Counihan: ‘we can perform even better next year’

IT’S 1990 since Conor Counihan was last on an All-Stars trip. He earned his ticket to Toronto that time on the strength of Cork’s second successive All-Ireland title and his own back-to-back nomination as the game’s outstanding number six.

Twenty years on and the latest tour has taken him to the city of Kuala Lumpur, a passage he earned by the dint of leading Cork on another victorious march up Croke Park’s Hogan Stand steps in September.

The symmetry is nice but the Aghada man still finds it difficult to process the fact that the Munster county failed to claim another Sam Maguire in the intervening years. No wonder, then, that relief is still the abiding emotion more than two months on.