Appreciating the moment
All along he’s continued to lead, prepare, plan. Even as he lay on the flat of that back on a table in the bowels of Semple Stadium that April afternoon and Dr Con Murphy and the Tipperary team medic told him that he only had a 1% chance of hurling again in 2012, Donal Óg Cusack never countenanced the possibility that his inter-county career could be over. His age — 36 the day before Paddy Day’s next year — was immaterial. Whatever perceived baggage he carried was irrelevant too from the moment Jimmy Barry-Murphy made him captain. Even this setback, his Achilles tendon coiling up like a broken elastic band, was no deterrent. He would play for Cork again. He will play for Cork again — if Jimmy wants him to.
“I can tell you something now, that thought [of never again playing for Cork] never occurred to me,” he says with that familiar eyeball earnestness. “In my mind that was a non-negotiable. When people actually said it to me, that you know, it could have been my last game for Cork, I was actually bemused by it because it was so far away from my thinking.
