John Cleary: Cork found out exactly where they stand on the learning curve

Cork manager John Cleary speaks to his players after the All-Ireland SFC quarter-final loss to Dublin. Pic: Daire Brennan, Sportsfile

Having told this newspaper last week that Dublin would inform a new-look Cork group of exactly where they’re at in their progression, John Cleary’s assessment of Saturday evening was that Cork are “a mid-to-lower Division 2 team” who are nowhere near the game’s standard-bearers.

That’s okay for the moment, though, because at least Cork now know where on the road they are and what needs to be done to move them onwards and upwards.

“For us as a group, the ultimate aim is to get up to the very top and we're a good bit off it there now,” began the interim Cork manager.

“We were beaten by Kerry by a similar type of score that we were beaten by Dublin. That's the standard and we're not at that, we're nowhere near it. But at least people can see that out there today, particularly all the lads in the dressing-room and the backroom, that that's the standard you have to try to get to.

“How long it takes and whether you can get there or not is another matter really, and when Dublin pushed on, their fitness, their conditioning, we just didn't have the answer.” 

As former Cork footballer Tony Davis predicted on these pages on Saturday, the gulf in strength and conditioning between the teams was a feature of the post-match conversation.

“That probably takes a number of years because there were times this year when we pushed on a bit with harder training and our lads were breaking down and getting injured,” Cleary remarked of Cork’s journey to arrive at a place where they can match the fitness and physicality of the top sides.

“It probably takes a good number of years to build. Like all the top teams who will be in the semi-finals, it didn't just happen overnight.

“You could see Dublin today, all their players that won the six-in-a-row, they were in fantastic physical condition, knew exactly how to play, knew exactly when to give the right ball, and never shot when it wasn’t on.

“And hopefully there’s an awful lot of learnings for the guys inside the Cork dressing room. Hopefully, they will be in a better position to do something better in the years going by if they can learn from what happened today, because it’s a relatively young team. But that doesn’t matter if they can’t learn from what happened here and from what happened against Kerry, and try and get onto the next level.”