Graham Callanan insists decider is not a revenge mission

For Graham Callanan, talk about revenge is wasted energy.

He and his Glen Rovers team-mates are concentrating on Sunday’s Cork county final against Sarsfields — last year’s heavy defeat by the same opponents isn’t on the radar.

“We don’t have the time to be thinking like that, about revenge. We have a big job on Sunday — obviously we’ll have thought about what happened last year, though we’ve spent the whole year trying to forget about it. We’re just focused on Sunday, really.

“I think the lads did a great job at the start of the year of making us forget about it — from the start of the championship we’ve taken it game by game rather than thinking of last year. Thankfully, we’re back in the final to try to make amends.”

They stumbled early on, though, losing to Ballymartle.

“To be honest, it wasn’t a huge setback,” says Callanan.

“We had been in control of the game, so it wasn’t as if we went out and got a clipping. We were seven points up with little enough time left and it just slipped away from us. We kind of threw it away.

“Performance-wise we wouldn’t have been happy they won, but we knew the safety net was there as well.”

As it was, they’ve improved with every game since, handling the will he-won’t he saga about Conor Lehane’s participation for Midleton in the semi-final well.

“Personally the Newtown game was a big one for me, because I’m playing senior hurling a while and I’d never gotten over that hurdle. I thought we controlled that game and deserved the victory.

“Against Midleton we were probably underdogs but obviously they were missing Conor (Lehane), who was a huge loss. But we just concentrated on ourselves. They have other players we had to look after and thankfully we got over that as well.

“I think you can’t worry too much about what players are in or out, you put in enough time on your own players. We didn’t dwell on it (Lehane’s availability) too much — we had something in place if he did play and something in place if he didn’t.”

Callanan is one of the more experienced players in the Glen ranks but feels his younger team-mates are not in need of too much counsel.

“I don’t think they’d listen to me if I was advising them — no, they have a couple of years experience now, most of them, particularly with last year. They don’t need too much advice from me.

“We’d set our standards high enough, we’d want to win county finals and not just be reaching them. The novelty of getting to a county final is gone when you’ve been beaten in two. You want to finish the job off.

“We’ve to put last year in context. If you’d told us before the season that we’d make a county final people would’ve taken your hand off and again, we came up against a very strong Sarsfields team, a team that’s been in seven of the last eight county finals.

“We were beaten by a superior team on the day That’s sport.”

Still, there were distractions last year they haven’t had to deal with this season, like the 1989 Glen team being introduced to the crowd before the game.

“I don’t know if it was a distraction but it probably fed into the players alright in the sense that we might have felt we were ‘due’ the county.

“Unfortunately sport doesn’t work that way — the talk about the ‘89 team, the last county final in the stadium where the Glen won the first county final... it probably had an effect but we still had to go out and play the game, and we didn’t. That’s the simple fact of the matter. We have to change that on Sunday.”

They came back from an early goal in the semi-final, which was encouraging. “Being honest, we’ve done that all year when we’ve conceded goals — and we’ve conceded some silly goals — that we’ve bounced back with a point or two quickly, which is hugely important. That’s something we mightn’t have managed to do last year but we’ve done it this season.

“It didn’t matter to me who was going to be in the final. I went to the other semi-final and saw a very clinical Sars team. If it had been Erin’s Own we’d have dealt with that.

“Sars have serious consistency, it’s our job now to break that run they’ve had. We’ve seen Sars peak towards the end of the season and we’re aware of that.

“Going into a county final you can have a plan, but I don’t think last year had anything to do with tactics — we just didn’t perform. We didn’t come out of the blocks, basically. We’ll start by coming out of the blocks and see where it goes after that.”