Many sides to complex Barry Walsh situation

As with almost everything, the Barry Walsh issue can be looked at through a few prisms.

The Cork U20 team face Waterford in the Fulfil Munster Championship in Dungarvan tonight and they will be without their talisman; a request from the senior management which indicates that he will make his senior championship debut in Thurles on Sunday.

You can say that a senior team looking to win silverware shouldn’t be reliant on a teenager; you can say that the U20 grade is a developmental one and that, if a player that young is good enough to play at the top level, it’s counter-productive to hold him back. Of course, there is a view that having the best players available allows an under-age to play to its best, giving more games for everyone in which to develop.

The situation around such players serving two masters has changed twice in recent times. When Pat Ryan led Cork to the 2021 U20 All-Ireland, it was without Shane Barrett and Alan Connolly as playing senior meant they were restricted from lining out at the age-grade. Then, the rule was altered to allow a player line out in both, but only in one across a seven-day period. Based on a Cork proposal after 2023, that was reduced to a 60-hour window.

Walsh could play tonight and play in Thurles, but it has been decided not to risk him at Cappoquin Logistics Fraher Field – much to the U20 management’s chagrin.

After Walsh impressed against Offaly in the Allianz Hurling League, senior manager Ben O’Connor spoke about the scenario.

“Barry then has U20 next Wednesday and the week after, the Wednesday before the league final,” he said.

“Look, we'll have to try and manage Barry as well. He's only a young fella so we don't want to be giving him any chance of getting injuries. Ian Jones [strength and conditioning coach] will sort that out. He'll tell us what to do with him and we'll just follow his advice.

“He [Walsh] is U20 so he'll be with the 20s.”

What O’Connor might say with regard to that is that he didn’t say that Walsh would be with the U20s throughout their provincial campaign.

The Killeagh attacker played away to Tipperary and at home to Limerick – scoring a total of 2-25 – and, given the way the fixtures fall and the import of the situation, he will feature against Clare on April 29, barring injury.

Where perhaps the disappointment for U20 manager and coach Noel Furlong and Dónal Óg Cusack comes from is O’Connor’s view when he was U20 boss in 2023 and Eoin Downey had to time-share due to the seven-day rule.

“The common sense thing is if he's available and he wants to he should be left play in senior and 20,” he said at the time.

“Do the GAA ever listen, do they ever listen to anything like? There's no bit of common sense. I'd like to know who voted on this? This vote was done in above and they changed the wording of it after to confuse the whole thing.

"If you take out the wording of it to read it, you read it 10 times and you still don't know what's going on. Leave U20s play U20 and senior if they're good enough. Don't be ruining a young fella's chance of playing in a Munster final.”

For Cork last year, there was no crossover and Furlong was able to see the positives and negatives of that.

“There are pros and cons,” he said.

“Obviously, if you have players involved with the senior squad, that's your job – in the U20, you want to train to develop players for the senior squad.

“You saw Tipperary, they had the Thurles CBS lads, and obviously guys involved with the seniors – did that disrupt their preparations?

“Who knows, we don't know, but in our camp all we know is that our lads are together, they're training consistently, they're giving it everything for us.”

As Christy O'Connor said in The Echo in 2023: “Hard decisions will still have to be made – by both players and management. On both sides.”

Essentially, it boils down to reality. O'Connor has deemed the Tipperary game must-win in a way that the league final was not. If the seniors win, then it will have been worth it from the management's point of view.