Ronan McCarthy: We aren’t in a position to take anyone for granted

The chances of Ronan McCarthy and the Cork footballers keeping a trick or two up their sleeve for when there’s bigger fish to fry? Are you kidding me, mused McCarthy, as he prepares for Saturday’s meeting with surprise Munster SFC semi-finalists Limerick.

“I actually think if you do that, you have already taken the game for granted. No way,” he emphasised. “You bring your full armour and every rocket you have in your artillery.

"It’s a Championship game and one we have to win. We are at a point where we can’t take any team for granted. If you think ‘I’ll keep that in my back pocket’ then you are in trouble.”

McCarthy and his inner circle are perhaps the only ones who have the faintest clue what sort of Championship frequency Cork will operate on.

They’ve played four challenge games since the League, winning all four including a defeat of a “middling” strength Dublin side in Nowlan Park at the start of the month.

There was also some morsels of comfort to be taken from their last three Division 2 league games against Tipperary, Donegal and Armagh.

“Confidence is a very fragile thing,” McCarthy says. “We have knuckled down since the (relegation) disappointment of the league.

I would feel the players are in a good, quietly confident mood and looking forward to the championship.

That seems to be the growing consensus within the squad that Cork may surprise a few outsiders with their championship competitiveness. But we’ve been here before. Caveat emptor and all that.

The Cork management team is opening up as many opportunities as possible for nascent talents to stake their claim - there are three debutants on Saturday at Pairc Ui Rinn, and there’s an expectation that systematically, Cork will play a higher press in the summer. Not that it’s that straightforward, as the Cork manager points out.

“Because I said at the start of the season that we needed to be more defensively solid, people jumped on it. We were trying to get the balance right. We would feel there is fierce attacking talent and potential in the team. In the early part of the League, I didn’t get that balance quite right.

"You can still get men behind the ball and be a counter-attacking side, but we didn’t get that balance right. I still don’t think we are there, but we are going in the right direction.”

He’s also expecting the players to respond accordingly inside the white line when different problems require different solutions in the championship.

“Over my time coaching, I try to encourage players to make good decisions on the pitch, so I don’t get too tied down to a particular system or a particular way of playing. We are looking to get the balance right so that the attacking talent we have on the pitch can express itself - but at the same time also making sure we are defensively more difficult to break down than we were last year.”