'Twisted' hype about Cork hurling was hard to avoid, says Pat Ryan

Cork will be underdogs for the Munster final against Limerick in just under a fortnight, with any hype created in the wake of the league win now having firmly dissipated.

Five points in the round-robin is Cork’s best return since the first year of the format, 2018, but the sole defeat, away to the Shannonsiders, meant that some of what manager Pat Ryan termed “twisted stuff” around the Rebels was quenched.

When asked after the win over Waterford if the outside noise had affected the players, Ryan took a dim view of the whole episode.

“I don't know,” he said, “but it's hard not to get drawn into the hype and some of it was stupid stuff altogether and a lot of it was coming from outside the county.

You heard people writing off Limerick, some of our own people, are they off their game of what?!

“From my point of view, look, that was very annoying – I think, sometimes, fellas would be building you up, hoping that you'd get a kick in the ass.

“I thought there was a lot of twisted stuff around it, to be honest with you. If I could find a better word I'd find it, but I thought there was a lot of twisted stuff around it.

“From our point of view, we just knuckle down, try to be the best team we can and try to represent the jersey and the Cork people as best we can.”

While the victory against Waterford was not Cork at the peak of their powers, the end justified the means.

“That was our goal at the start of the year,” Ryan said, “to win enough points to get out of Munster and get into the All-Ireland series.

“I think we’re in the Munster final now in two weeks’ time, that’s the way it goes.

“Look, delighted. As I said the day above against Clare, this Munster championship is a marathon. We’ve progressed on that side of it.

“We’ll enjoy our victory tonight against Waterford, a tough team. We’ll think about the Munster final tomorrow morning.”

One sour note was the enforced departure of Ger Millerick after what had been an excellent performance.

“Dislocated finger,” Ryan said, “it might be broken up to the top. We’ll have to get a scan on that. It was more of a dislocation than anything.”

Millerick joins Declan Dalton (hamstring) and Niall O’Leary (groin) on the injured list along with captain Robert Downey.

“We probably shouldn’t have played Rob against Limerick,” Ryan said, “but he is our captain and you are going up to Limerick and you don’t want to be giving that away.

“We’d be hoping he’d be available for some part [of the final].

“It's a small bit of a hamstring,” he said, “a tight kind of hamstring, but it's not something too bad, so we'll just see where that goes.”

TRUST

In terms of the game itself, playing into the wind in the first half didn’t necessitate a massive change in the Cork gameplan.

“Not really,” Ryan said, “it was all about workrate, that's what we needed to get done.

“We got a good few balls inside, probably didn't make them stick enough, probably trying to take on a man before winning the ball – I think that's the key against the wind, you have to win the ball first and then play from there.

We also probably had a couple of stupid wides against the wind, where we could have given half-balls in or we could have taken the ball an extra touch.

“That's something we'll work on, the efficiency side of it, but I thought our workrate, our hitting the breaks, our hunger to get on the ball was an awful lot better than it was last week and that's the way it should be, that's the standard.

“You're not always going to play as well or have great hurling at times and things mightn’t come off in your gameplan, but your workrate and your attitude and your character has to be the standard.”