'If it's the worst county final in history, I don't care. All that matters is we win'
The Cloyne coach has brought his team to their first ever Cork senior hurling final in this, his first year in charge, but he'll never single out Donal Óg Cusack.
Why? Because the Cloyne coach is Donal Óg Cusack. He is also the team captain and, from his all-seeing position in goal, the literal and physical driving-force behind their recent crusade to the top. Not that he'll thank anyone for pointing that out. "Please," he begs, "I would have preferred if the fact I was coaching the lads hadn't been made public; don't write me up now as the guy who knows it all." He doesn't know it all, nobody does, but he knows a lot.
Utterly dedicated to hurling, a serious thinker on every aspect of the game, it was always on the cards that Cusack would go into coaching, sooner or later. That it has come this soon however, still only entering his peak years as a goalkeeper, has taken even him by surprise. "We were talking about it at the start of the year, Tomás (O'Brien, team manager) and the lads, looking for a coach; finally I said look, I'll do it, but it's not something I like to advertise."
Time for some important definitions. In the Cloyne set-up, Diarmuid Falvey is the trainer who gets the team to peak fitness for peak games, the championship. O'Brien is team manager and looks after the essentials surrounding the team. Donal Óg is coach, and strictly that.
"There are very few good coaches in hurling," he said before the All-Ireland final last year. "Roy Keane is getting £60,000 a week to play soccer but he's not just left to do his own thing with Manchester United, he's playing to instructions. Look at the basketball players in America, they're told by the coaches, this is the way we're going to play, and they're brilliant. There's not enough of that in hurling. You can have fellas saying, 'I want fast hurling now, low ball into the forwards'. That's fine, but HOW do you do it? How do you get into position, how do you hit the right ball, how do you set it up so that everyone knows what's happening? That's where coaching comes in."
That's where Donal O'Grady came in with Cork, according to Cusack; that's where he wants to come in with Cloyne. "It's no secret, if I'm coaching a team we're not going to be just belting the ball around the pitch. The only people who would still claim hurling isn't a tactical sport are those people who just do not understand the way the modern game has gone, and I don't mean to be disrespectful to anyone in saying that.
"Hurling is like any other sport, it keeps developing, but still, I'm shocked at some of the comments of the so-called experts this year. During the RTÉ commentary for the All-Ireland final, Michael Duignan criticised our puck-out tactics, said I should just puck out the ball, let the guys fight for it. I played in the half-forward line for Cloyne and I can tell you now I would see that as crazy.
"There's no great science to pucking out a 50-50 ball, but if you're playing as a team, everyone is trying to help each other out. Surely to God any time you have the ball, you should be trying to place it to the best advantage of your own team. Also, the other guys on the team should be supporting the fella who has the ball.
"There's no great science in any of that either, it's just common sense, but a lot of people still don't get it, and that comment sort of summed it up. Nowadays, I turn down the volume when I'm watching a game on television, it gets so frustrating. I've tried to do things myself I haven't a clue about, but that's just ignorance, shows a lack of respect for players, what they're trying to do."
A critical role then, for Cusack, in this Cloyne set-up, a role that goes beyond that of any of his fellow players. Yet, as he is at pains to point out, no one man ever won anything on his own on a hurling field, not even the great Christy Ring, to whom he is distantly related.
"There's no point in any individual coming out this Sunday and thinking he had a great game if the team loses. In this game, the team has to be the entity, everybody fighting towards the same goal. We're very lucky with the kind of fellas we have, all the leaders in the team, the likes of Phillip and Maurice Cahill, Declan and Seán Motherway, Diarmuid (O'Sullivan); their attitude is that we're all playing for the team, that's paramount."
Off the field, the team approach has also been important. "One of the things I've emphasised with the lads, if you get to a final and lose it, you'd be better off if you'd never reached it at all. And I'm convinced of that; it's such a hurtful thing to lose a final. I have zero interest in the occasion, zero interest in the band, the marching around, all I care about is the game, the result. If it's the worst county final in history, I don't care; all that matters is that we win. I know the lads feel the same way.
"We've gotten some desperately harsh lessons over the last few years; last year it was Blackrock in the semi-final, a game we should have won, but even going back before that, we took some desperate beatings from Imokilly. Those beatings were the hardest things to have to accept.
"We had got up to senior level, but all of the junior and intermediate teams around us who hadn't, had ganged up, if you like, and given us desperate hidings in Midleton. But we approached those games in a totally different frame of mind to what we've had this year, we've learned our lessons. We were going to war, and while it's grand to have that attitude, to still see the game as tribal warfare, you must also box clever."
Cool head rather than a hot head? "Exactly." That's Coach Donal Óg Cusack.
*Tomorrow's permanent tsb Cork SHC final between Cloyne and Na Piarsaigh will be broadcast live by TG4, throw-in, 3.30pm
:
: (probable): M O'Sullivan; D Murphy, R O'Byrne, D Mannix; J Gardiner, D Gardiner, S Óg Ó hAilpín; M Prendergast, R McGregor; C O'Sullivan, C Connery, C O'Mahony; A Ó hAilpín, Steve O'Sullivan, Stephen O'Sullivan.
: D. Cusack; E. O'Sullivan, K. Cronin, D. Motherway; Donal O'Sullivan, M. Cahill, Diarmuid O'Sullivan; L. O'Driscoll, M. Naughton; P. Cahill, C. O'Sullivan, I. Quinlan; P. O'Sullivan, C. Cusack, V. Cusack.
: D. Copps.
