Premier SFC: Mark Cronin proud to be part of strong Nemo Rangers heritage

It’s hardly surprising that Steven Sherlock and David Buckley lead the way in this year’s McCarthy Insurance Group Premier SFC scoring charts.

The St Finbarr’s and Newcestown sharpshooters have recorded 6-36 and 0-46 respectively across their clubs’ five matches, giving averages of 10.8 and 9.2. Even allowing for the greater output afforded by the new football rules, they are impressive figures.

Coming in third to that pair is Mark Cronin of Nemo Rangers with 1-30 - a tally that has an important caveat, given that Nemo earned the quarter-final bye and so have only played four games to reach Sunday’s final against the Barrs.

The Cork star’s average is 8.25 and he has converted 16 frees, three of them from outside the two-point arc.

Of course, that’s not to suggest that he is not a threat from open play - he has a further 11 points there, along with a goal from a penalty - but it’s likely that, if Nemo are the regain the Andy Scannell Cup, Cronin will be weighing in with quite a few dead balls.

While he was always the man on free-taking duty for his own age-group and then inherited the senior job from Luke Connolly - now a selector under manager Robbie O’Dwyer - Cronin credits performance Kevin Clancy with helping to bring about a greater level of consistency.

“In fairness, I would have done a lot of work with Kevin Clancy, the last maybe four or five years,” he says.

“Practise has become more routine now and there's a lot more work into them. Like anything, as you get older, you get more experience and know what works for you, and know the level that you have to put into it, really.

“I'd probably be a bit more serious about frees now, than I was before, yeah.”

If it comes down to having to kick an important free late in the game on Sunday evening, Cronin will be looking to ensure that the routine is so ingrained that the external importance does not effect the execution.

“Yeah, I suppose, it's probably the boring answer, that's probably what you're practising,” he says, “to bring yourself back into your routine, and I suppose trying to make every kick the exact same kick, whether it's training outside or whether it's in the county final.

“That's where the likes of Dean Rock have excelled, that they're able to do that, like even you look at the one where Lee Keegan threw the GPS at him, and that level of concentration is huge, so I suppose you're always striving for that.

“It's down to your training, really, and how specific you are in your training, whether you can or not.”

While Nemo have a little bit of history in their favour in that four previous finals against the Barrs have all gone their way, they are seeking to avoid losing a third straight decider, having been beaten by Castlehaven in both 2023 and 2024.

Rather than dwelling on this, 25-year-old Cronin maintains they have tried to make them educational experiences.

“I suppose I wouldn’t say they’re sitting in the back of the mind,” he says. what I'd say is we probably took the lessons from them, and then parked them from there.

“You wouldn't really reference the games but you reference the lessons I suppose, and hopefully then that this week will go our way.

“I suppose you wouldn't think about them every day, but I think we'd be naive if we didn't take lessons from the last couple of years. If you went back and looked at the last few games, yeah, you have to take lessons from it, you build them into next year, but you kind of park it and it's a new year, there's new faces in the group, same way as there's new faces for the Barrs, same as there's new faces for Castlehaven.

“Every year is different in itself, so no, you don't really think about it every day, it’s just [a case of being] glad to be in another one, to be honest with you.”

It will be a sixth final for Cronin, who made his debut in 2018 and won medals in 2019, 2020 and 2022.

While the general expectation might be that Nemo will always be reaching finals, Cronin certainly doesn’t take that for granted.

“No, definitely not,” he says.

“I suppose growing up, I would have been watching the four-in-a-row [2005-08] and 2010, but then there was a barren spell until 2015, though we lost in 2013 then to the Haven.

“You can't take it for granted, and I suppose it's times like that, that you don't have the finals, even as a young fella, that you do realise how much they mean to the club and how much they mean to everyone.

“I remember even in 2015, seeing lads crying on the pitch after, old men that were at the games, that's when it hits home, really. I suppose it was described as a barren spell at the time, five years.

“It's nice to be there and never take it for granted. The more you do it, the more you enjoy it. You enjoy the two weeks’ build-up. It's nice, it's great for fellas who are in the club, and it's nice as players too to be involved. It's better to be involved than not be involved.”

Helping to ensure he stays involved on a micro level is the expertise he has built up in physiotherapy.

Having initially done BIS at UCC, he undertook a Master's degree in anatomy to allow him to enrol on the physio course and he is now employed by GM Physiotherapy in Douglas.

“I suppose definitely it's helped me in terms of rehab and injury prevention," he says.

“Sometimes, fellas can go too far with the injury prevention that you end up injuring yourself on the far side too, it's kind of getting the right balance.

“You have the term ‘prehab’ that's going out there, but if you're doing prehab every day, it leads to injury too as opposed to doing it at the right time.

“I'm lucky, the set-up with Cork, the set-up with Nemo, that we have very experienced heads, like Ian Sisk here with Nemo, and he's in with Cork as well, and Aidan Kelleher, Brian O'Connell, the whole group, they're very good in fairness, and they're good to lean on, they're good to give experience, so no, I'm lucky that I've been surrounded by great people, to be honest.”

And he's also glad not to be surrounded as much on the field, thanks to the effect of the new football rules.

“Even the space alone is great. I suppose, at the time, when you're training, you probably didn't realise how bad the game was, because you're in it, and you live it, you know what I mean?

“As soon as you're shown something else, it's nearly a breath of fresh air. You'd be doing video-analysis and you'd look back at games back from last year, and you're saying if they ever went back, you'd have to question things.

“Some of the level of football - as I said, I was in it, I didn't realise how bad it was - but you could go to a game of football before and if you didn't watch 20 minutes, you mightn’t have missed anything, whereas now it's so end-to-end and that's great.

“Even, you saw our game against Newcestown, it's end-to-end stuff and it's not nice when you're playing it, but it's exactly the way we want the game to be.”