Ciarán Sheehan: Cork football still in search of its identity
Ciaran Sheehan Feature, Ballynamona Beach, East Cork, 27/5/2020 Cork footballer Ciaran Sheehan Mandatory Credit ©INPHO/James Crombie
It’ll never leave him. They’ll always be part of him. Even when he was Down Under, or now in the day job after handing back the jersey, Cork football and the Cork footballers have informed so much of what Ciarán Sheehan is and has been about.
For the last six months he’s been working with a start-up company called Green Rebel and he’s struck by how much of what he does is shaped by his time being a red one.
Basically they’re an offshore wind energy company; with a small fleet of boats and planes and an army of scientists, ecologists, engineers and IT specialists, they acquire geodata to help potential developers find prime, environmentally-friendly spots to erect wind shore farms off the coast of Ireland. With a resource like the wind we often complain about, a medium-term goal would be that Ireland could be a world-leading exporter in the field. It’s new, exciting, ambitious and challenging, especially for Sheehan in the role he has.
In old-school terms he operates in HR, their first hire in that space. Only being new school, that’s not what they call it, or at least him.
“My title is People and Culture Lead, looking at ways to retain, attract and gel new talent into the industry. We’ve a very diverse workforce: we’ve people that go up on planes, or spend time out on a boat, or researchers who have come straight from doing their PhD straight into the industry. Our offices are based in Penrose Dock, just there by [Cork’s] Kent Station, but obviously we’ve a lot of people working remotely. There’s a lot of moving parts but eventually we’ve come to the conclusion that we’re operating in high performance. Are our people reaching their goals, even outperforming them? Can we create a place where when they walk in the door they nearly forget that it’s work, that they’re coming to a place that they’re doing something they love and enjoy? What does that look like?”
And he knows what that looks like because from 2009 to 2013 he was part of the Cork senior football setup.
“Culture wasn’t a word that was really used in those days but if you ask me what was my first experience of a high-performance environment it was joining the Cork footballers when I was 19.
“And it was only when I looked back on it I appreciated just how much it was driven by the players: your Graham Cantys, Nicholas Murphys, Noel O’Learys, Alan Quirkes. They really owned it without the management having to get too involved, which was clever of Conor [Counihan].
“You had alright the likes of Aidan O’Connell, our S&C coach, raising the bar in that sphere but it was really the players who drove it on. And it was just by their example. Before the senior setup I hadn’t really done any work on my strength and conditioning. All of a sudden I realised I’d have to go to a whole other level. I don’t remember anyone having to pull me aside to say ‘You need to hit the gym.’ It was more a matter of you just did it or you’d get left behind. Because you would get left behind. It was that competitive in there.”
We’re catching up with him in a week in which his last Cork manager, Ronan McCarthy, has said that while he has no issue with players continuing to play both hurling and football for Cork up to U20, they’ve to make a call after that with no going back to the other code; so be it if football tends to lose out in four out of every five of those cases. Sheehan was such an exception. While he was also a talented hurler, winning a Munster minor final in 2008, a year later it was the big ball he zoned in on.
Why? The U21 football championship started before the hurling back then, just as Conor Counihan called him a week before the hurling senior manager Denis Walsh did. The footballers went on to win that U21 All-Ireland. His Éire Óg clubmate Daniel Goulding was already involved and starring with the senior footballers. But above all he found there was a heart to Cork football in how its custodians appealed to his.
“I can’t remember sitting down saying should I pick hurling or football? It was more subconscious than that. I was very lucky to be involved with some great coaches coming up through the ranks. I had Keith Ricken at U16. We won at that grade but what I remember most about him and that time was that he’d always ask how my mom [Liz] was. He must have known it was just me and her at home, it’s the way it’s always been. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had great support, but I think Keith recognised our situation and gripped onto it a bit which was exactly what I needed at the time. It made me perform better. I wasn’t just playing for my peers or family or county. It was a bit for him as well.”
At minor then he won a Munster final in Killarney under Mick Evans who had the late great Terry O’Neill from Bantry as a selector. Terry had the wisdom to know the way to a son’s heart was through his mother’s, or at least her stomach; when she’d sit in her car, reading a book, for the duration of any of their regular training sessions in Ballygarvan, he’d gift her with some of the finest west Cork cuisine in the form of a box of mussels, a token of the sacrifices she was giving to help facilitate her son’s dream. Similar generosity and guardianship extended to when O’Neill was a selector to Counihan.
By then Sheehan had been exposed to John Cleary, another son of west Cork with a ferocious love for Cork football but who often exhibited it in the form of tough love.
“John would put the fear of God into you,” smiles Sheehan. “Back then your typical wing forward needed to get on the scoreboard and he wanted me on the ball as much as possible and he conveyed that in very simple language!”
He’s not sure if Cleary coaches the same way he did in those U21 days. He’s probably tweaked his methods. But they still share a bond. Cleary’s daughters play for Éire Óg and he has coached a lot of their teams, so the pair often cross paths and talk up at the club pitch. Sheehan knows too how influential he was on his senior career with Cork and how Counihan regularly leaned on his counsel in those glory years.
Whether it was Counihan’s or Cleary’s brainwave to bring Sheehan into the senior fold as quickly as possible, it worked.
“In the early summer of 2009 I went to Australia on trial for a month and actually signed a contract with Carlton. But what threw a bit of a spanner in the works was Cork bringing me in as a waterboy for the Munster final against Limerick below in the Páirc. Aidan Walsh came off the bench that day. I’d played with Aidan with Cork since we were U14 and I just thought, that needs to be me as well!
“I watched the All-Ireland semi-final against Tyrone on a Leaving Cert holiday in a bar in Santa Ponsa and I’ll never forget the buzz it gave people. So at that stage I said, I’m staying home. I’ll focus on college and football and see where it takes me.”
A little over a year later it took him up the steps of the Hogan Stand, thanks in no small part to his go-level point in the final against Down. But he was more than merely one of the men of 2010, just as he’d like people to remember they were more than simply one year.
“The 2011 league final against Dublin was one of the best games I was ever involved in. The way we came back [from eight points down], just sticking to our process, just chipping away, chipping away, all through points.”
In 2012 they were even better, only they ran up against a Donegal side who counter-attacked better than any side he or football had known. By the time he finally joined Carlton in the autumn of 2013 he had three Division 1 national league medals and a couple of Munster medals in his pocket. Some people sniffed at such a medal haul back then. No Cork person or at least current player would dream of doing so now. When Sheehan left the Cork dressing room for good last June, having returned to it and Ireland in the winter of 2019-2020, it meant also gone with him was the last link the place had to the team of 2010.
He looks back fondly on his second stint with Cork, for all the lack of silverware they’d have and the lack of championship gametime he’d manage. He retired as a starter, fighting his way back onto the first 15 for a win in Portlaoise and also starting on the edge of the square the next day out in Ennis before he had to hobble off after about 20 minutes.
“I was on air going into those games but if you’ve spent a lot of time in the rehab room it’s very hard to rid yourself of any fear that you have of getting injured again; you can’t just pick that piece off your brain and just throw it away and leave it there. I was really enjoying the football but there was always that lingering doubt that if I started ramping up the conditioning where would that leave my knee?
“It was a dagger in the heart having to go off against Clare but it wasn’t like it was one definitive incident. It was more a case that the batteries just ran out there in the middle of Cusack Park and the pain and body was telling me: That’s it.
“It was disappointing but I really was energised by the group of lads that were there. I got way more from them than they would have got from me and learning how Gaelic football had changed.”
In hindsight though he found Cork itself hasn’t quite got up to speed with how football has evolved. While he rated Ronan McCarthy as a brilliant leader and Cian O’Neill as an excellent coach, Sheehan reckons they struggled to nail down what Cork’s identity and priorities should be. Even their successors, his old mentors of Ricken and Cleary, haven’t yet pinned it down either, judging by the league.
“In my mind when I look back on it, what we were doing [in 2021] was really good stuff but maybe we were trying to dip our toes into too many things at the one time. I look at Cork football across the board and I think our defensive structure is something that needs to be worked on right now as a matter of urgency. And by that I don’t mean from one to seven, I mean from one to 15 – and 15 to one – and having a contingency plan for when we [negatively] turn over the ball. Looking back, maybe that wasn’t prioritised enough.”
He references a clip that went viral in recent months of another player from the 2010 All-Ireland final that has had experience of playing AFL. Marty Clarke at a coaching workshop in Newry spoke about how a decade ago the AFL was essentially a turnover league; almost 80 percent of scores teams were conceding stemmed from when they coughed up the ball. So they adapted. They identified and developed players with the skillset and mindset to be in position for a counter-attack. Instead of chasing the ball, they began facing the ball. In Killarney last year far too often Cork were chasing. McCarthy himself highlighted in an Examiner podcast this week how Kerry’s decisive first goal of the second half originated from both Cork midfielders being in the Kerry square when Brian Hurley ballooned a shot. Footballing suicide.
“Your best form of attack now is your defence,” Sheehan elaborates. “And that possibly has got a bit lost in Cork.
“It goes back to the identity thing. What do you want to be known as? What do Kerry on Saturday night walk off the pitch thinking about Cork? That they’re a strong physical team that run the ball hard? That they were tough to play against? Or that they were easy to play against?
“Traditionally we’ve been a hard-running powerful team with a couple of Grade A forwards that will do the damage. But in this day and age you can’t continue to be that without a sound defensive structure for when you turn over the ball, otherwise you are going to be killed going the other way. To be a hard-running, powerful team that allows fellas express themselves and run deep, you need to be set up defensively really well. Everyone needs to know their role in that structure. That means the halfback on the far side tucking in or the corner back playing a position and a half away ahead of his man when the ball is 70 metres away as opposed to being stuck to him.
“Even delaying the ball. The biggest part of defence is delaying the ball so that if you do give the ball away, you can delay it and slow it up as much as possible. I feel Cork are struggling to delay it. And they’ll run into trouble against Kerry big time if they don’t delay the ball and get themselves set up properly because we know from the bitter experience of Killarney last year how pacy Kerry are and how good they are at taking advantage of that.”
He’d like there’d to be more joined-up thinking, workshops, even walkthroughs, on such matters across Cork football. And it’s a change he’s tried to bring about himself. This year he served as a backroom member and eventual selector to Bobby O’Dwyer’s Cork U20 team. It was an opportunity to impress some of the tactical commonalities he would have had with O’Dywer, along with transfer some of his work as a culture and people lead. Who did they want these red Rebels to be? O’Dwyer had only four survivors of the minor team he led to All-Ireland glory in 2019 yet with seven minutes to go in last week’s Munster final in Tralee, Cork trailed by just a point.
“For a team that were missing a lot of key players, I was super-proud of those guys because we really tried to implement a structure which they executed well for a lot of the game.”
His passion for his club similarly remains. Although he broke down that time in Ennis and he and his wife Amy and little Edan now live by the water in Shanagarry over 30 miles away, he still played hurling for Éire Óg last year, calculating that not having to kick a ball or roam as much away from goal was within his capacity. This year he wants to play for the footballers in championship. The way he sees it he has played every grade of football for the club: from U8s right up to junior to intermediate to intermediate premier. With the club now operating at senior, he’d love to tick that box.
“Championship for us is another 12 weeks away. I’ll know by then if the knee will be up to it. The most I think I could hope to achieve would be to come on for the last 10 minutes of a game but I need to be able to make an impact in that time.”
He’s certainly made an impact with Cork. Just as he’ll be grateful for how it has impacted and moulded him.
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