Ryan O’Dwyer hoping there will be no repeat of Croker drubbing

Sunday’s Division 1 semi-final may be in Kilkenny, but that’s where Ryan O’Dwyer wants to leave the references to the reigning league and All-Ireland champions. 

“It’s gas, when Kilkenny aren’t playing, everyone still harps on about Kilkenny. It’s a league semi-final and I’m sure, as much as they’d want to win this, the year is still young and they have other things on their mind. The fact that Kilkenny aren’t in it, there’s four teams left and we’ve one team to deal with and that’s all we’re focused on.”

Yes, the Dublin forward would much prefer to talk about Cork instead of you know who. “You’ve two teams that just want to go out and play. Cork are all fantastic hurlers and they just want to go out and hurl, they don’t want to drag you down to a certain level or defend. It’s all-out hurling.

“There’s so many natural hurlers on the Cork team and it’s the same with Dublin, we just want to go out and hurl. When you have teams like that, there’ll be a lot of scoring chances and there was in that league game for Cork anyway.”

But isn’t there a danger of buying into that stereotype of Cork, even if the current Dublin manager is a former selector of theirs? “From any time I’ve ever played Cork, they’re a genuine team. Now, there’s not many teams out there that aren’t genuine,” laughed O’Dwyer.“No, they’re a genuine team, they go out to play hurling, and off the pitch, I don’t know all of them but I’d say they’re all nice genuine fellas, and they want to go out and play hurling because they love the game.”

There wasn’t many niceties last month when Cork trimmed Dublin by 11 points, scoring 34 of them. Dublin managed 1-20 themselves, lending to the idea games between the counties usually turn out to be shoot-outs.

The 2013 All-Ireland semi-final provides further evidence of that.

Naturally, O’Dwyer doesn’t want a repeat in Nowlan Park of what transpired last time at GAA headquarters. “It was a strange game and before the game, we felt we were ready for it, we were fresh and the training had been great and we just went out and they got a run on us.

“It was one of those days when whatever way the ball bounced, it was bouncing into a Cork hand for the first half anyway. In the second-half, we made a few changes, I was taken off so that probably helped!

“We came back but we left ourselves too much work to do.”

That game was O’Dwyer’s only start for Dublin this spring. “I wasn’t starting a few games, I came back later because we were in the club. When we were finished, Ger said: ‘I don’t want to see you for a couple of weeks, just recover and get the body right’ and because he did that, you want to try harder when you are back.

“So I took me a while to get back into it and hopefully when the team is picked (for Sunday), I’ll be on it.”