Injuries, hype and dual demands: Cork underage stars struggle to break through
Brian Roche of Cork is tackled by Ryan Taylor of Clare. The 2017 star minor has progressed this season. Picture: Ray McManus/Sportsfile
WE are probably all guilty of building up young sporting talent to ridiculously lofty and probably unrealistic levels.
On Leeside we are susceptible to it more than most.
The 2017 Cork minor hurling team is a prime example. When Cork romped to a 4-21 to 0-16 victory over Clare in the curtain raiser for that year’s Munster senior final – those were the days – a lot of folk were already pencilling in five or six of that side as guaranteed future Cork seniors.
Six years later and some of them have indeed made the grade, and a few others such as Conor O’Callaghan and the Roche twins look on the cusp of breaking now. Yet those deemed most likely to make it have never kicked on to expected levels. Injuries, form, life, whatever – sometimes it just happens that way.
Every player lining out underage for Cork has potential, but ultimately from a senior perspective that is all it is, potential. So much needs to happen before these young starlets are ready for senior action, but we expect it will happen regardless.
We just assume time will take care of that, whereas the big question that Cork GAA needs to ask itself is, are the optimum pathways in place for these potential-filled players to maximise that potential? Are we doing as much as other counties in this regard?
If not, why are so many talented individuals failing to progress in Cork in comparison? Sure, some counties do not have to deal with the dual issue of young players falling between the two stools of football and hurling, and Cork seems to have more players who dabble in some of those ‘foreign sports’ as well, but the attritional rate of players who slip through the net seems too high, regardless.
Cork’s underage football teams of the past 15 years or so are a case in point.
Since Cork’s last football All-Ireland win in 2010 they have managed to win seven Munster Championships at U20/U21 level. That is a lot of players to have felt that warm fuzzy feeling of winning a provincial title for Cork, yet that hasn’t really filtered through at senior level.
It is worth noting, though, that the 2019 crew were the only one of these seven teams to go on and win the All-Ireland, so some of those squads were probably not vintage ones, to be fair. However, you would have expected two or three players to be filtering through year on year to the senior side from these Munster-winning outfits, with Cork being a competitive animal at senior level as a result. It has not really worked out like that though.
The extremely high injury rates suffered by emerging talent, particularly in football, has never been adequately explained either and is clearly one of the major reasons why Cork football is where it is right now. You can count on one hand the number of untimely injuries to talented footballers in Kerry in recent years, for example. Quite often hypothetical teams picked completely from a list of injured/unavailable underage Cork players actually seem as strong as the ones that they actually field in championship combat.
That simply cannot be right. Injuries are always going to occur, for sure, but not at the rates that Cork suffers them surely.
We often hear of how Cork has the biggest number of clubs of any county in Ireland and has a huge number of players, and that in itself is half the problem. Organising that many clubs and players is always going to be a bit of a logistical nightmare.
Even from the perspective of having central training camps, there is the obvious geographical issue of being in the largest county in the land, which means hours of tortuous travel for many.
There is some serious talent coming through at minor and U20 right now in Cork in hurling and football, but perhaps we should not be counting any chickens in this regard, as the journey from underage to senior is such an arduous one.
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