Christy O'Connor: Early setback but new Cork hurling management must be prepared for tough road ahead

In late October 2023, over five months after Cork had exited the Munster hurling championship, Pat Ryan sat down with Denis Hurley of this newspaper for an extensive and wide-ranging interview.

Cork had been extremely unlucky in that championship when losing to Clare and Limerick in their last two matches by one point. A draw against Limerick would have stamped their ticket into a Munster final, but the thrust of Ryan’s insights and comments in that interview was on making sure Cork learned enough lessons from the experience ahead of the 2024 season.

That applied to the management as much as the players. Being better organised in how they reassessed games, and in how they managed players during the Munster round robin was Ryan’s key starting point going forward.

“Donal O’Mahony (selector) was probably the only fella with previous experience of the round-robin system and the block of games,” said Ryan in that interview. “There’s a nice bit of organising in it.” 

Ryan admitted that they got their preparation completely wrong for the six-day turnaround between the Waterford and Tipperary matches. Yet there were learnings everywhere the management looked during their post-season debriefing.

“One thing that really caught us was the lack of communication that you can get on the field,” said Ryan. “Obviously, some teams were better at it than us. They had different scenarios going on – people in the stand or communicating with hurley-carriers – that we didn’t have. And that probably affected us a bit.” 

EYE-OPENER

Despite the huge experience Ryan had already accumulated heading into that first season in 2023, having been part of Kieran Kingston’s management team in 2016 and 2017, and 2020, and having led Cork to successive All-Ireland U20 titles in 2020 and 2021, taking over as senior manager was a whole different level again. 

“It was a big eye-opener,” said Ryan.

No matter how much experience a manager has, it’s only natural to underestimate just how much of a beast the senior job actually is, of how much that animal can scratch, bite and chew you up at every opportunity.

It’s hard for a new manager to get a full appreciation of what it actually entails until they are fully exposed to that wrath. Yet the beast is bigger in Cork than anywhere else. And after losing the last two All-Ireland finals, the beast has become gargantuan.

Before the season has even warmed up, Ben O’Connor has already been scratched. O’Connor wouldn’t see it that way. He’d have viewed losing a backroom team member as just a minor nick, but shedding a coach long before the needles have been shed from the Christmas tree is more than just a little scuff.

Whatever happened between O’Connor and Niall O’Halloran, any potential clash of ideas, culture or philosophy between the pair should have been thrashed out long before Cork went back training.

That should have been seen to by the manager but both men had never worked together before O’Connor recruited O’Halloran. 

He is highly regarded as a coach but it was always going to be difficult for O’Connor and O’Halloran to have the same compatibility that Pat Ryan had with Donal O’Rourke for the three previous years because Ryan and O’Rourke had been friends for such a long time.

O’Rourke also shared the same vision as his manager in how they both wanted the team to play. O’Connor and O’Halloran clearly weren’t on that same page.

If Cork were to lose their coach, it’s better for that to happen now than later in the season when the coaching principles and style of play would have been more deeply embedded, and when the players would have been used to how the coach ran sessions.

Cork do have people with plenty of coaching ability in their backroom team but it’s extremely rare now for an inter-county team not to have a head coach overseeing the whole practise.

O’Connor may take on that role himself in some capacity, especially when he has such a strong background in coaching, but he’d want to be careful too not to underestimate just how much modern inter-county management requires from a single individual.

After Real Madrid were beaten by Manchester City in last week’s Champions League, Thierry Henry said that Xabi Alonso’s management style may require some tweaking if he is to hold onto his job as Real Madrid manager.

"He's coaching too much, for some people, and not managing enough," said Henry. "I feel sorry for Alonso because you can see what he did with (Bayern) Leverkusen when he was able to coach a team who was going to listen to what he was going to do."

O’Connor was always going to do things his way, no matter what. Cork need to find a new direction but one of the biggest disadvantages the current management have to deal with is that none of them had been exposed to inter-county senior management before.

Since Jimmy Barry Murphy was first appointed Cork manager in 1996, every other Cork manager in the meantime had some involvement in a senior inter-county management before taking the job, either as a coach, selector, or a previous inter-county manager; Bertie Óg Murphy, Donal O’Grady, John Allen, Gerald McCarthy, Denis Walsh, JBM again, Kieran Kingston, John Meyler, Kingston again, Pat Ryan.

Walsh didn’t have any senior hurling managerial experience before being installed as full-time replacement for Gerald McCarthy in March 2009 but Walsh had managed the Waterford senior footballers for two years between 2001-’02.

NEW

The new senior management did guide Cork to the 2023 All-Ireland U20 title but stepping up to inter-county senior is a whole new level again. It is an eye-opener.

And a completely different beast.