SPORTING NEAR MISSES, the glorious ones, sometimes invoke thoughts of Joey the Lips Fagan and Jimmy Rabbitte down on the Dublin docks before anybody thought to add silicon to their title.
“Look, I know you’re hurting now but in time you’ll realise what you’ve achieved.”
“I’ve achieved nothing,” says Jimmy.
“You’re missing the point,” says Joey. “The success of the band was irrelevant – you raised their expectations of life, you lifted their horizons. Sure we could have been famous and made albums and stuff, but that would have been predictable. This way it’s poetry.”
Pat Ryan set his own bar as Cork manager. He said that a three-year term that did not end with an All-Ireland win would be a failure. By that metric he has failed, by many others he has not.
Ryan’s interview with Marty Morrissey was brimming with the class and humility he brings to everything. The most arresting line was that 2025 would have been the worst year of his life no matter what happened after his brother Ray died tragically. Nobody needed to be told that. Everybody knows that hurling success was inconsequential to the pain the Ryan family suffered with the passing of a husband, father and brother. Yet to hear Pat Ryan put it in such terms really hit hard.
Pat Ryan. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
The longing for Liam MacCarthy and the collective agony at not being able to win it is so flimsy next to real human tragedy, which has been suffered by so many families, in Cork and everywhere.
Everybody realises this. And yet they struggled to shake the sorrow of this sporting disappointment in the days and weeks which followed the All-Ireland final. Grieving over something which is not life and death should not be a cause of guilt, though. For as long as people get to live they’ll take meaning where they find it, and invest their passion and emotion where it feels most natural. And to tens of thousands of people, that was the hurling team managed by Pat Ryan.
That support has existed in huge numbers since long before Ryan’s time, in the glory days and the lean ones which followed. They’ll turn out in their legions in 2026 and every year that’s coming after that. Still, it’s a mighty sad thing to see Ryan walk away.
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Much as he’d rail against the suggestion, Ryan created a mass movement with Cork. There was a renewal in direct, bold hurling and in identity and self-esteem. His team would not try to trick you with false teams or rotating forwards or sweepers or tika taka. It was a firefight. When it worked it was magical and all-powerful, an experience rather than a spectacle; senses jacked to the point of combustion. When it didn’t, well, Cork came to reimagine spectacular failure.
The band of the moment are Oasis, again. Of all the smart and talented bands that have filled the moments since the mid 90s, none have had quite the same blend of devastating force and vulnerability. There is a potency to three chords and the truth, and, like the band, Cork lurch from supernovas in the sky to scratching around in the same old hole.
Would you want it any other way? Is there a better alternative to this thrilling and beautiful and, at times, emotionally overwhelming show? Cork county board seems to believe so anyway.
Had they wanted Ryan to stay they surely could not have suggested or imposed the reported idea of a backroom rejig. Someone so loyal would not countenance this. Nor should he have to. If you trust a person to lead your team, you trust them to select their people. Yet true to character, Ryan left the role with nothing but gracious words for the board.
The pressure is on that Cork board now. When you put in place terms which could well lead to a change of regime, you need to be fairly sure that results and outcomes will improve. It’s Liam MacCarthy or bust for them now.
There are a number of candidates that have been mentioned. It would be a surprise if Ben O’Connor does not get offered and take the job. Who knows what his personal circumstances are? It might not be the best time, though it probably never will be. All intercounty jobs are too much; this one is entirely mental. You are heading up a minor nation state where there is no separation of church and state and you are in charge of both. Tactician, manager and spiritual leader to 30-odd players and around half a million invested citizens among whom you walk. Every step, every day.
But O’Connor has to take it. What is life but a series of ludicrous challenges, and this one may only come around once.
O’Connor has the managerial record with the Cork U20 team, Charleville and Midleton. He also had a glorious playing career with Newtownshandrum and Cork, with whom he won All-Irelands in 1999, 2004 and 05.
Pat Ryan was around in 99 of course, but O’Connor’s elevation would represent the first of that generation with three All-Ireland medals – and the fallout that came from strikes – to become Cork manager.
Perhaps it is what they need. That group had a winning know-how and a certain ruthlessness. One of the more curious, and probably unwelcome, developments in the past few years is a bit of neutral good feeling towards Cork. A hope that they would ‘get over the line’ or that ‘Hoggie gets his medal’ . . . ‘I’d love to see them do it’.
That might diminish in time with O’Connor and a couple of his peers from 04/05 in charge.
There’s a scene in the 1996 movie Swingers (not those type of swingers, get your mind on higher things) when Vince Vaughan puts it straight to Jon Favreau.
“I don’t want you to be the guy in the PG-13 movie everyone’s really hoping makes it happen. I want you to be like the guy in the rated-R movie, you know, the guy you’re not sure whether or not you like yet.”
Cork will become the R-rated guy under O’Connor. You’ll remember the 2023 U20 All-Ireland final and Cork, let’s say, imposing themselves physically on Offaly. For the few days afterwards the discourse went from the evergreen ‘Cork are soft’ to ‘This is barbarism and it must be denounced’.
Fair warning, what follows will be generalities which are likely to offend: There is a certain type of Cork person, essentially decent but 100% aggro when it comes down to it. It’s a trait which is pronounced among those who were children there from the late ‘70s through to the early ‘90s when it was a more poor and grey place. You didn’t need to be aggressive to live there but you definitely had to learn to deal with those who were, and so you developed a side.
There was a lot of needling and verbal cutting down to size and the odd flurry of fists. Roy Keane is the most famous example, and there were others in sport such as Ronan O’Gara. Even people such as Sonia O’Sullivan and Donncha O’Callaghan, who were modest and affable away from the arena, were killers when it came to competition.
Capable of the odd angry moment: Ronan O'Gara, left. Lorraine O'Sullivan / INPHO
Lorraine O'Sullivan / INPHO / INPHO
That Cork hurling team from the late 90s to the mid 2000s were infested with that attitude. Lovely fellas no doubt in nearly all aspects of life. But a switch could be flicked where they were defiant, paranoid, furious; not the kind of men you’d want coming after you.
None of this makes anybody invincible or anything. It’s just a dark energy that can make people better at a chosen thing than they would otherwise be.
That generation might be able to put something in this one: a new edge which makes them a meaner opponent.
Though sometimes you’d wonder whether it is possible to visit that on today’s senior players. They grew up in a different Ireland and a radically different Cork. No town ever kicked them around, told them they had no future there, or that the only way was out or stay and fight over scraps.
It could be an unworkable culture clash or a necessary fusion of old and new. Just as Ryan brought some of the old style back and refined it for modern hurling, O’Connor could do likewise with the attitude. Borrow from a more angry past and take it to today, with not one backward step.
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Ben O'Connor would be mad to take Cork job - but even more mad to turn it down
SPORTING NEAR MISSES, the glorious ones, sometimes invoke thoughts of Joey the Lips Fagan and Jimmy Rabbitte down on the Dublin docks before anybody thought to add silicon to their title.
“Look, I know you’re hurting now but in time you’ll realise what you’ve achieved.”
“I’ve achieved nothing,” says Jimmy.
“You’re missing the point,” says Joey. “The success of the band was irrelevant – you raised their expectations of life, you lifted their horizons. Sure we could have been famous and made albums and stuff, but that would have been predictable. This way it’s poetry.”
Pat Ryan set his own bar as Cork manager. He said that a three-year term that did not end with an All-Ireland win would be a failure. By that metric he has failed, by many others he has not.
Ryan’s interview with Marty Morrissey was brimming with the class and humility he brings to everything. The most arresting line was that 2025 would have been the worst year of his life no matter what happened after his brother Ray died tragically. Nobody needed to be told that. Everybody knows that hurling success was inconsequential to the pain the Ryan family suffered with the passing of a husband, father and brother. Yet to hear Pat Ryan put it in such terms really hit hard.
The longing for Liam MacCarthy and the collective agony at not being able to win it is so flimsy next to real human tragedy, which has been suffered by so many families, in Cork and everywhere.
Everybody realises this. And yet they struggled to shake the sorrow of this sporting disappointment in the days and weeks which followed the All-Ireland final. Grieving over something which is not life and death should not be a cause of guilt, though. For as long as people get to live they’ll take meaning where they find it, and invest their passion and emotion where it feels most natural. And to tens of thousands of people, that was the hurling team managed by Pat Ryan.
That support has existed in huge numbers since long before Ryan’s time, in the glory days and the lean ones which followed. They’ll turn out in their legions in 2026 and every year that’s coming after that. Still, it’s a mighty sad thing to see Ryan walk away.
Much as he’d rail against the suggestion, Ryan created a mass movement with Cork. There was a renewal in direct, bold hurling and in identity and self-esteem. His team would not try to trick you with false teams or rotating forwards or sweepers or tika taka. It was a firefight. When it worked it was magical and all-powerful, an experience rather than a spectacle; senses jacked to the point of combustion. When it didn’t, well, Cork came to reimagine spectacular failure.
The band of the moment are Oasis, again. Of all the smart and talented bands that have filled the moments since the mid 90s, none have had quite the same blend of devastating force and vulnerability. There is a potency to three chords and the truth, and, like the band, Cork lurch from supernovas in the sky to scratching around in the same old hole.
Would you want it any other way? Is there a better alternative to this thrilling and beautiful and, at times, emotionally overwhelming show? Cork county board seems to believe so anyway.
Had they wanted Ryan to stay they surely could not have suggested or imposed the reported idea of a backroom rejig. Someone so loyal would not countenance this. Nor should he have to. If you trust a person to lead your team, you trust them to select their people. Yet true to character, Ryan left the role with nothing but gracious words for the board.
The pressure is on that Cork board now. When you put in place terms which could well lead to a change of regime, you need to be fairly sure that results and outcomes will improve. It’s Liam MacCarthy or bust for them now.
There are a number of candidates that have been mentioned. It would be a surprise if Ben O’Connor does not get offered and take the job. Who knows what his personal circumstances are? It might not be the best time, though it probably never will be. All intercounty jobs are too much; this one is entirely mental. You are heading up a minor nation state where there is no separation of church and state and you are in charge of both. Tactician, manager and spiritual leader to 30-odd players and around half a million invested citizens among whom you walk. Every step, every day.
But O’Connor has to take it. What is life but a series of ludicrous challenges, and this one may only come around once.
O’Connor has the managerial record with the Cork U20 team, Charleville and Midleton. He also had a glorious playing career with Newtownshandrum and Cork, with whom he won All-Irelands in 1999, 2004 and 05.
Pat Ryan was around in 99 of course, but O’Connor’s elevation would represent the first of that generation with three All-Ireland medals – and the fallout that came from strikes – to become Cork manager.
Perhaps it is what they need. That group had a winning know-how and a certain ruthlessness. One of the more curious, and probably unwelcome, developments in the past few years is a bit of neutral good feeling towards Cork. A hope that they would ‘get over the line’ or that ‘Hoggie gets his medal’ . . . ‘I’d love to see them do it’.
That might diminish in time with O’Connor and a couple of his peers from 04/05 in charge.
There’s a scene in the 1996 movie Swingers (not those type of swingers, get your mind on higher things) when Vince Vaughan puts it straight to Jon Favreau.
“I don’t want you to be the guy in the PG-13 movie everyone’s really hoping makes it happen. I want you to be like the guy in the rated-R movie, you know, the guy you’re not sure whether or not you like yet.”
Cork will become the R-rated guy under O’Connor. You’ll remember the 2023 U20 All-Ireland final and Cork, let’s say, imposing themselves physically on Offaly. For the few days afterwards the discourse went from the evergreen ‘Cork are soft’ to ‘This is barbarism and it must be denounced’.
Fair warning, what follows will be generalities which are likely to offend: There is a certain type of Cork person, essentially decent but 100% aggro when it comes down to it. It’s a trait which is pronounced among those who were children there from the late ‘70s through to the early ‘90s when it was a more poor and grey place. You didn’t need to be aggressive to live there but you definitely had to learn to deal with those who were, and so you developed a side.
There was a lot of needling and verbal cutting down to size and the odd flurry of fists. Roy Keane is the most famous example, and there were others in sport such as Ronan O’Gara. Even people such as Sonia O’Sullivan and Donncha O’Callaghan, who were modest and affable away from the arena, were killers when it came to competition.
That Cork hurling team from the late 90s to the mid 2000s were infested with that attitude. Lovely fellas no doubt in nearly all aspects of life. But a switch could be flicked where they were defiant, paranoid, furious; not the kind of men you’d want coming after you.
None of this makes anybody invincible or anything. It’s just a dark energy that can make people better at a chosen thing than they would otherwise be.
That generation might be able to put something in this one: a new edge which makes them a meaner opponent.
Though sometimes you’d wonder whether it is possible to visit that on today’s senior players. They grew up in a different Ireland and a radically different Cork. No town ever kicked them around, told them they had no future there, or that the only way was out or stay and fight over scraps.
It could be an unworkable culture clash or a necessary fusion of old and new. Just as Ryan brought some of the old style back and refined it for modern hurling, O’Connor could do likewise with the attitude. Borrow from a more angry past and take it to today, with not one backward step.
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