Niall O'Leary on how he'll prepare to tackle Clare's danger men in Croke Park

After the parade and just prior to the national anthem before the All-Ireland SHC semi-final against Limerick, the Cork team formed a huddle by the Hogan Stand sideline.

The expectation might have been that a player – captain Seán O’Donoghue, perhaps, or elder statesmen Patrick Horgan or Séamus Harnedy or even Cork-Limerick border-dwellers Darragh Fitzgibbon or Tim O’Mahony – would deliver an impassioned speech, design to lift the intensity before throw-in.

Instead, as Niall O’Leary outlines, it was a case of ensuring that everybody was calm for the task at hand.

“There wasn’t a whole pile of talking, really,” he says, “it was more to take a few breaths to get back down to earth, more than anything.

A couple of words from Seánie to get fellas going again but it was mainly to get a breather, relax and reset.

“It’s something we’ve been doing all year. [Performance coach] Gary Keegan has done a lot of work, this year and last year, on different breathing practices that we’ve brought into our game to bring us back down to earth.

“It’s just a reset, really, to relax a fella before going out.”

Certainly, a corner-back in the modern game has to be ready to deal with the size of the challenge, especially against Limerick, all the more so when Cork don’t play with a sweeper.

With high-scoring tallies par for the course now in hurling, the days of holding a man scoreless are all but gone and so the parameters of what constitutes a good game for the backs have changed.

“Anyone that’s playing inside, you really have to embrace it,” O’Leary says.

“It’s great having the likes of Wayne [Sherlock, Cork selector] and the lads there with us, guys who have played there themselves, to get a lot of information from them on what they’d do in different scenarios.

“Again, look, you’re up against such good forwards at this level that they’re going to get one or two points off you in a game, maybe three. If you can keep a fella to that, you’re doing well, I think.”

More often than not, O’Leary has been tasked with shadowing the opposition corner-forward that is likely to drift furthest from goal. It’s a role he relishes.

“Myself, Seán [O’Donoghue] and Eoin [Downey], there’d be a lot of fighting for who gets that role on matchday,” he laughs, “it’s maybe seen as the easier role in the full-back line, that you’re getting out of danger! You’re not in the last line of defence.

“I do get to enjoy it a bit more, you have a bit more freedom and a chance to get on a lot more ball. It’s easier maybe than being stuck inside on a man, I don’t know, but, again, you have to be able to play anywhere when you’re playing inside there.

“I got caught to play inside there a couple of times this year, too; it all depends on the day, really.”

FRESH

The aforementioned Sherlock once said that, while management might provide DVDs of what an expected opponent might do, he never looked at them, preferring to play each game on its merits. O’Leary adopts such a view, too.

“No, I’m very similar, to be honest,” he said. “With the way it is these days, you know exactly what you’re coming up against. You see enough of them throughout the year that you know what they’re like.

“It’s not something in my own game, that I like doing a lot of research into fellas. I kind of take it as it is, really.”

One local source of advice that he does consult is fellow Castlelyons clubman Timmy McCarthy, who won All-Ireland medals in 1999, 2004 and 2005. While the talk may not be technical, he provides valuable counsel.

“A lot of fellas know Timmy, he’s a great man and we’re very lucky to have him in the club,” O’Leary says.

“I was actually only doing a Cúl Camp with him last week, so it’s nice to have a fella like that that you can talk to.

“And, again, he’s not a fella that’s going to be asking you a lot of questions about the game, either. 

He’d rather take your mind off it more than anything, which shows his experience, really.

“It’s great to have him.”