PATRICK HORGAN HAS revealed he would have considered playing on with Cork if Pat Ryan had remained as manager and asked him to stay on board for another season.

Horgan brought the curtain down on a brilliant playing career with Cork last week after 18 seasons on the senior squad.

Ryan departed in late August as Cork senior boss with Ben O’Connor since appointed to replace him.

Horgan, speaking to Colm Parkinson today on The Smaller Fish GAA podcast, admitted if Ryan had wanted him to stay, he ‘probably would have done it’.
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“Pat leaving and all that, it was, really hard, like. Pat was well got. I loved him, like, loved playing for him and, yeah, just that was disappointing. I probably would have done anything in the world that Pat Ryan told me to do.

“So, if he had wanted me to to do anything, I probably would have done it for him. You hear all the other players, everybody talks about him the same. He’s the best man ever and the players all loved him. There’s nothing more I can say about him that people don’t already know, he was great.

“I was thinking about it (retirement) for a while and I just didn’t want to say anything because we were playing with the Glen and I wanted to put all my effort into that, and as soon as we went out of the championship, it kind of became a thing. Had a think about it for a few days and that was it.”

Horgan was asked had he discussed his plans with new Cork manager Ben O’Connor. 

“No, only nearly after every match last year I would have got a message just saying well done or whatever. That was about it.

“But I suppose I just didn’t want it to go on any longer and have kind of talk about this and that, just had it done.”

Horgan also spoke about the rumours of a dressing room bust-up that emerged in the wake of this year’s All-Ireland final loss and how he felt the Cork county board could have handled the situation better by speaking out on that topic.

“There are things that they could have done better and I’m even referring back to the All-Ireland final on this. I think there were certain times where they could have, like, you know, help, helped out.

“The half-time kind of rubbish that was being said, which wasn’t true at all, and I think they just left that lingering there, left us to kind of take the brunt of it really. It was pretty bad stuff going around.

“Even though to be fair now, I hadn’t been sent anything but a few of my buddies there that I trust, like, they kind of just came to me and were like, ‘This is what’s going on, this is what’s being said, you were fighting here, you were fighting there and everywhere.’

“Couldn’t be further from the truth.

“But yeah, was happy that a couple of weeks ago when Pat (Ryan) was chatting that he kind of quashed it anyway.”

Horgan didn’t feel it was appropriate for any of the Cork players to speak out at the time as they dealt with the major setback of another major All-Ireland final defeat.

“You lost the final, in the way we lost it, I know this from talking to all the rest of the players, like, you’re down.

“There’s no point in saying otherwise, you’re down, and you don’t want to really talk about anything. No matter what someone accuses you of, you’re like, whatever I actually don’t care about it.

“I don’t think it was for one of us (to talk), like we’re just gonna be shot at then again. I think it shouldn’t have been in our hands to come out and say something like that.

“We know it wasn’t true, and they know it wasn’t true. They (Cork board) should have kind of just said, ‘Look, this is the story or whatever, there’s nothing going on, nothing happened.’

“Which there wasn’t, that’s the truth.”

Horgan also spoke in the interview about the All-Ireland final losses during his career, the culture change in Cork hurling, his levels of preparation in arriving early for training sessions, and the competition between him and TJ Reid over the all-time hurling championship scoring record.

• You can listen to the full Smaller Fish interview with Patrick Horgan here.