Fintan O’Connor: ‘I’ve a strange background in hurling... I never played myself’

To say Fintan O’Connor is your conventional inter-county hurling selector wouldn’t just be inaccurate: it would be wrong.

That becomes abundantly clear within a couple of minutes of sitting down with the Blackwater Community School, Lismore teacher. “I have a strange background in hurling, I would have never played hurling myself.”

The Kildare-born former rugby coach laughs that his first introduction to hurling was seeing Maurice Shanahan as a first-year student carrying a hurley the same September he started in the school in 2003. But it wasn’t long before principal Denis Ring, he of Harty Cup fame with St Colman’s College, had recruited O’Connor as manager.