Change to the Cork hurling team won't be as radical as many expect
Cork manager Pat Ryan will look at more newcomers in 2024 but the core of the team will remain the same. Picture: ©INPHO/Ryan Byrne
IT feels like the Cork hurling team has changed a lot in the past 12 months.
Pat Ryan took over from Kieran Kingston and the general feeling is that a lot of younger players are getting their opportunity now; not that Kingston was afraid of throwing in a newbie. In the coming year, we all probably expect the Cork team to evolve significantly once more, the recent U20 All-Ireland winners coming on stream.
Yet a closer look at selections tells us that the reality does not really fit that narrative.
So that big change to the Cork team from 2022 to 2023 we mentioned above – yeah, it never really happened.
The Cork team that lined out in the All-Ireland quarter-final defeat to Galway last June in Thurles contained 11 of the starters who went down by the same one-point margin to Limerick in the last match of the Munster round-robin series.
All of them would probably have started at the Gaelic Grounds if fit.
That just leaves Conor Lehane from the starting 15 from the Galway game. And the Midleton man was brought on late versus Limerick.
Five subs were brought on that day against Henry Shefflin’s side: Patrick Horgan, Jack O’Connor, Ger Millerick, Alan Cadogan and Tommy O’Connell. Horgan is obviously still a huge part of the attack and O’Connor would probably also have featured only for injury.
Millerick did start in Limerick and Cadogan is the one player who can feel hard done by in terms of game time this summer. O’Connell was dropped against Limerick but started the previous three rounds.
Bride Rovers’ Brian Roche and Fr O’Neill’s Declan Dalton turned out to be the big two changes, starting every game, and the likes of Shane Barrett and Brian Hayes got decent game time too.
Eoin Downey had a big league campaign at full-back, even if he did not see as many championship minutes as he would have liked afterward. Padraig Power and Ethan Twomey both came off the pine against Limerick, suggesting that had Cork managed to pilfer just one more point and survive, they could have played bigger roles later on.
One of the inevitable side-effects of mourning a championship loss is that one immediately begins glancing ahead to the future, wishing next year’s championship could start tomorrow. With that in mind, we cannot help but pick hypothetical teams for next year, with these teams usually being packed with untried debutants.
The reality, however, is that the 2024 Cork team will be largely similar to the one that lost in Limerick. The hope is that none of the players that lined out in the Gaelic Grounds will retire – we are looking at you Patrick Horgan and Seamus Harnedy, don’t even think about it! – as it feels, that despite exiting in the round-robin stages Cork are close to a breakthrough.
Conor O’Callaghan is another injured rookie who would bolster the squad. Eoin Roche, Cormac O’Brien, Dáire O’Leary and Sean Twomey will hope to get themselves in the frame for selection too.
There will be inevitable talk of mining this year’s U20s but realistically only Ben Cunningham and Brion Saunderson might be looked at for next year, with a lot of that crew still underage in 2024, although others can certainly expect to be promoted in the coming years too.
Change can be expected in the coming year but don’t be expecting a 1999-type revolution, when Jimmy Barry-Murphy famously threw Donal Óg Cusack, Wayne Sherlock, Mickey O’Connell, Timmy McCarthy, Ben O’Connor and Neil Ronan into the lion’s den for their championship debuts together.
To quote the author Robert Greene: “Change is slow and gradual. It requires hard work, a bit of luck, a fair amount of self-sacrifice, and a lot of patience”.
He may not have had Leeside hurling in mind when he uttered those words, but they certainly fit.
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