Grind of playing weekend after weekend takes its toll, insists Cleary

CHALLENGING PERIOD: John Cleary, Cork senior football manager, pictured at a press evening in Pairc Ui Chaoimh. Pic: George Hatchell

Come Sunday evening, John Cleary hopes to be attributing a third consecutive Cork win to the momentum mined from their victories over the past two weekends. 

Right now, though, his view is that three games in 15 days at the business end of Sam Maguire speaks to a championship that is too compressed.

At 4.30pm on Tuesday, the Cork football manager sat down with four reporters in the media room at Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

He took the questions as they were kicked into him. Deliveries rained in from all angles and distances. They ranged from Brian Hurley’s hamstring to unscrambling the Ulster champions’ style and set-up to his own playing-day memories of the first and only Cork-Derry summer dance way back on the concluding afternoon of action in 1993.

When the dial moved to calendar matters and teams sweeping aches and pains under the dressing-room carpet ahead of a third outing in a fortnight, there was no whinge or deliberate fault-finding from Cleary.

His response was considered, measured. It was a response built on experience, on what he and others in the Cork camp have been dealing with and trying to navigate their way through in recent days.

“That's the one criticism maybe I have, the three weeks in a row,” Cleary began.

“The reward for winning your group is that you don't have that. But I think it's a bit too compressed at this stage of the season. And look, maybe next week we'll be saying, wasn't it great to have momentum for those lads that played three weeks in a row.

“But, as I said, the jury is out on whether the teams that were sitting at home last weekend have the advantage.” 

Cleary puts meat on his argument. It’s not even the 70 minutes of fare weekend after weekend after weekend where the toll is being paid. It is everything that comes before and after those two blasts of a referee’s whistle.

“Those games, I know even from our side of the fence, they take a fair bit out of you because you're preparing and it's a long day, the day of a championship match. The following day, you're fairly wiped out.

“And then to realise it starts here again because six, seven days' time you're doing it all over again and you need to get up the reserves of energy, and for us all there, you got to go to work the following day and the players have got to go to work.” 

There’s an unspoken acknowledgement from Cleary of the many managers who’d love to be in his shoes this week. To be part of the quarter-final poster. To be sniffing around a semi-final berth. But appreciation for where he and Cork find themselves doesn’t mean the workload gets any smaller.

There’s a clip of Laois manager Billy Sheehan from Sunday remarking that the job demands 50 hours a week. We ask Cleary what number he’d put on it.

“I wouldn't say all day, every day. But there's something happening every hour anyway, whether it is dealing with players or even the logistics now of trying to get a hotel in Dublin for the weekend wasn’t easy.

“There were about 45 phone calls and then come back to me and say, ‘look, is this place all right, is that place, alright?’ “All the logistics goes in on the Monday, you're trying to review your match the day before and you're trying to get Derry in focus. And then you were waiting until later in the day to see when the fixture was on, was it Saturday or Sunday? So, it's definitely all consuming. You're thinking about it all the time when you go to sleep at night, you're thinking about it in the morning.

“That's why I say even if you had a week's break you could just take a deep breath and then go at it again.

“But look, we're no different to the other three teams that came through [the preliminary quarter-final], but in the overall sphere, I'm sure other guys would agree. It needs maybe to be a small bit more spread out at this stage of the season.” 

The demands of the job have surprised him. But like everyone else patrolling a sideline, there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.

The lows aren’t much fun. The few hours after such sweet victories like they had against Mayo and Roscommon, though, leave a lovely aftertaste.

“It's like everything else, when you win it's great. The couple of days after the Clare game wasn't the most enjoyable.

“Your phone stops ringing, the messages don't start coming. Everybody is hurting, and we were all hurting at that time.

“And when the good days come then we probably don't enjoy them enough, but particularly in this championship, you don't get a chance. As I said to the lads in the dressing room after the game, lads you have two or three hours to enjoy this, then it's focus for next weekend.” Constantly rushing ahead in an All-Ireland series that allows no room for pause.

On the injury front, Cleary said it is still too early to make a call on Brian Hurley’s availability. Hurley is one of three injury concerns, with Ruairí Deane (neck) and Luke Fahy (ankle) also at risk of missing the last-eight bout.

“Brian will have to train before the end of the week. He is making progress, but he really needs to be in top shape to have a chance of lining out on Sunday. We'll make a call on it on Thursday or Friday.” Cleary is hopeful Deane will be fine, Fahy is rated “50-50”. Both were second-half withdrawals against Roscommon.