Hard work pays off as Colm O’Driscoll making most of Cork opportunity

If Colm O’Driscoll is sore he didn’t make the top grade quicker than last year, he doesn’t show it. When Conor Counihan was in charge of Cork, it wasn’t that his face didn’t fit: it was his body.

“I didn’t get a lot of a look in, to be honest,” he says of his All-Ireland U21 winning year of 2009 and the few seasons that followed.

“It was a different management. They had a lot of very, very good players at their disposal.

“It was a very tough team to break into, to be fair. I don’t think many fellas broke into it. I think Aidan Walsh and Ciaran Sheehan, who were exceptional athletes, were the only two to break into it. There was a lot of big men on the team at that time. When you’re standing at 5ft8in, you wouldn’t be classed as a big man.”

At least he knew it wasn’t really his football that was keeping him out of the reckoning but when Brian Cuthbert succeeded Counihan, the door opened. He does though acknowledge there were occasions when he lost heart.

“It’s always in the back of your head that you’re not getting any younger. Look, regardless of whether you had or hadn’t made it, I think it was in the blood to keep playing and to do the best you can every time you go out.

"That’s what I did, kept the head down, kept training and used it as a bit of motivation, bottled it up. When I got my opportunity, thanks be to God, I got a bit of luck with it and everything went well.”

Coming from a small, remote club like Tadhg MacCartaighs, O’Driscoll’s opportunities to make a name for himself were slimmer than most. Carbery in the senior championship gave him the platform he craved.

“When you get a chance to play with your division, you’ve got to be playing well and you’ve got to be trying to keep them in championship as long as you can, to give yourself the best chance possible.

“I think to be fair the Cork juniors, a lot of lads go through that and maybe it takes a year or two to step up physically and get yourself in the right condition to play senior. I think fellas can use that as well.”

O’Driscoll, in his role alternating between defence and attack, personifies the new, savvier version of Cork but he takes exception to Jim Gavin’s “the most defensive I’ve ever seen Cork play” comments following February’s clash.

“Jim is entitled to his opinions, as is everybody. I think that’s what makes the GAA so interesting, that there’s different opinions out there. I wouldn’t be inclined to agree with him. You sit down and you look at the opposition and the management decide what way you play and you just implement that.

“Whatever we have to do, we give it 110%. Any day you put on the Cork jersey is a proud day and you’re playing for a very proud county. Whatever you have to do the next day, we’ll just go out and do it to the best of our ability.”

As for Cork’s remarkable 251 hand-passes against Donegal in the semi-final, O’Driscoll puts that down to their attempts to kill the clock in the closing stages. “When you have the ball you’re not going to be giving it away, certainly not to top sides. I think that was an unfair reflection. In the last five or six minutes, we just tried to keep the ball as best we could so that definitely bumped up the hand-passes.”

When Cork boast such finishers as Colm O’Neill, the defensive tag doesn’t stick as easy. O’Driscoll says it’s a pleasure to know O’Neill is in the inside line, branding him a “genius”.

“The man is a genius. It’s nice to be playing out the field, look up and see Colm O’Neill standing in the full-forward line.

“It gives you a bit of faith that when the ball goes in there’s a good chance it will end up inside in the net. He’s a brilliant player and a lot of counties would like to have him. We do, so we’ve got to make the most of it.”