Ronan Curran: Cork U20s showed hunger when chips were down

For the second time inside a week, a Cork hurling team struck late to secure a vital victory as the U20 side overcame Clare in Friday’s oneills.com Munster U20HC semi-final at Cusack Park.

The seniors came from four down to overcome Limerick last Saturday night and Ben O’Connor’s team found themselves three behind after an unanswered 2-3 put Clare in front with time running out. They refused to panic though and a goal from sub Barry O’Flynn helped to turn things around again as they won by 1-23 to 2-16.

It sent them through to meet Tipperary in the final on Friday night and selector Ronan Curran was full of praise for the character of the team.

“We’re delighted,” he said.

“A game like that, when you see it going away from you, against a very, very good Clare team – whatever they’re doing up in Clare, they’re getting a lot of stuff right – we were under massive pressure.

“The most pleasing thing was, when our backs were to the wall and the lads looked like they were gone, that they could summon something from inside to turn it around and that’s what they did.

“They’ve shown themselves to be a great team in the past but you just have to keep going back. The biggest thing in any team is hunger and they showed a massive amount of it when the chips were down.”

The final will be a rematch of Cork’s only defeat in the round-robin section, a 3-20 to 0-18 loss at FBD Semple Stadium on Friday, May 3. With a fortnight between that and the Clare game, Cork needed to summon a response.

“I’ll be honest, we were just looking for a reaction,” Curran said.

“Against Tipp, we seemed a bit dead, a bit flat. We asked the lads after that if they wanted it and the Clare game was the time to show us if they did – ‘Is there going to be a reaction, how bad do you really want it?’

“To be fair to them, all of them, to a man, gave it everything. Even from a quick look at the stats at half-time, everything was up and that’s all we ask for.

“At the end of the day, it’s a semi-final and we’re looking at Tipp now the next day. They beat us handy in Thurles and shut down a lot of our danger areas. We have to look at it but we also have to bring the same intensity.”

Goalscorer O’Flynn certainly played his part, netting just after coming on for his debut.

“He’s still only 17,” Curran said, “he’s a great young fella, to be fair.
“He wasn’t on the panel for the first four games but he was just going so well in training – he has that danger about him.

“There was just that feeling that he could do something and we said we’d bring him on. He has massive pace and we needed that injection – the same with Adam [O’Sullivan] when he came on and Oran [O’Regan] they injected a bit of pace and energy into it and that’s what we needed at the time, when things were going against us.”

Another interesting selection call was that of Cork U20 football captain Hugh O’Connor, who scored a point in an impressive display at wing-forward.

“We just felt after the last game that we needed something different to give it a boost there,” Curran said.

“Hugh has played up through the ranks in hurling and we tried to get him hurling at the start of the year but football is his number one and he was captain of the U20 football team.

“We always stayed in contact with him and, look, it was a bit of a gamble, there’s no doubt about that, but he did the business.

“He showed what he can do – he’s a good ball-winner, a good bit of pace about him, a great fella to be able to bring in.”

Now, Curran and the rest of the management hope that they can build on the momentum when they face Tipp again.

“They’re a good team,” he said.

“They have very good inside forwards especially and they play to a system. They’re very dangerous.

“It’s Cork and Tipp in a Munster final but the main thing for us is that we’d be hoping to put in a better performance than we did the last night.”