League a time to look in the mirror

Away days.

Hoors of days. That blasted computer certainly had it in for Cork when it put together this year’s Division 1 fixtures.

They won’t give back any of their four home games for love nor money but their three trips happen to be the longest possible ones for them to make in the division.

Noel O’Leary doesn’t mind Armagh tomorrow. The quality of the road to Dublin makes the journey that bit more comfortable but Donegal and Mayo in March are, as he says, “nice spins”.

All the travelling will be done by coach. It’s not the getting there that’s the problem; it’s the coming back.

“Picking up injuries in away games can be a bit of a disaster,” says O’Leary. “Not being able to treat them for a good few hours certainly can be a bit of a disaster but it’s a thing that can’t be helped. Generations have been doing it down through the years and we’ll just have to deal with it.”

That vein of pragmatism runs through O’Leary’s utterances. In his nine senior seasons previous, he’s hardly known a Cork set-up without John Miskella and Anthony Lynch, players he describes as “extraordinary men”, but they’ll be missing from the seats tomorrow.

He’s not for sentimentality, though.

“Life has to go on and it’s up to the next guys to take over the mantle and pick up the slack. That’s the way it’s going to have to be. Life moves on and you just have to move with it.”

It’s fixtures like tomorrow which he sees as chances for the new breed to demonstrate they’ve the appetite for battle and are worthy of replacing the retirees.

“They’re the kind of games that will sort the men from the boys and you’ll know better what you’re dealing with.

“They’re great games to have and certainly for the new guys they are games that will kind of define a lot of them.”

Cork still have stalwarts, though. O’Leary, even though he isn’t 30 for another few months, being one. Graham Canty, 31 in July, another.

It’s Canty’s age which O’Leary wants to bring attention to. He believes the common misconception is that his captain’s older.

“There’s a lot been said about him, his injuries and his age, which is funny enough because he’s not that old, not that much more than myself.

“Over the last three years, he’s been ravaged by injuries and Graham hasn’t played a massive amount of football.

“I think he’s had a good run at it now since the start of the year and he’s fresh and motoring as good as any of us, young or old.

“I think as the year develops Graham is going to have a massive part to play in Cork football and I think he’s going to surprise a lot of people.”

Canty’s return may be interpreted as the impatience of Cork to rectify what went wrong last July.

It was the first time since 2004 Cork had failed to see championship football in August.

Still, six months to kick competitive ball again is a long time waiting.

“In a way it was an unusual experience but it was inevitable it was going to happen some day,” shrugs O’Leary about the Mayo defeat. “We’d be hoping it will stand to us in relation to freshening us up.”

On deep reflection, O’Leary comes back to one missing ingredient.

“The biggest thing that stood out to me was hunger and how massive it is in relation to playing at the top level. You have to have a massive hunger to get over the line and I think we were lacking that last year. We didn’t seem to have the same bite as we did the two or three years before that.

“Dublin were knocking at the door for the last three years and with that hunger and appetite it finally went their way and got them over the line. Credit where credit is due, they deserved it. It showed we can’t take anything for granted. You don’t have a God-given right to be in quarter-finals, semi-finals or finals. You have to work and really, really want it.”

Earlier this week, Conor Counihan implied it was a curse in disguise beating Dublin in last year’s Division 1 final when they recovered from being eight points down. Giving them perhaps a false impression of their powers.

O’Leary concurs. “We would have felt after the league final that we could weather most storms in front of us.

“But when you looked at it in the cold light of day, like Conor was saying, it was just papering over the cracks.

“It eventually caught up with us. It just showed we were lacking something during the year and Mayo tipped us over.”

The introduction of semi-finals to Division 1 this year might afford Cork room to iron out some creases while reaching the knock-out stages.

However, O’Leary doesn’t want such favours. Not if it means Cork cruise into the last four and once again get a false impression of themselves.

“I’m not too gone with it looking at it now. A lot of teams don’t have to do a whole pile to reach a league final.

“Without being biased on the whole thing, we have four games at home which will give us a big advantage.

“We can’t pass judgement on it just yet until we’ve seen it. I think it’s slightly unbalanced but we’ll wait and see.”

Picture: Noel O' Leary