Cork's best young hurlers will be out to impress new manager Pat Ryan

THE All-Ireland football final remains the only outstanding item remaining in the inter-county GAA season, meaning the club scene is about to take centre stage, with both the football and hurling championships set to be crackers on Leeside.

The split season was devised to ensure the club players get a significant amount of the season siphoned away for themselves.

It may not be to everyone’s liking to have the inter county calendar effectively shut down by mid-July, but it undeniably presents the club scene with a chance to shine.

From a Cork inter-county point of view the club championships kick off from a relatively positive starting point.

The football side did not pull up any trees in their 2022 campaign, but surviving in Division 2 in the league, beating Louth and Limerick in the qualifiers, and putting up ‘respectable’ performances against both Kerry and Dublin constituted a reasonably positive campaign.

The inverted commas are there to signify the fact that Cork never looked like beating either of those two sides, but considering Cork’s injury issues and where they are in their development cycle there were certainly more positives than negatives to take away from the campaign.

Cork’s hurling season ended in extremely disappointing and frustrating fashion, as Cork will feel that they should have beaten Galway in the All-Ireland quarter-final in Thurles, and then gone on to have a right crack at Limerick in the resulting semi-final.

Sarsfield’s Pat Ryan has now stepped into the hot seat, and while we await news on what his management team will look like for next season, you can be sure that the upcoming club championships will be studied with great interest by whoever will eventually make up this coaching ticket. 

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A fresh approach and new ideas have to be seen as a good thing, and you would expect that numerous players who were not part of the 2022 panel will suddenly come into the reckoning.

Given that Ryan was the manager of the Cork U20 sides that won both the 2020 and 2021 U20 All-Ireland’s you would certainly expect many of the graduates of these two teams to feature more heavily going forward.

To have players with the confidence garnered from underage All-Ireland triumphs coming onto the team can only be a positive.

Eoin and Brian Roche, Eoin Downey, Ethan Twomey, Sam Quirke, Brian O’Sullivan, Colin O’Brien and Darragh Flynn would all expect to get this chance, with the likes of Tommy O’Connell, Shane Barrett and Daire Connery also hoping for some more game time.

It will also be incredibly interesting to see how Declan Dalton performs for Fr O’Neill’s in the coming weeks and months, and also on what role, if any, he will have with Cork going forward.

The football management team is a little up in the air given that John Cleary was acting as interim manager in the absence of Keith Ricken, who had to step away from the main job early in the season.

It remains to be seen what the make-up of this management team will be for 2023.

However this ends up looking the hope will be that Cork can build on the progress made in 2022.

Probably the easiest way that Cork can improve is to get most, or all, of their injured contingent back.

The details of Cork’s injury list have been well documented before, so no point repeating the long list here, but if Cork can get a full squad playing then this should automatically bring them up a level or two.

It will certainly be worth keeping an eye out for a lot of Cork football’s recently injured stars in the upcoming football club championships to see whether they are showing signs of returning to their optimal performance levels.

Killian O’Hanlon, Sean Meehan, Liam O’Donovan and Conor Corbett are just a sample of these players that Cork will be hoping to have available in 2023, while a number of recent Munster and All-Ireland winners at U20 and minor level will also be hoping to come into the equation based on their displays in club colours.