Donal Cronin: Sarsfields drubbing made us

At 32, Donal Cronin has been part of the Glen Rovers senior hurling squad for exactly half his life.

Sunday’s Cork SHC final against Erin’s Own in Páirc Uí Rinn (4pm) will be his fourth final and third in a row, a far cry from when he made the step up to senior ranks as a teenager.

While his underage teams were unbeatable in hurling or football, it was a low time for the Glen at the top level.

“It was a big change to adapt, the first few years I played senior we didn’t get past the first round,” he says. “It was hard but I was lucky that I had the U21 teams and they were going well. There were other fellas who were 23 or 24 and their year was over by June. We’re lucky the young fellas coming in now have given it an extra dimension but they’re coming into a team that’s going well, they’re floating around like they know no different.

“We were trying to preach to them in 2014 these things don’t come around too often and now they’re looking at us, wondering what we were on about! They might get a shock in a couple of years!”

Victory on Sunday would make it back-to-back titles for the Glen for the first time since 1960, which would represent quite the turnaround from the 16-point loss to Sarsfields in the 2014 final.

“It was the hardest day I ever had to take, from a sporting point of view, we just never showed up,” Cronin says. “It was the last final in the Park, the 25th anniversary of the 1989 win with a lot of guys flying home from different parts of the world. I suppose there may have been a small bit of thinking we were better than what we were? We thought we’d able to go down and hurl with Sars but you don’t come out on the right side of hurling with Sars too often.

“I always remember the throw-in, Gavin O’Loughlin won a great ball and Graham hit him with a fair shoulder and I was thinking, ‘We’re at it here’ and then things just gradually started going wrong. Everybody was making silly mistakes, there wasn’t an intensity or a workrate, things were going well for Sars. It was very demoralising, there was a huge crowd down there, it was on the telly, the last final in the Park and all that. You were hoping to just get out of there as quickly as you could. We’ve come a long way since then. In a way maybe it was the makings of us.”

Twelve months on and they met Sars again in the decider. The memories of that are much happier.

“There has been a lot said about how well we reacted to it,” he says, “but I don’t think we could have reacted in any other way.”

Were you going to go out on that note? “No, and I think that it was a motivating factor for the whole of 2015, it’s probably still being used as a motivating factor. I couldn’t see us losing last year’s final and I wouldn’t have said that about the year before. The way we played showed we weren’t going to be beaten.”