Waterford and UCC games offer chance to size up Cork hurlers' early-season progress

It is somewhat strange that 2025 will be a year where the GAA’s pre-season competitions are absent.

Since the change to the inter-county season operating within the one calendar year in the early 2000s, the provincial throat-openers have slotted in to provide a change to stretch the legs in January – for players and supporters.

Given that Gaelic football is about to undergo seismic changes, the McGrath, McKenna and O’Byrne Cups and the Connacht League would have served as handy explainers for players, managers, officials and spectators alike. Instead, most counties will be adapting behind closed doors and the beginning of the national league will be the first opportunity for the wider public to experience the new situation at close quarters.

Of course, it should be pointed out that January weather can be unpredictable – or, perhaps, all too predictable – and that calling off a challenge match is less troublesome than looking to re-fix a postponed pre-season game.

Just under a year ago, three attempts to play the Limerick-Cork game in the Co-op SuperStores Munster Hurling League meant that the competition was not concluded and so Cork, the winners in 2023, remain the last winners.

Incidentally, Cork also claimed victory in the last running of the Oireachtas Hurling Tournament, played in 2005. You may be unaware of this fact, as it gets very little airtime, but that was also the same year that the county last won the All-Ireland title.

Thankfully, for those who want to be there for what they hope will be the first steps towards bridging that long gap, there are two early-year opportunities to see Pat Ryan’s side in action.

The first of those is tomorrow week, January 4, as the Rebels travel to Fraher Field in Dungarvan to take on Waterford in a challenge match.

OPTIONS

As well as allowing Ryan and his opposite number, the newly-appointed Peter Queally, to assess their options, the game will serve as a fundraiser for The Friends of Brian Greene and Waterford Hospice.

Greene, a member of the Waterford side that won the Munster title in 2002 – the county’s first in 39 years – received a cancer diagnosis in 2022 and has been unable to work. His father Jim – who won an All-Star in 1982 – feels that the visit of Cork should draw a crowd, but more than that, that the community spirit of the GAA will be demonstrated at its finest.

“It doesn't matter who you are or what you are,” he said, “when you are in the GAA, it is democratic equal.

“We are equal. I am not an All-Star in Mount Sion, I am Jim Greene, end of story. 

It is a great association. And it is nights like this that prove how great it really is.”

Five days after that, Thursday, January 9, Cork will take on UCC in the annual Canon O’Brien Cup game, which has a 7pm throw-in at the Mardyke.

Build-up to both matches will feature in The Echo as the season kicks into gear.