Keegan pivotal in helping Ryan find balance between leading and managing

Irish Examiner

14-07-2025

They don't come much more self-critical than Pat Ryan.
And more often than not, the Cork manager's self-criticism is completely unprompted.
In the Croke Park media room after their All-Ireland semi-final win, Ryan was asked how difficult it was to stand again at ground zero following extra-time heartache last July and plot a fresh course all the way back to the decider then 12 months in the distance.
He stated in reply that one of the first actions undertaken was he and the rest of management looking at what they had done wrong in 2024 and the final itself.
He could easily have said that he and management looked at what they could have done better or looked at where they needed to improve.
That's not Ryan's style, though. He never spares himself.
Last week's All-Ireland final press evening at Páirc Uí Chaoimh was no different.
'I was probably managing instead of leading,' admitted Pat when asked by the Examiner what he was getting at with the aforementioned semi-final statement.
Performance coach Gary Keegan isn't exclusively for the players. Pat too sits down with him to learn and grow, to have pointed out what he might be blind to.
'Gary would speak an awful lot with me that you need to lead maybe a bit more, instead of maybe managing the situations.
"It's not taking over, it's you giving the direction clearer to people and you're giving the direction of what we want to do and the standards and the expectations of everybody is clearer and then fellas just go and do their jobs, whatever their role is within our group.
'I think the fact that we did perform really, really well in 2024, the players believed in us as a management team more.
"And when the players are believing in you as a management team and understand that you're doing the right things and that you can get them to where they want to get to, what their dreams and expectations are, that gave us a bigger footing again in 2025 to go on and expand our game-plan and expand the way we wanted to do things.'
Pat leads where he has to. The leadership group established at the outset of the 2025 assault ensures the camp is player-led regarding on-field style and off-field analysis.
'The 20-minute video sessions are gone. It's five, six, seven minutes regularly, just to get fellas tuned in and that seems to be working. But the proof is in the pudding on Sunday.'
Neither Pat nor anybody else in the Cork camp is sitting down in-person with Gary Keegan on the run-in to Sunday. They are instead sitting down for Zoom calls with the Lions staffer resident on the far side of the world.
'He's been unbelievable for us over the last couple of years,' Ryan continued.
'It was Kieran [Kingston] who first got him involved. I met Gary in 2023, and he was adamant he wanted to stay involved. Obviously, his work schedule had got busier, but he was adamant that he could do it.
"He's probably down to us maybe five or six times a year, he does an awful lot of one-to-ones with the lads, does one-to-ones with myself.
'He's done one or two zoom calls since he's been away in Australia with the lads, and he'll do one or two more before the All-Ireland.
'He makes the effort. Like, he was up at 3.30am after one of the matches, he's got really, really keen, he's got a great affinity to these players, and as good as a fella that you could meet.'
Elsewhere, the Cork boss said his 'biggest bugbear' in management is the inability to get messages to players during Croke Park games.
'There should be a situation where you have something in place, some sort of mechanism where you can give instructions maybe two or three times a half. A runner, or something like that. It's absolutely crazy that coaches can't adjust on that situation on that day.'