The second coming

WHEN Cork football meant royalty, Colman Corrigan manned the portcullis. The big full-back dominated the square when Cork finally gained supremacy in Munster in 1987, so you'd expect him, as a Cork selector, to be despondent in the wake of Kerry's Munster final victory this summer.

Not quite. After the getting-to-know-you season with the players last year, the management put the panel on weights and ran up some reasonable league results. If their plans went awry against Kerry, Corrigan focuses on the positives in the three-point defeat, such as the introduction of new blood into the Cork attack.

"Our initial reaction was disappointment," he says, "we'd trained very hard for the Kerry game and we were disappointed not to win. We put that disappointment away and got back training on the Thursday afterwards and decided we'd focus on our next game.