Michael Moynihan: Pat Ryan fits on all counts

THE CHOSEN ONE: Cork U20 manager Pat Ryan, left, and selector Donal O'Mahoney during the 2020 Bord Gáis Energy GAA Hurling All-Ireland U20 Championship Final match between Dublin and Cork at UPMC Nowlan Park in Kilkenny. Pic: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile

The Cork County Board meets this week with one issue dominating the agenda - ratifying Kieran Kingston’s replacement as the county senior hurling manager, Pat Ryan.

To use Hemingway’s old description of events, such appointments are inclined to happen gradually, then suddenly. A period of rumination usually followed by an accelerating consensus: Pat Ryan. In this case, the rumination didn’t last too long.

Officials’ interest in the outgoing manager continuing for one more year suggested a hankering after continuity, which is understandable. Many counties aim to appoint a senior manager who isn’t learning on the fly but who has some experience at the top level which helps him to bed into the role quicker.

In Limerick, for instance, John Kiely served an apprenticeship as a selector and U21 manager before taking on the senior role.

Granted, the opposite approach can also work: the manager who took Kiely to the brink last weekend, Henry Shefflin, is in his first year at senior intercounty and not even managing his own county, Kilkenny, but Galway. 

Pat Ryan fits on all counts. He impressed as a manager first at club level in Cork over a decade ago, leading Sarsfields to county championship success. In due course he became Cork senior hurling coach under Kieran Kingston, a role he held when Cork beat Clare in Thurles won the 2017 Munster title.

When Kingston stepped down as manager later that year Ryan ruled himself out of consideration as a replacement. He was strongly linked at that time also with the Waterford manager’s job but he took time out before returning to take over the Cork U20 hurlers in 2019, working with another former Cork teammate, Wayne Sherlock.

Under their guidance Cork enjoyed All-Ireland success at that grade in 2020 and 2021 and several of those players have already featured for the county senior side, like Daire O’Leary, Shane Barrett and Daire Connery. Alan Connolly and Ciaran Joyce are further along in their development and are already established senior starters for Cork.

Ryan is in a unique position, then, being familiar with both the older generation of players who have soldiered for Cork since 2017 and the coming generation of underage players. He also gained valuable experience of senior intercounty hurling under Kieran Kingston’s regime, when his coaching was very highly regarded. If continuity is desirable to the decision-makers, Ryan certainly offers that.

Would the outgoing selectors augment that sense of continuity? Of the three men involved - Diarmuid O’Sullivan, Pat Mulcahy and Noel Furlong - Mulcahy and Furlong are newcomers to the senior intercounty scene, coming in as coaches this past season.

By contrast, O’Sullivan has five years’ experience in total as a senior intercounty selector, and it was duly noted on Leeside that his clubmate and former Cork colleague Donal Og Cusack paid particular tribute to O’Sullivan on RTÉ’s The Sunday Game last weekend.

Further backroom possibilities for Ryan include Ben O’Connor - a playing contemporary of the new manager, as well as O’Sullivan and Sherlock. The Newtownshandrum clubman has probably been the leading club coach in Cork in recent years, winning a senior county championship with Midleton last year and overseeing Conor Lehane’s return to form, as well as reaching an All-Ireland intermediate club final with Charleville in 2019.

Complications arise, naturally enough. For instance, O’Connor was due to take over coaching the Cork minor hurlers in 2020, with Jimmy Barry-Murphy as team manager, but that appointment fell through at the last minute. Would O’Connor be happy to work with the county board after that experience?

Other considerations include the players themselves. Though there are routine declarations that players play and managers manage, no county board imposes a manager against the wishes of a senior county panel. Soundings - official or otherwise, discreet or overt - are routinely taken by officials to take the temperature before an appointment is made. Clearly the players who were present for Ryan’s initial service as a coach remember those sessions well.

The early noises about an outside manager remained just that: noises. It was clear quickly enough that there was no appetite on either the players’ or officials’ side for a manager from outside the county.

The presumption that the process would stay internal proved safe. Even if that process was sudden rather than gradual, rather than the other way around.