O’Leary focused as Cork eye long road

NOEL O’LEARY says he and his Cork football teammates will have to be focused to make progress in the football qualifiers, but the wing-back stressed yesterday that the Rebels were upbeat as they faced “the longer route”.

Cork suffered an agonising one-point defeat at the hands of All-Ireland champions Kerry on Sunday, and the Kilnamartra clubman vowed the side wouldn’t be complacent going into the qualifiers.

“We’ll be going the longer route now but we’ll have to be focused to make progress,” said O’Leary.

“We know that and there’s no danger we’ll be overconfident going into those games.

“You had a lot of pundits tipping us as favourites for the All-Ireland all year, but with nothing to back that up. Losing to Kerry might be a blessing in disguise in that sense, because it could take the limelight off us a bit in the qualifiers.”

O’Leary dismissed speculation that Cork and Kerry might meet again later in the summer as disrespectful to other teams in the championship shake-up.

“There are a lot of good teams out there, and it’s not going to be easy for us. You hear fellas saying ‘when Cork meet Kerry in August in Croke Park’ and all that kind of thing, but that’s nonsense. We’re not paying any attention to that kind of talk – we’re concentrating on getting ourselves right to perform in the first game of the qualifiers, and we don’t expect an easy run or anything like that.”

O’Leary also acknowledged the disappointment of Sunday’s loss to the Kingdom.

“It was hugely disappointing, but it’s a lot different to years ago when you were gone out of the championship after one game and a defeat would be eating you up for 12 months until you got another chance at the team that beat you.

“Now with the back door you can get games again almost straightaway, and you can use it as a positive.

“If you go back a couple of years the likes of Kerry and Tyrone have both used the back-door route to try different things, to try different players and they ended up winning the All-Ireland after it.”

O’Leary rubbished suggestions Cork suffered a psychological blow with another defeat by Kerry, echoing manager Conor Counihan’s view that Cork had lost to Kerry before, so another defeat wouldn’t make a huge difference.

“Conor hit the nail on the head when he said that,” said O’Leary.

“We’ve lost to Kerry in the past and come back, and we’ve beaten Kerry in the past. Talking about psychological blows is fair enough, but another way of looking at is if we’d beaten Kerry, people would have probably started saying, ‘oh, they beat them in Munster but they can’t do it in Croke Park’.

“You can’t win with some people no matter what you do.”

O’Leary closed with a rallying call to Cork supporters. “We’re not out of it at all. It was disappointing to lose last Sunday obviously, but there’s a lot more football to be played and we aim to drive it on from here.”