Pat Ryan: 'There’s no pressure here. This is where you want it to be'

NO PRESSURE: Cork manager Pat Ryan not feeling pressure ahead of the All-Ireland SHC final against Clare. Picture: ©INPHO/Tom Maher

“Pressure doesn’t matter in these things. We’re pucking a ball around the place”

— Pat Ryan, May 2024.

ON the brink of a second successive early championship exit, Pat Ryan treated disaster like an imposter.

Now, on the cusp of triumph, he’s clearly taking Rudyard Kipling’s advice and treating it with the same contempt. Neither are to be feared. As that other sage Shankly said: “Pressure is working down the pit. Pressure is having no work at all.”

Or ill health. Hurling was put firmly in its place in 2018 when Ryan was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukaemia. With pain came perspective. His approach to the fervour that has enveloped Cork since showing Limerick the door is to embrace it. To try and ignore it would be futile but to not harness it would be silly too.

“As I said to the lads there a while ago, there’s no pressure here. This is where you want it to be. We’ve had lots of fellas who gone under the knife, gone to England for hamstring injuries and knee injuries and all that type of it. That’s where pressure is, that’s where you get down a bit. It’s a brilliant two weeks. We’ll be back in Mallow in November in the pissing rain again and that will be more hard than the next two weeks.”

At the same time, when John Kiely spoke last week of how much of Limerick players’ lives such as where they live and what they do for a living was coloured by hurling it resonated with Ryan. “That’s the same with our fellas, it’s just so important to them,” he says.

But emphasising a 19-year wait for an All-Ireland title to a team of whom only half probably remember Seán Óg Ó hAilpín lifting the Liam MacCarthy Cup is not on Ryan’s agenda. His barometer for Cork is in the here and now.

“We try to express to our lads all the time since we came in that it’s about representing that jersey. Of course, you want to win but if you represent that jersey properly and fellas see real effort and real fight, then there will be none of that social media stuff or negativity that comes with it.

“I think our fellas are giving that and I would expect the exact same in the All-Ireland final. And, obviously, we’re confident we can go out and put in a performance and it will take a huge performance to beat Clare. But we know that the lads will perform and if the lads perform and really give that effort, we’ll be very, very close and I think the Cork public will be happy with that.”

If Cork go ahead and end the famine, Ryan might look at getting into the self-help business. In an interview with this newspaper nine months ago, he bemoaned how quickly teams were allowed to restart games after wides, admitting it “drives me mad”.

In these last two championship wins over Limerick, it was the rapid puck-outs of Patrick Collins that put in train the move for Patrick Horgan’s winning penalty goal in Cork and later in Dublin Declan Dalton’s long-range points. Talk about turning a weakness into a strength.

“To be honest, I think it’s been happening for three or four years,” says Ryan. “I suppose from my point of view it punishes defenders a small bit. But, look, we just have to play to that game. I think we probably got caught last year in a couple of games.

“In fairness to Patrick, it’s all about Patrick, and we have set it up that our lads know the minute the ball is gone wide that you’re set up and you’re ready to go and you move that quick. Look, in fairness to the referees, it makes a great game. I think there’s 99 shots or something (v Limerick). It makes a great game, a great spectacle.

“Sometimes giving out about it, that, oh my God, we’re breaking our arse over there to make a hook or a block and all of a sudden the ball is (pucked out)… we do a great thing to get a score or it’s a wide and then someone is out there the other side and they get a score.

“Look, it’s the same thing for every team and one area that we really trained was that our backs would get back out. So your backs really have to push themselves back outside the 21 (yard line) because they (referees) won’t leave that puck-out go if your own defenders are inside the 21.

“We’ve worked an awful lot on that because we felt it was an area we got caught on last year. It was an area that Clare caught us on last year and it’s an area we’ll need to be tight on them again.”

Ryan baulks at being mentioned in the same breath as Jimmy Barry-Murphy but there are lessons from the Cork great’s success as manager in 1999 with a group that included Ryan and two of his selectors, Wayne Sherlock and Brendan Coleman.

“I remember how calm that Jimmy was around the group. How much confidence he gave to the lads. It was just another day so enjoy it because these are days to be savoured.

“That was another thing that Jimmy was fantastic on, he always made people feel a part of it. And the other selectors as well that were involved. So that’s something we try to do.”