Waterford beware, Ben’s back in the mood

ON a scale of one to ten, the prospect of Ben O’Connor falling out of love with hurling would surely rate at about the eleven mark.

Still, by last autumn and his club Newtownshandrum’s departure from the Cork senior hurling championship, that was pretty understandable. O’Connor had been on the go non-stop, more or less, since 2003 and they both agreed to a trial separation. Around Valentine’s Day there was a reconciliation.

“In that length of time I had no interest in the hurley. But when it came to February I started getting itchy. The senior hurling league starts again and you want to get back into it, while before that I’d been going through the motions.”

There’s a difference between the ballwork and the treadmill, as O’Connor explains.

“You get sick of doing the same thing – for a while there we were going up to the field in November and December and you’d just be depressed to see the place, just sick of going up there.

‘‘You were going up, training, and then the thought of going back there two nights later . . . I suppose the older you get the harder it gets too.

“But then when the weather starts to get fine, you’d be out hurling. It’s easy to pick it up then again.”

Avoiding the now-famous row before the Clare game with a trademark sidestep — “I was late out of the dressing-room, and when I came out I just saw lads going one way or the other” — O’Connor acknowledges that the game which followed the shemozzle that day was pretty flat, suggesting that the fight took some of the sting out of the contest itself.

Now it’s Waterford. Again. There’s a little difference this time round, however. Waterford come into the game with a national title, and O’Connor nods when asked if the Déise are likely to benefit from that NHL victory over Kilkenny. “In the last few years we’ve been lucky enough to come out on the right side in close games against Waterford — even when things weren’t going well we got the scores near the end to get there. The NHL win is a monkey off their back, now they’re focusing on winning the Munster championship, and an All-Ireland. The pressure’s off them a small bit.

“Hopefully we can improve on the Clare game, that’s all we want to do. People said the Clare match wasn’t great. We won and we don’t care. We’re only looking for a result.”

Still, do Cork need to improve if they’re going to overcome Waterford?

“Oh, we’d have to bring it up. We hadn’t had a game for a while before that and we were only going at 60-70% — both teams were. But that’s only to be expected, when you don’t have match practice. It’s the same for the Ulster football championship — if you watch them, they’re building up in the early rounds and through the qualifiers, and then they’re flying it by the time it gets to the All-Ireland quarter-finals and semi-finals.

“We’re training since January, but you can’t expect fellas to get into it straight away.”

Ah. So therefore we can infer that Cork have their eye on the back-door route? Not so fast, says O’Connor.

“No-one wants to go that route. Someone said we’d be better off going through the back door this season, that that was the easier option. But everyone wants a Munster medal, we want the quickest route to an All-Ireland, so we’ll be going out all guns blazing to win the Munster championship.

‘‘Winning is a habit, and when that happens you’ll win games you shouldn’t have won.”

It makes a difference to be talking about games, of course. O’Connor dismisses the peripheral stuff that dogged Cork early this year: “There was a lot of stories going around, fellas were pulling out and there was fighting and big bust-ups in training and so on. I was at training most nights and I didn’t see any of that! It’s just that someone heard something from someone else and there was an arm and a leg grew on the story. Now it’s nice to concentrate on the hurling.”

O’Connor and hurling, back together again.