Last man standing Quirke stays focused

IT’S THE loneliest place in a crowded stadium. Goalkeepers can pace the small parallelogram, juggle their gloves or pick out clouds in the sky, but it’s still a solitary posting.

Cork’s Alan Quirke is used to his own company. As a result, he works hard to keep his focus during the long periods of inactivity even in a hectic championship game.

“I suppose the big thing for me is to keep my concentration, and I usually do that by talking to the players outside me.

“I generally do a lot of talking to the three lads outside me in the full-back line, and even the three lads in the half-back line.

“We have water-boys and the team runner as well, they’re in and out and they’d keep you on your toes, but yeah, it can be a challenge to keep your concentration when you’re not being called into action.”

Quirke draws on the experiences of other net-minders in other disciplines to help.

“Definitely you’d look at some of the soccer goalkeepers when it comes to maintaining your concentration, whatever about shot-stopping or whatever.

“You’d look at a guy like Edwin Van Der Saar, for instance, because his game with Manchester United wouldn’t be dissimilar to how a lot of Gaelic football goalkeepers’ games pan out – he doesn’t get a lot to do for long periods of the game, and then he’ll get a couple of shots to save after maybe not having anything to do for 20 minutes or so.

“So that’s something you’d look at – in an intercounty championship game you know that anything can be coming around the corner, you have to be ready and ensure that you’re not caught out. I’d keep an eye on Van Der Saar to see what I can learn.”

Not all the comparisons stack up. Quirke faced a penalty in the Kerry game but he doesn’t study opponents to the extent that Van Der Saar and co do.

“To a small extent you’d study kickers, but each situation is different. Certainly it’s probably dangerous to second-guess forwards of the calibre of Colm Cooper because he could make a fool of you very quickly.

“Generally in a situation like that you try to take it as it comes and react as quickly as you can – if that works out, great, and if it doesn’t, well, that’s just the way it goes.”

In any case there are specific Gaelic football challenges, of course. Cork’s kick-out strategy worked well against Kerry in the Munster semi-final replay, but he doesn’t overplay that success.

“You try to vary the kick-outs, obviously, but I also think that people can end up reading too much into statistics on kick-outs.

“Sometimes they work for you, and then the next day people end up saying ‘everything he kicked out today he kicked out to the opposition’, even though you mightn’t be doing anything a whole lot differently.

“It’s not an exact science. You’re kicking a ball 50 or 60 metres, after all, and a lot of times in the modern game it comes down to whichever team can win the break.

“There’s not a huge amount of clean ball won in the middle of the field, I’d just be hoping it goes well on Sunday.”

And Sunday means Limerick. The big goalkeeper says complacency on Cork’s part won’t be an issue, after the Shannonsiders ran them close last season. Playing at home won’t be a huge boost either.

“It’s not just last year, remember – in 2006 we had a desperately difficult year against them, before that – in 2003 – they beat us at home.

“So in that sense it’s not just rhetoric to say ‘we’re not being complacent’. That’s doesn’t even come into it – any time you lay Limerick you expect a very tough battle, end of story.

“You’d have to be honest and say it’s a slight advantage for us to play in the Pairc – we train there regularly and we’ve obviously played a lot of games there.

“But most of this Limerick team has played there quite often. They’d know it as well as we’d know the Gaelic Grounds, and once the ball is thrown in it’s game on.”