Walsh confirmed as new Cork football coach, Ó hAilpín joins minor hurling ticket

CORK-BOUND: Former Galway and Sligo football manager Kevin Walsh

Former Galway and Sligo manager Kevin Walsh has been confirmed as the new Cork football coach.

The two-time Connacht SFC winning manager was ratified as the new coach in John Cleary’s backroom team at the Cork county board meeting on Tuesday night.

When the Irish Examiner first reported the likelihood of Walsh linking up with Cork for the season ahead, Kerry’s 2014 All-Ireland winning manager Éamonn Fitzmaurice described Walsh’s impending move south as a “major coup”.

“Watch Cork improve incrementally. Adds another layer of intrigue to an already compelling Div 2 2023,” Fitzmaurice tweeted.

The two-time All-Ireland winning Galway midfielder arrives into the Cork set-up with a decade of inter-county managerial experience split evenly between his five years with Sligo (2008-13) and his five years with his native county (2015-19). Walsh is highly regarded as a technical coach whose precision work on structure has been occasionally misinterpreted as overly-defensive.

Another high-profile coaching appointment ratified on Tuesday night was that of Seán Óg Ó hAilpín with the Cork minor hurlers. 

The 2005 All-Ireland winning captain was previously involved with the Cork minor hurlers during Donal Óg Cusack’s one-year tenure in 2020. Ó hAilpín will link back up with another old teammate - manager Kieran Fraggie Murphy - for the 2023 minor season.

Elsewhere, the Cork executive will bring a motion to next month’s county convention proposing that minor at club and inter-county level be returned to U18, with full decoupling, despite several Cork clubs being stridently opposed to decoupling at U18 level.

At last month’s special county board meeting to establish the preferred minor age grade of Cork clubs, there was unanimous agreement to return minor to U18, but clubs were split on the issue of decoupling. 

Those firmly against decoupling were the smaller rural and city clubs who rely on 17-year-olds for their flagship and second adult teams, while there was acknowledgment from the more populous clubs that a solution would have to be found to assist clubs hard-pressed for playing numbers.

Delegates at the meeting did not block the motion going forward to next month’s county convention, but it is highly debatable if the motion will receive the necessary support on December 11 to be sent forward to next February’s Congress.

In the same motion recommending a decoupled U18 minor grade, the Cork executive is further proposing that U20 be kept at inter-county level, while also played as the last age grade before adult at club level. If passed, U18 and U20 would take effect from 2024.

It was revealed at the meeting that the “sticky plaster” approach for 2023 will take the form of an U18 competition that will not involve decoupling. These U18 competitions will replace the U19 competitions that were mired by walkovers and withdrawals earlier this year.

Rebel Óg will still run decoupled U17 minor competitions, with the U18 championship a “secondary competition” to ensure 17-year-olds who do not wish to play adult fare have a games outlet. U21 will remain a divisional competition in 2023 without a county championship element.

“We feel it is appropriate to substitute U18 in for U19,” said Cork chairman Marc Sheehan.

It was also revealed that Cork’s two-year-old county championship structure has been deemed compliant with the 16-team county championship cap under general rule and will therefore not require a major overhaul.

It emerged last month that the GAA’s rules advisory committee was of the view that Cork’s 12-team premier senior championship and 10-team qualifying section fell outside the 16-team limit, but Kevin O’Donovan has provided assurance that Cork’s county championship is “safe” from further reform.