Unhappy fringe players a sign of progress for JBM

Cork hurling manager Jimmy Barry-Murphy says some of his panellists are “very unhappy” not to be on the first 15 — and that’s just the way he wants it.

“Without getting into specifics, there are a number of players who are very unhappy not to be playing, I’d say, but that’s a good thing to have. It’s where we wanted to get to, to have real competition for places.

“When I was involved with Cork before we had a very set panel and team and you didn’t have the spread of players you’d like to have. But the game has changed so much now, the intensity is huge and fitness levels are massive, and no team finishes a game now without using 19, 20 players.

“There are players who’d like to have more game time, I’d say, but we’re prepared to change the team if we feel it’s necessary for the next day.”

The Leeside icon admitted the qualifiers draw had been “kind” to Cork.

“The draw fell our way in terms of meeting teams from Division 1B. That’s not being disrespectful to them, they’d admit themselves that it’s hard to get up to the level of Division 1A because you’re not meeting that caliber of opposition regularly.

“Offaly we played at home, which was a good boost, and Wexford are a team in transition, so the draw has been kind to us.”

Barry-Murphy added that Cork’s record against Waterford in recent years wasn’t impressive: “Being honest, of the four teams left in it, a Kilkenny team on the rebound... you’d always be worried there.

“Having said that, our record against Waterford in the last five or six years hasn’t been the best. We don’t have a good record against them in the last five or six meetings and we’ll be looking to put that right.

“It’s a tough draw, we’re making some progress, I feel, but it’s hard to gauge yet how far we’ve come.

“Waterford are obviously a team with a lot of experience and we have a mix of younger players and more experienced lads.

“We’re trying to get back to the level we were at when we played Tipperary, which was our best display. Even though we lost it was a game we felt we could have won, we just didn’t take the chances that came our way.

“A bit of inexperience cost us and it’ll be interesting to see if we’ve learned from that. You hear this thing about getting more goals but it’s not something we get on to the players about too much.

“I think it happens in games, whether they’re on or not, but it was good to get goals against Offaly and Wexford, it gives confidence to the players. We created chances and took them, so that’s a start.”