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'I was thankful that we got out with a point': Red card in rearview mirror as Barrett leads Cork into battle
HAVING BEGUN THE Munster senior hurling championship on a low note, Cork attacker Shane Barrett could yet end it by captaining the winning side in the final.
If the Rebels are to win a provincial title for the first time in seven years, it will be Robert Downey lifting the Mick Mackey Cup in the Mick Mackey Stand but, as the Glen Rovers man has been limited to a place on the substitutes' bench due to a hamstring injury, his vice-captain will lead the side out.
For 24-year-old Barrett, it was an honour to be asked by manager Pat Ryan but, equally, something he has tried to take in his step.
'Pat said it to me at the end of year review, would I be interested,' he says.
'I asked him who the captain was going to be, but he wouldn't tell me – I had a bit of an inkling and then I found out it was Rob. It is an honour to be asked especially when Rob was going to be captain.
'It is a nice honour but hopefully I won't have to do it too many more times this year and Rob will be back.
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'When I get the chance to do it, you are not really thinking about it at the moment but afterwards you reflect on it and it is a nice thing.'
Reflection of the less-nice kind was required after the Blarney man's red card against Clare at Zimmer Biomet Páirc Chíosóg in the first round of fixtures.
'Look, I suppose it happened,' he says, 'and I was thankful that we got out of Ennis with a point.
'If we had lost up there, we would have been under a lot more pressure and I would have been feeling a lot worse but once we got a point and Tipp and Limerick also drew, no team was worse off.
'It cost us a point in Ennis and very regretful but we weren't any worse off than when we got up there. Pat had said beforehand that he would have taken a point against the All-Ireland champions.'
Barrett tries to escape the attention of Limerick's Will O'Donoghue. Tom Maher / INPHO Tom Maher / INPHO / INPHO
The indiscretion meant a watching brief in Cork's next game, the routine victory over a Tipperary side that were themselves reduced to 14 men after Darragh McCarthy's first-minute dismissal.
'It was my own doing, so I couldn't really give out to anyone else,' Barrett says.
'I probably hadn't watched a game like that in ages, so it was an experience I hadn't got since I was about 18. I didn't think of it much before the game but at the game it was horrible, but the lads were brilliant on the day and put the game to bed in the first half.
'So, I enjoyed the second half.'
While the second half of the 16-point defeat to Limerick at TUS Gaelic Grounds three weeks ago was better than the first period, nobody in red was enjoying it.
However, there wasn't any dwelling on it, either, given the need to respond a week later against Waterford.
For Cork, the Monday gym sessions bring as much mental as physical benefit.
'That is the case,' Barrett says, 'especially when you have the back-to-back games and say you have been playing on the Sunday.
'You come in on the Monday and completely park that game. In our case it was Waterford this week, so you don't have time to be dwelling – you are just fully focused, about being back around the lads and getting our work done, getting ready for training on Tuesday and the match at the weekend.'
And, given the chance to avenge that earlier defeat, where does Barrett identify the major areas for improvement?
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'Everything, really,' he says.
There wasn't anything we could have taken as a positive, they blew us completely out of the water. We had no answer for them whatsoever.
'I think we improved on a lot of things against Waterford, that weren't there in the Gaelic Grounds, but we just had no answer for them up there.
'Limerick are an unbelievable team. You just have to respect what they've done over the last seven, eight years. They're an unbelievable unit, a well-oiled machine. They know each other inside out.
'It's about weathering the tough moments against them, and trying to impose your own gameplan on them.'
