Nemo return to spotlight with county final return on their minds 

Nemo Rangers rejoin the championship and the conversation this Sunday. The spotlight has found them.

Alan O'Donovan, Nemo Rangers and Luke Meade, Newcestown. Pic: Jim Coughlan.

Nemo Rangers, remember them?

The far-and-away most successful club in Cork football has somehow managed to fly under the radar all the way to the county semi-final. They’ve happily kept hidden from the spotlight for as long as was feasibly possible.

Bar the opening Friday night of the championship, when a third quarter power surge was required to prevent a Ballincollig upset, Nemo have gone about their business coldly, clinically. 

Their unwillingness to engage in any semblance of drama has given little to discuss.

Nothing to see here, said Nemo, bar the usual collection of comfortable early-round wins. And given there was plenty theatric and plenty unexpected happening elsewhere, those comfortable wins were relegated down the conversation pecking order.

Carrigaline and Newcestown were the stories of the group phase. 

Castlehaven and St Finbarr’s, having to meet a round earlier than their usual semi-final dance and the six-goal quarter-final spectacular the Barrs proceeded to produce, then took up most of the conversation in the four weeks between the conclusion of the group phase and eve of the semi-finals.

Nemo rejoin the championship and the conversation this Sunday. The spotlight has found them.

For a crowd that went unbeaten in the group phase in four of the first five years of the new format, it is a wonder how Nemo had never before claimed the number one seeding and direct passage to the semi-final.

The record of those to have previously claimed the quarter-final bypassing ticket is as follows: three wins and two defeats. In the grades below, it is 15 victories and 13 defeats for the group winners coming back in after four weeks far away from centre stage.

Hard to discern much of an advantage from those numbers.

So, Nemo Rangers, a hindrance or help the four-week pause in competitive fare?

“I am probably better suited to give you an answer after Sunday,” begins long-serving midfielder Alan O’Donovan, “because plenty of times when the team that goes straight to the semis and wins, everybody says it is because they got all their injured players back, they were well rested, and they were hopping, but if they come back in and they are beaten, everybody is saying it is because they were cold, they lost their sharpness, and they would have benefited from a quarter-final.” 

O’Donovan described their group form as “patchy, up and down”. 

The club’s county semi-final form could never be described as up and down.

Since the turn of the millennium, Nemo Rangers have reached the semi-final stage of the Cork championship on 18 occasions. They successfully cleared the hurdle on all bar two occasions (2014 and '16).

O’Donovan was involved in both defeats. He was also involved in the first Nemo team to lose back-to-back county finals in 2023 and ‘24.

Crippling defeats. Defeats, though, he does not carry with him.

“In the immediate aftermath, you are definitely disappointed, but you go back to work and life goes on. You kinda have no choice but to get over it because I probably get a medal for the amount of moping around I do after losing a game. It just drives you on for next year.

“Thinking about last year's county final, before you asked me about it there, I haven't thought about it in months. It is not something we talk about as a group or we talk about every night of the week, there aren’t fellas chatting to me about it and how if we did this different or that different in the county final, or the one before that.

“Every year is a new year, and we just want to put our best foot forward and get back into the county final.”