Cuthbert hails fighting spirit

CORK minor boss Brian Cuthbert struggled in the aftermath to explain how his side had triumphed in yesterday’s pulsating All-Ireland semi-final.

Cuthbert has been watching his team battle against the odds all summer but this latest victory was their most dramatic of an incredible season.

“With 15 minutes to go I said to one of the selectors at that stage, ‘if we can pull this out of the fire, we’re going to be very lucky’. But that’s the young fellas I have. They don’t panic, they don’t give up, they just keep plugging away.

“It’s something I had to drill into them all year. But it’s very hard to drill something into an 18-year-old, that’s quite difficult to do. These lads thankfully just seem to take the information we’re giving them on board.

“There are no superstars, but we have mature players who will battle until the very end. They just clawed it back. In fairness to our guys, after 12 or 13 minutes it would have been very easy to fold up the tent and say ‘it’s not our year, we’ve had a good run’.

“You’re very impressionable at 18. If you play three high-quality championship games and you come back every time, you believe that this can happen again and again.

“But the one thing I said to them is that this isn’t always going to happen. It’s happened three times in a row, it’s not going to happen maybe the fourth time. We coughed up some soft goals as well. There was a spell there in the second half when Galway could have had three or four or even five goals and the game would really have been over then.”

There was a strong Castlehaven influence to Cork’s victory with Brian Hurley nailing three pressure frees to win the match and Damian Cahalane driving the team on from midfield.

Cuthbert praised both and revealed that Cahalane had been hampered by illness in the build-up to the game.

“Brian is one of these special players that the bigger the stage, the better he likes it. Damian had a great game. He’s after playing I think five championship games in the last 13 or 14 days. But he was the one guy that drove us forward. He had a stomach bug the last two days and didn’t come up with us on Saturday.

“He was operating on an empty tank. The day he has a full tank, God help the opposition.”

The result creates a special occasion for Cork football on September 19 when for the first time in 17 years the county’s minor and senior sides will play All-Ireland finals on the same day.

Cuthbert has the distinction of playing on the victorious minor team on that day in 1993.

“Yeah, it’ll be very special. There’s two ways it can go. You can say it’s great to have the crowd behind you or they can be a bit in awe of the occasion and it’s gone past them before they really realise.”