Former Echo sportswriter Mark Woods gearing up for new role with Cork football team

When Cork opened their 2024 season on Wednesday night against Clare in the McGrath Cup, it marked the start of a new era.

Barry O’Mahony was the journalist providing the report for The Echo as, for the first time in two decades, Mark Woods was not presiding over the beginning of a new campaign.

However, the man who retired last summer after 46 years covering all sports for the Echo and The Cork Examiner won’t be absent from Cork football matches. If anything, he’ll be more present than ever.

Last year’s All-Ireland SFC win over Louth was the final game that Woods reported on for The Echo. Afterwards, he was presented with a Cork jersey by senior football manager John Cleary – and now the pair will be working together as the Douglas native has taken up a new role as media liaison officer for the team.

“I was going through Killorglin during the summer, after I had retired, and I got a call from John Cleary,” Woods says.

“I was delighted, I said I’d do whatever he wanted me to. We met up and I had my first meeting with the group recently, the official review of the year.

“It’s something I’m looking forward. If I can be a help, grand, and we’ll see how it goes. In fairness, John has a lot on his plate and if we can take some of the burden off his shoulders then that’s a good thing.”

Woods witnessed a lot in more than four decades as a journalist, not least an explosion in the way sport was covered.

“I started in 1977 and worked in a few different departments,” he says, “then I got a job in the editorial as a junior reporter.

“There was no sports department at the time – a few guys might do a day or two a week of sport but space was tight. It all started to change around the mid-1980s – you had Sonia O’Sullivan in athletics, Seán Kelly and Stephen Roche in cycling, Barry McGuigan in boxing and then the big thing was qualifying for Euro 88.

“Battalions were sent – sports reporters, news reporters, columnists, photographers, you name it. It was given ‘the treatment’, as I called it and Cork footballers were coming to prominence at the same time so, from 1988 on, everything was given the treatment!

“It was a case of learning as you went along. I was getting great experience – unbeknown to myself at the time – in dealing with people from around the country, going to press conferences, developing contacts, picking up what to do and what not to do.”

In addition, it’s hardly surprising that, of the many sporting events that Woods counts himself fortunate enough to have covered, Cork’s 1990 hurling and football All-Ireland wins, the historic ‘double’, are near the top.

“It was unbelievable,” he says.

“It’s hard to imagine it was 33 years ago and it’s only as time goes on that you appreciate the enormity of it.

“At the Canal End goal, the left upright as you’re looking out, the two Cork goalkeepers – Ger Cunningham and John Kerins – made great saves in the two finals, at important stages.

“Back then, you could go into the dressing room – eventually! There was a gate manned by a steward – I’d say he took the gate home with him, he loved it so much! – and there was what I called ‘the three Ps’ in order of priority: priests went in first, then politicians and then the press.”

It took 20 years for Cork to win another football title, but Woods was still there in 2010.

“They were under fierce pressure that day,” he says, “because they had lost two of the previous three finals and were big favourites against Down.

“They got over the line and one thing I remember is Conor Counihan standing at the bottom of the steps and shaking hands with all of the members of the extended panel, telling them that Cork wouldn’t have won without them.”