Rebel Pat Horgan still haunted by the one that got away

By Brendan O’Brien

Five years on and the memories still eat away at Patrick Horgan.

He thought he’d won it. His 10th point in that drawn All-Ireland final with Clare had been posted two minutes into additional-time.

History beckoned but then turned its attention towards Domhnall O’Donovan as the Clare defender sent over an outrageous, unlikely equaliser.

Seanie McGrath, a Cork selector that season, has admitted in the years since that a day doesn’t pass without him thinking of those ‘sliding doors’ moments. And, for Horgan, they have come to occupy a similar residency in his daily routine.

“Yeah, it’s unbelievably tough, I think about that game a lot too. It’s like ... the game was over, you know what I mean? And they’re not given out easily. And when you’re in the position where you’re up, time is up and he doesn’t blow it, it feels like you’re being robbed. It feels like it’s been taken from you.

“And then having said that, time was up and I remember the puckout came and there were five or six things that happened all in Clare’s favour at the time. If even one of those things hadn’t happened, they wouldn’t have got the chance to score and that’s the way hurling is. Sometimes your luck is in, sometimes it’s not.”

Horgan has had to bank other unpalatable memories with Cork since.

It’s been testing for the Rebels, no doubt about it. But he still believes.

“Yeah, jeez, definitely. When you see the level that has to go into it, going training so early in the year, going training now in a couple of weeks’ time for this Super 11s (Fenway Hurling Classic in Boston) and after that it will just continue as normal.

“When you see that level going into it, if you don’t think you’re going to win you may stay at home. It’s every day, it’s three hours a day anyway at least, between gym, hurling, stretching, the whole lot. There’s so many different things you have to do to prepare for just hurling. It’s crazy.

“So if you thought there was no hope of winning I don’t know why you’d go at all.”

The recent ESRI report on the inter-county game stated that players are committing over 30 hours every week to their pursuit of success on the field, but a chat with Horgan confirms that this is merely a baseline figure and that the parameters of the study could have been extended.

That figure of 31 hours doesn’t include the weekends where he stays at home while friends embark on a trip away. Or all the other nights spent sitting in with the curtains closed. Hurling doesn’t impact on his job with Crane Worldwide but it spills into every other corner of his existence.

It is an obsession. It has to be. Whether it is healthy is another thing.

“With some fellas it would be, with some fellas it wouldn’t. For me, it works perfect, even though, like, a few of my buddies (say), ‘Oh, you’re a psychopath, I always knew you were!’ I’m just like, ‘All the boys are doing it, I have to do it!’ It depends on what you make of it.

“What I would say is that when it all finishes and a fella has to stop playing, I don’t know what that fella is going to do. We were knocked out there a couple of weeks ago with the Glen, probably one of the worst defeats we’ve had playing with the club.

“Jeez, since then fellas don’t know what to do with themselves. Because every other club is still in it, fellas training and all of that. I can imagine when you have to call time on playing, I don’t know what fellas are going to do.”

The hope is that he will have claimed at least one Celtic Cross by the time his turn comes to walk away. Cork are clearly close, and another influx of talented U21s next year should make them even more competitive, but would Horgan consider his career a success if the ultimate prize eluded him?

“I would say, yeah, because at the end of the day, you have a Kilkenny team there, like, I don’t even know how many they have? Ten, nine, eight each? Whatever. Something like that. At the end of it all, if you asked them what they’d take away from it it’s the fellas they played with, how friendly they got with them and the different stories they have from games together, training together and all of that.”