Stephen Cronin ready to give everything for Nemo in yet another final
Stephen Cronin at the Nemo Rangers press evening. Picture: Jim Coughlan
Though he has only just turned 29, Stephen Cronin has already crammed a lot into his football career.
A senior championship debutant for Nemo at the age of 16, he has amassed five county medals and is aiming for a sixth when the Trabeg side face Castlehaven at SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoimh on Sunday (3.30pm).
There was a six-year stint on the Cork panel, albeit of a sometimes-frustrating nature as he was in and out of the team, despite his Nemo manager at the time, Paul O’Donovan, rating him as the best centre-back in the county.
The former county minor captain has also had his share of injuries, which impeded his ability to make an impact at college level with UCC. He is philosophical about those, however.
“In 2013, I broke my collarbone and missed the semi-final,” he says. “I played the final but my collarbone wasn’t fully right. They were all impact injuries; it was just that they happened three years in a row.
“At the end of 2015, we were playing a league game against Clon and we were up by about 15 points. I caught a kickout and came down and somebody fell on the front of my leg and someone else went through the back of me so the leg just snapped.
“They’re just freak incidents. The dislocated shoulder in 2014 was actually out at training here, a fella went through me with a knee as I went down over the ball in an A-v-B.
“I think it’d be a lot worse if you had a niggly hamstring.”
The 2015 season, before the leg-break, had seen him make his Cork senior debut. Often picked for the crunch games, there was just as much time kicking his heels. When the call came in January of 2021, he made sure that Cork’s loss was Nemo’s gain.
“To be fair, I got dropped off the panel but I was happy to go back to Nemo and play every week,” he says.
“I always remember Colin O’Brien – ‘Tucker’ – driving you on, saying, ‘How is this man not playing with Cork?’ but you’d always fellas in this club, the likes of Brian O’Regan, who were with Cork for a while and then came back and gave everything to Nemo.
“That’s the way I looked at it and I don’t think I missed a training session the whole year. It’s important to be here, mentally and physically.”
The step away from inter-county action also allowed Cronin to dabble again in rugby with Dolphin’s J2s, having played the game at under-age level.
That interest came from his father Pat, who would come under the St Finbarr’s banner in GAA terms. However, his mother Susan is from the Cotter family, steeped in Nemo heritage, and so there was little debate as to who Stephen and brothers Alan and Mark would play for.
As mentioned, the championship bow came in August 2012. While he had been part of the Coláiste Chríost Rí team that won the Corn Uí Mhuirí a year and a half previously and had Cork under-age experience, this was an eye-opener.
“I probably could have been taken off early on,” he says, “I remember Jason Sexton got 2-1 off me.
“You think it’s the end of the world; when you play under-age, a fella never scores that off you. You have to learn a different way to play – you don’t carry the ball into contact, you give and go, you find the fella closest to you that has a bit of strength to give the ball to.”
The decade-plus since then has seen him develop into one of the team’s leaders, while seeing football evolve and develop and changing how defenders play.
“I was always a centre-back and would have marked my man,” says Cronin, who works for Lilly in Dunderrow.
“One thing that I noticed with Cork was that, apart from 2015, I never played marking a man, I was only ever a sweeper. It’s not something I’m a big fan of, to be honest. I much prefer to be marking a man and then driving on.
“When you’re playing against opposition teams, you do notice it. People say that the ball is moving too slowly but you get the ball in the backline and you look up and there are four fellas running back – not even facing you, you could nearly hit them on the back of the head with the ball!”
Despite the changes, one constant has been Nemo’s ability to win silverware. Last year brought that rarest of beasts, a county final defeat – their first since 2013.
When asked if that bring a different feeling at the start of the following year, Cronin makes a good point.
“Unfortunately, because we haven’t managed to win an All-Ireland, we’ve never had a year where we didn’t lose,” he says.
“Ultimately, you’re always looking at what you did wrong and trying to improve. It was probably a bit different this year in that we had Paulo for a number of years and a new manager obviously wants to maybe start things slightly differently.
“To be fair, it’s been pretty consistent, even then. It’s about getting the basics right, working up to a level of fitness, getting your gym-work done.”
The consistency has brought them back to the decider, facing off against the Haven again. While the clubs had not met in a final before 2013, this will be their fifth since then, with two wins each in the previous four.
A year ago, the Haven won 0-11 to 0-9 and Cronin feels that another close encounter is in store.
“You’re always going to look at past games to see what you did wrong and what you did right,” he says.
“Obviously that game turned out to be a fairly defensive one. You look at it with 58 minutes gone, we had scored a point to go one up and, even though it was defensive, we were chasing their kickout.
“That’s actually what caught us – we chased their kickout but they were able to get a mark and scored again straightaway.
“There’ll be a lot of the same players but the management teams are different. Utimately, a lot will depend on the day.”
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