Mulcahy admires forward thinking

YESTERDAY morning, 6.30am, still black dark outside but on duty early because of some urgent business, and from his office in Cork Airport Business Park where he works for Irish Life & Permanent, Pat Mulcahy could hear the storm raging outside.

The rain like machine-gun fire against the windows, horizontal with the force of the wind. And he gave thanks, did Pat; not for the fact that he was nice and sheltered in a warm, comfortable office, grateful and all as he was for that. No, Pat was thinking of later on in his long day, the journey home to Newtownshandrum, the training that evening in preparation for this Sunday’s Munster club senior hurling championship semi-final against Adare, in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

And he was thankful to the visionaries in his home club, those who had the foresight over the last decade, when Newtownshandrum were going so well at county and at national level, to think big and install a floodlit all-weather sand-based pitch, so that rather than slogging through mud under lights so dim that the only training they could manage would be numbingly physical, they would instead be able to have a full, flying, hurling-based session.