Pat Ryan keeping an open mind on 'best 15'

THERE are still almost seven weeks to go until Cork’s Munster SHC opener against Waterford on April 30 and the team remains a blank canvas as far as manager Pat Ryan is concerned.

Sunday’s Allianz Hurling League Division 1 Group A win over Wexford secured qualification for the semi-finals, meaning Cork will have two more games and three if they make the final.

In the 2-14 to 0-18 win over the Model County, Pádraig Power became the 29th different player to start across Cork’s four league games and the Blarney man staked his claim by scoring a goal and a point. 

The other goal was scored by sub Cormac Beausang, while Séamus Harnedy also came off the bench for his first involvement of the year.

Tim O’Mahony has yet to feature while Seán O’Donoghue, Conor O’Callaghan, Damien Cahalane, Conor Lehane, Darragh Fitzgibbon, Mark Coleman, Alan Connolly and Patrick Horgan were some of the players unavailable.

Little wonder then that Ryan doesn’t have a set idea as to what his ‘starting 15’ will be. At training, there will be an A-versus-B game, with the ‘A team’ being those who began Sunday’s game, but nobody is certain of their spot.

“I think I never get into a situation where I’m picking the first 15 for April 30,” Ryan says.

“I think that’s unfair on the players that are there. I think when you get into that, your head gets confused on what you’re doing.

“You’re nearly looking for things out on the field that you want to look for. We judge what we see on Tuesday and Thursday nights. That will be our best team going forward.

“The team that goes out on Tuesday night will be the team that started against Wexford. That will be the A team. Then we’ll keep changing that. I don’t think you should get into a situation where you’re saying, ‘this is my A team’.

“You’re not being fair what’s happening and you start seeing things because you want to see them and you’re not seeing what’s happening in training.”

Beyond talent and skill, though, the management want to see the intangibles from their players.

“At the end of the day, if you want to be an inter-county hurler, it’s the most important thing, your character, your mentality,” Ryan says, “and we’re looking for that from the lads.

“We’ve been trying to build the way we play, we’ve been looking for attitude and character from our players and we’ve seen that.

“I think, obviously, Wexford played a very tactical game today and it made us struggle a small bit. They’re areas that we’ll work on going forward over the next couple of weeks.

“We’re happy with where we are at the moment but there’s lots to work on, as you can see.”

That work be done collectively and in-house from now on. While players were released to play with their clubs in the opening round of the RedFM Hurling League the weekend before last, it’s not logistically possible for that to happen for the upcoming fixtures this weekend.

“It was great for them to get back to their clubs,” Ryan says.

“A lot of our lads needed game-time. It was a break for them and it was a break for them from us.

“In Cork, it’s probably different than a lot of counties. We take our club league very seriously and clubs wants to have their players available.

“That was the only week we could give them, really. We’re out next weekend and there’s a round of league matches so we couldn’t give them that week.

“The next league week is April 1 and we couldn’t give them that because we’ll be heavy in training for the first round of the championship. If we didn’t release them last weekend, they wouldn’t get them until we were nearly out of the championship. And I think that’s unfair on the clubs. We were delighted they wanted them back.

“A lot of lads had good performances and they were buzzing on Monday night when they came back to us in the gym.”