we're very proud of the connection that we have with our supporters.
'That brings with it the responsibility that you have to deliver. Everybody's busy these days, people are paying good money to go and watch us, and in Limerick the last day, the traffic was chaotic. People are giving a lot of time, a lot of money to follow us, we need to give them something to follow.'
The wrecking ball that Brian Hayes has become at the edge of the square is the type of forward Cork folk will gladly fork out to see.
O'Mahony can't stress enough how vital it is to have players with different skillsets.
'We felt at times before we might have been one-dimensional, whereas we've developed an adaptability, and that's a concern we have when we're looking at who we add to the panel. If we keep adding the same player, we're probably easier to play against.
'On one end of the spectrum, you have William Buckley who is lightning fast and a brilliant fella on the ball, all the way up to Brian Hayes, who's 6ft 5, and plays a totally different style of hurling.
'We feel we can change the way we play in-game, which is really important. In my first iteration (with John Meyler), we had really good players but were probably the same type of players and replacing a player with the same type of player you were likely to get the same outcome.'
To execute a different result now, Cork must be different.
O'Mahony is emphatic that they can be.
'If you look at the modern game of hurling, we were 12 points up at half-time in Ennis, and Clare turned a 12-point lead around in 35 minutes of hurling, so why can't we turn a 16-point deficit around in 70 minutes of hurling?
'We know we're capable of getting goals, and we're averaging nearly 30 points, we were 31 against Waterford, and we have the arsenal to do it, so we're confident that that 16-point deficit isn't a barrier to us.'