'Dwelling on ref decisions is ridiculous': Alan O'Connor refusing to look back in anger at Munster final defeat
Pictured are Brendan Harrington, CEO of McCarthy Insurance Group, Alan O'Connor of St. Finbarrs and Charlie McCarthy of the McCarthy Insurance Group at the Championship launch in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Pic: Jim Coughlan.
Long put to bed. How they put it to bed is where curiosity lies. Hard to shut the eyes and slip off when the horror of those final few minutes is playing on loop.
Friday evening’s Cork Premier Senior football opener represents the Barrs’ first time crossing the whitewash for a championship fixture since the disaster that was the Munster final defeat to Dingle on December 7 of last year.
Yes, a full nine-game league campaign has thrown-in and concluded since then, but given the multitude of players they have involved across a myriad of Cork hurling and football camps, this group opener is the first time the entire blue band is back together for a competitive fixture since they trudged heartbroken out of Thurles seven months ago.
Alan O’Connor was one of seven Barrs players stood haplessly in the large parallelogram as Dylan Geaney’s 64th minute two-point winner sailed well overhead.
How had it come to this? They had led by three as late as the 59th minute. They had chances to keep Dingle out of catching distance. There were two alone during the opening two minutes and six seconds of injury-time.
None were taken. The door was left ajar.
That was the blue imprint in the devastation.
Then there were referee Chris Maguire’s back-to-back calls of game-changing consequence.
He first deemed Ian Maguire, who had Mark O’Connor’s two arms wrapped around him from behind, to have overcarried. Barrs sub Dylan Quinn picked up the loose-spilling ball following the call. Dingle defender Brian O’Connor, arms outstretched, charged into Quinn to create the scenario where a quick free had been impeded and a 50-metre advancement awarded.
The referee bit. Dylan Geaney raised orange. The Barrs’ Munster bid disappeared and dead.
33-year-old O’Connor, recently of new dad status and not so recent when it comes to the 15 seasons he has put down in the Barrs defence, was their representative at last week’s county championship launch.
His was a measured, articulate, and perspective-driven recall of that December day and the stinging days that followed after.
“When Jimmy [Barry-Murphy] spoke after the game, I actually thought he spoke very well about it,” O’Connor began.
“He basically said that you can't control decisions that go for or against you in a game, that's just the bounce of the ball and sometimes they're brilliant, sometimes they're not.
“We look back at the areas that we could have done better. We were winning by a decent margin and we maybe left them kick more comfortable scores than we should have. We probably didn't take scores that we could have.
“We probably didn't put the final nail in the coffin ourselves and so those are the things you need to look at because, ultimately, if a ref makes a decision, it's completely out of our control.
“Whether you agree with it or not, it doesn't really matter. Dwelling on that is ridiculous because there's nothing you can do to get better at looking at refs' decisions for next year, but there is something we can do at stopping up other teams, being a bit more stout in defence, protecting a lead better, going for the throat, scoring a few more scores, capitalising on kick-outs, capitalising on breaks, not giving away soft frees, all this kind of stuff.
“We look at it as we should have been far enough away that any decision wouldn't have mattered.” Utterly forensic from O’Connor. Functional, too, as they take a first step towards successful county title defence. But what of the human side of that December experience?
“It was very emotional on the day for a lot of us. It was very, very disappointing,” continued the Occupational therapist.
“We lost after extra-time to All-Ireland winners in Kilcoo [in 2022], we lost to a last-second two-pointer to All-Ireland winners Dingle, we were in the [county] final in 2017 and we lost after a replay. We've had some very, very tough defeats.
“I remember when we lost a game one year and Denis O'Brien and I were talking on the pitch after and he said, and it's something that stuck with me through the years, that if you don't bottle this up, if you don't think about this, then you're not using it as fuel. A case of don't let it consume you, but you have to use it.
“I'm not looking back at that and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s a heartbreaking loss’. I’m looking back and being like, the hunger we have to produce now and the talent we have and the standard we need to reach to get past that level is what we're looking at here, as opposed to just throwing our hands up to the sky and saying, ‘Why us?’”
At Ballinhassig this evening, the climb starts again.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
