Ó Sé hoping to be fit for Cork showdown

DARRAGH Ó SÉ is confident he will be fit for the All-Ireland Final against Cork.

Ó Sé sustained a hip injury which limited his involvement in yesterday’s All-Ireland semi-final to the opening 22 minutes and the last 16 minutes.

His hope is that it’s just a muscular problem — caused when a team-mate ran gave him a knee into the hip — but as a precaution he will have it checked out in hospital later today.

“It’s very sore (now). I don’t know, but I’m hoping. I’ll have a scan and see how I go. The muscles seized up. I couldn’t lift my leg or I couldn’t run hard, so I had to come off. I was only a liability there,” he said.

“It was hard to come off. No player would want to leave (the field) like that. It was a cracking game and it was fast. That’s what you train for all year — to get into a game like that.

“Tommy Griffin was outstanding when he came on. So was Seamus Scanlan. The lads played exceptionally well. They horsed into it and I think we won the breaks.

“But it was going to be swings and roundabouts. For whichever team had the momentum going forward it was time to make hay when you had the ball.”

At the time he came off — the injury occurred in the 16th minute, and he played on for a further six minutes — he didn’t envisage returning to the action at a later stage — Peter Canavan-style.

But that’s exactly what he did, when the management obviously felt that his presence was needed.

“By half-time it had loosened up and I got an injection. There wasn’t a need (to come back) because the lads were doing so well. Towards the end of the game it got a bit tight. I was lucky to get a run.

“When Dublin were winning that kind of possession they were having a good run of it. But, we were just lucky to come in at the right time and get the scores. We rotated the ball well to get a few scores at the end.”

He agreed that the Monaghan game had brought the team on a lot after having been inactive for six weeks following the Munster final. But, it wasn’t as if they had underestimated the challenge from the Ulster runners-up.

“On any given day you can be beaten by anyone. You can’t take anything for granted. Monaghan could have been here just as easy as Kerry and who’d know how that would have gone,” he added.

“We didn’t dwell too much on the Monaghan game. We knew there wasn’t going to be much in it. We did a lot of work before the game from the physical side of things and it stood to us.

“And we got no booking. We weren’t going to lose anybody in that game — we needed everybody for today as it showed.

“Every game is different, the next game is going to be different. Cork are Cork. That’s it!”