Hoggie: Board officers shouldn’t meddle in player selection

Glen Rovers vs Midleton: Glen Rovers' Patrick Horgan

Cork legend Patrick Horgan says former manager Pat Ryan found himself between a rock and a hard place on the Glen Rovers man’s retirement from the intercounty game last year.

In his autobiography, Hoggie, to be launched Thursday at the Glen Rovers clubhouse, Horgan suggests that high-ranking county board officials were in Ryan’s ear on who should be on the Cork panel after the disastrous end to the 2025 campaign against Tipperary in the All-Ireland final.

“That’s not what the board should be doing,” Horgan writes, “telling a manager who should and shouldn’t be dropped from the county selection. No manager in any sport would work under those conditions, where the administrators are deciding who should and shouldn’t be playing on a team. That’s the manager’s job.”

Horgan says he rang Cork GAA CEO Kevin O’Donovan to convey as much, saying that it was galling that after all he had done with Cork, for the Glen man’s name to be brought up to Ryan in such a context.

“Eventually he (O’Donovan) said he didn’t think my name had arisen in the way I thought. I made the point anyway, that naming players to be dropped wasn’t the job of administrators, plain and simple. 

"Anyone who knows the (inter-county) game will see the issue here. Management see the players all the time, they judge how their form is going, and they’re the ones entitled to pass judgement on the players.

“Pat would have been within his rights to say to those officials ‘If I’m the manager I’ll pick the team’. 

"But I suspect that he saw he wouldn’t have maintained their backing if he retained players that they wanted gone from the panel. How could a manager continue in that situation.”

Elsewhere, in his autobiography, published by Gill, the 37-year-old says that the ‘minor controversy’ over the 2025 All-Ireland homecoming that wasn’t could also have been better dealt with by the county board – coming as it did amid rumours of Cork players ‘fighting with each other in the hotel’ after the final loss.

“The board should have further clarified their statement (on why there would be no homecoming), and addressed those WhatsApp rumours. 

"The board could have helped by pointing out there was no truth to them at all. But they didn’t.” 

 Horgan scored 0-11 for the Glen last Saturday as they powered past Midleton and into an all-city Cork Premier SHC final on October 18 against St Finbarr’s (4pm).