O’Connor: We knew Offaly would fight
Cork beat the Faithful County by the bare minimum following a late goal from the midlanders, but O’Connor said recent upheaval in Offaly was bound to bond the county’s hurlers.
“They’ve had their own bother in Offaly, which is always going to bring a team closer together,” said O’Connor. “As for us, it was never going to be easy after the highs of last weekend against Laois — the 10 goals and all of that.
“When you’re down to 14 men for most of the game you’re happy to cover a lot of ground, and in fairness to Offaly they had their own game plan.”
Cork lost to Patrick Cronin to a straight red card on 20 minutes and O’Connor admitted that playing most of the game a man down eventually took a toll.
“The last 10, 15 minutes we were feeling it all right — the yards were getting that bit harder to cover, Offaly were able to create that bit more space — and again, to be fair to them, when they created chances they were well able to finish them. They were very accurate.
“I know in the first half they hit a few bad wides, but in general they took their chances well.”
O’Connor stressed that expectations of another goal-fest against Offaly were completely unrealistic.
“After running in 10 goals against Laois last week people in Cork were probably expecting something similar against Offaly last Saturday, particularly when, as everybody knows, there was a bit of disarray in the county in the last few weeks.
“People fell into the trap of classing Offaly in the same group as Laois, which was wrong. We knew we weren’t going to be getting 10 goals last Saturday but you could tell at the same time that there was an expectation around that we’d be banging them in.”
Having soldiered through three player strikes in a decade, O’Connor and the other Cork veterans are uniquely placed to comment on the positives that team can draw from such strife. “When you’ve problems like that it can certainly work to a team’s advantage — it becomes a case of ‘us against the world’, and you hate everybody. You work out a plan of attack and what you find then is that everybody works that little bit harder to put it into operation — and you could see that that’s what Offaly did, there was only a point in it at the final whistle.”
O’Connor had words of encouragement for some of the younger Cork players who have been introduced to championship fare this season by manager Denis Walsh.
“They’re improving with every game. It’s very hard for a young fella to be parachuted into a team for the championship. In reality it could take a player a couple of years to get used to the routine of the championship game — the pressure the week beforehand, all of that — and all these games will bring them on. We’re getting there.”
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