Pat Ryan: 'Some Cork people were writing off Limerick. Are they off their game?'

Irish Examiner

03-06-2025

The Sunday morning of their season-defining Waterford game, Pat Ryan's phone pinged.
Into his WhatsApp landed a Saving Private Ryan meme. But instead of Tom Hanks and his combat helmet, superimposed in was Pat Ryan's face. And instead of Saving Private Ryan, the graphic read Saving Pat Ryan.
The Cork manager thought to himself, 'what the…' and then thought not a second more of it given the importance of the day in front of him.
Of all the noise, hype, and 'twisted' commentary that has greeted the Cork hurlers in recent weeks, the Saving Pat Ryan meme was at the lesser end of the ridiculous scale.
But finding its way into the Cork manager's pocket on the morning of a potentially championship-ending fixture shows how difficult the task is to insulate his players from all the noise, hype, and 'rubbish' that has flowed and continues to flow since their League title procession.
'It's hard because fellas are amateur athletes,' the Cork manager begins.
'They're going into work, you're hearing it. Fellas are seeing it on social media. There's WhatsApp groups, there's text messages going around. There was even one that came to my phone about Saving Private Ryan.'
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Social media is unmanageable, the content churned out and passed around not held to particularly high standards. Then there's the printed word and the punditry side of the game.
Pat expects that corner of the house to maintain a certain level of credibility. He couldn't believe what he read on the run-in to the Limerick round-robin fixture.
'I thought some of it was rubbish. The really annoying thing was some of our own people writing off Limerick. Are they off their game? That's only setting us up for a fall. They're things that fellas pin to dressing rooms and that couldn't be further from the truth.
'We try to be as humble as we can. That's what we try to do in Cork. There was a thing written ages ago around the football thing, which I'd say John Cleary hates, this thing about 'Corkness'. It drives me mad when I hear that. It's the most stupid word I've ever saw.
'From my point of view, I just thought a lot of it was wrong. Even about Paddy Power paying out, that was only a gimmick, a stunt, and wrong for a betting company to be doing that for amateur athletes, putting them under that pressure.'
Ryan was correct to call out the betting company's carry on. Their antics amounted to shameless exploitation of amateur athletes. Paddy Power paying out or not, Pat notes that his players and others are being exploited all the time as amateur athletes.
That, though, is a conversation for a different day. This conversation is about reminding those on the outside that these Cork players have Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm lives.
'I just think fellas need to be more cognisant of when you're dealing with some of the articles that are written and the things that are said, some of the things going online, that you're talking about people who aren't getting paid for what they're doing.
'I keep stressing it to the lads, they'll never get the chance to be…unless you're a doctor, a teacher, or volunteering out in Africa…to be part of something here and create a legacy that gives so much joy to people.
"You saw what happened with Limerick, and with Clare when they won the All-Ireland last year, that joy they gave them. Even ourselves, getting to the final, the joy that brought to fellas and obviously disappointment abroad as well.
'From our point of view, the lads are giving everything they can and that should be honoured all the time.'
Cork's manager Pat Ryan during the first half in Limerick. Pic: ©INPHO/James Crombie.
That's the off-the-pitch distractions and disturbances dealt with. Now, to matters inside the whitewash.
John Meyler was the first Cork manager to navigate the Munster round-robin. Ryan always remembers John's remarks, no doubt influenced by the Premiership background of his son, David, that Munster round-robin defeats have to be parked, move on, and reflect as you go forward if the opportunity allows.
The Waterford game and its season-defining status came a week after the Limerick skewering. There was no time to sift through the debris of the 16-point Gaelic Grounds reality check.
The two-week lead-in to their return trip to the Gaelic Grounds allows for the necessary space to study the first visit and arrive at a fixable conclusion as to why Cok were so below the requisite markers for the non-negotiables of effort and attitude.
Mark Coleman, said Pat, was the only individual of the starting 15 that showed up, battled, and engaged his opponent. That's some indictment of the other 14.
Ryan has his own conclusion as to what happened on May 18. He reckons the group had fallen into an attitude where there was across-the-board contentment that 'things are moving grand'.
Limerick fairly shook that attitude from them. Limerick fairly shook them out of their comfortable space.
'Losing to Limerick is never embarrassing but losing to any team in that manner is embarrassing. We'll reflect on it tactically and what we need to do.
'If you lost by five or six points, you can say we were tired, or the three-week break, or we had a long campaign coming off the league final, but when you get hammered like that, you just look at it systemically, where was that attitude from and we just left them hurl all over the field.
'It was a puzzling one and I probably look back on my own role, maybe I didn't go after them enough. Maybe I wasn't driving the standard over the last couple of weeks and maybe a small bit of complacency slipped in that we were going well enough, but look, obviously, Limerick were well prepared. Our job is to make sure we're right the next day.
'I told the lads we were going to get an unbelievable version of Limerick on that day. Maybe they didn't believe us, but they know now. There's a Munster title on the line. A lot of our guys don't have it and we'd dearly love it.'