Cork Hurling: Ben O'Connor and his selectors know panel needs to be freshened up
Lisgoold ace Diarmuid Healy made his breakthrough with Cork this year but who else can follow him from the U20s? Picture Larry Cummins
In the past week we got a reminder of how the inter-county hurling championship transpired as well as a timely notice that soon we can forget about all that and look towards the 2026 season.
The All-Stars are always the moment when we can finally put a line through that year’s campaign. Individual gongs are handed out as we get one last reminder of how the summer played out.
Cork ended up collecting four All-Stars for Sean O’Donoghue, Ciarán Joyce, Darragh Fitzgibbon and Brian Hayes, but as Christy O’Connor stated in these pages in recent days: “it’s rarely happened where so many players cemented their All-Stars in one half of hurling”.
Cork probably did not deserve any more than the four they got, but at half time in the final it looked like seven awards at least would be heading to Leeside.
It was not to be, and while it was great to see the four Cork players deservedly collect their individual awards, the event felt like trauma revisited for most Rebels. They just want to move on and look towards the 2026 campaign at this stage.
Hence the perfect timing of the announcement of next year’s league fixtures, with all eyes already on the home fixture against Waterford on January 25, when the Rebels will kick off their league title defence.
That game against the Déise will be the first of three home league ties, with there being a quick rematch of the All-Ireland final on February 7 when Tipperary travel south, while they will have the luxury of a home tie against Offaly in their final fixture on March 21, should they need a result one way or the other.
There will be away fixtures against Galway, Kilkenny and Limerick in between. Both Cork and Tipp only lost one game each in qualifying for this year’s final, so if Cork are to have ambitions of retaining their title, then they may have to garner two victories from those trips.
Of course, this year sees the return of the Munster Hurling League in January after the competition having a fallow year. The six Munster counties are involved and the competition is scheduled to take place between January 3 and 17, with each county getting three games and the two finalists getting a fourth day out.
These fixtures will be of particular interest to Cork fans, as not only will they be the first chance to move on from last year’s All-Ireland trauma, but more importantly, it will be the first opportunity to see a Ben O’Connor-managed Cork side in anger.
Every Cork fan will have their own thoughts on what changes should be made to the Cork panel for next year but ultimately only the opinions of O’Connor and his managerial team matter now.
We have already heard that Watergrasshill pair Dáire O’Leary and Sean Desmond, Kanturk’s Brian O’Sullivan, Newmarket’s Hugh O’Connor, Ballincollig’s Brian Keating, Sarsfields pair Cian Darcy and Colm McCarthy, Dungourney forward Jack Leahy and Killeagh youngster Barry Walsh are set to be given opportunities in these matches. We can expect others to get shots too, such as Bride Rovers’ Cillian Tobin and some of the players who won U20 All-Irelands with O’Connor, such as Ben Cunningham, William Buckley, Shane Kingston and Micheál Mullins.
Listing players who deserve a crack is the easy part.
The one thing that we can say for certain is that the panel probably needs freshening up now. Losing three All-Ireland finals in five years will have left scars and it is time to bring in a few players with no scar tissue from those defeats.
A lot of the panel has been involved since 2021, and before, so there is also a real danger of some sectors of the team ageing out together. Ben O’Connor will be conscious of this and may well be moving a few more big names on, in order to bring down the team’s age profile. The Newtown man will have to be ruthless, even if the player or players in question might have more to offer.
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