Bust-up ‘should not have happened’, admits Ó hAilpín

CORK star Sean Óg Ó hAilpín said yesterday that the pre-game melee before last Sunday’s Munster SHC “shouldn’t have happened”.

The row between Cork and Clare players before last Sunday’s game has been widely criticised, and the 2005 All-Ireland winning captain said he doesn’t expect the scenes to be repeated.

“It shouldn’t have happened that the teams came out together, and all I know is that it probably won’t happen again.”

Addressing the issue of whether players were over-hyped before games and whether that had contributed to the row, the Cork star pointed out that the culture in most GAA dressing-rooms had changed of late.

“There was a time before matches you’d be in the dressing-room and you were told to take the door off the hinges and run out the tunnel and sprint eighty yards across the pitch – after that you were fecked, you’d be thinking ‘now I’ve a match to deal with’.

“In most sports you see the two teams coming out calmly, they’re professional sportsmen, they’re on top of their game and they know what’s required. Maybe the culture within our games is different to others, and I know the GAA likes to sell the uniqueness of the association, but it was just unfortunate the two teams happened to come out at the same time. That’s probably unprecedented – I’ve never experienced that.

“If everything had gone according to plan it wouldn’t have happened, or got to the stage where players were rubbing shoulders with each other coming out.”

Ó hAilpín added that spectators enjoyed the physical element in Gaelic games: “That’s what puts bums on seats, people like to see that. If you look at a sport like Australian Rules, before the ball is thrown in the full-forward and the full-back are squaring up to each other – I wouldn’t say thumping each other – and the GAA is similar. Players accept that and move on with it. After the dust settled on Sunday, we moved on and had a game, and in the game itself there wasn’t a foul stroke.”

Ó hAilpín’s predecessor as Cork captain, Ben O’Connor also played down the pre-game row yesterday.

“It was nothing, just a bit of handbags. There was a lot made out of it maybe because the game itself wasn’t great. It was just one of those things that happened for both sides, a bit of pushing and shoving.”