Peadar Healy eager to put more of a foot into Cork football

Gregarious he was as a manager in front of the media, but on all matters Cork football, Conor Counihan will be remembered as a cagey operator.

On all other topics, he was positively effusive. Any time horse-racing was brought up in conversation his eyes lit up. Ditto his favoured Liverpool. Pre-Jurgen Klopp, their lack of size was always a source of despair for him.

That won’t surprise anyone: big men were always favoured by Counihan during his time although his methods were often seen as crude and rudimentary. One of his fiercest critics since stepping away from inter-county football has been Paul Galvin: “Jack (O’Connor) was clever,” he told this newspaper after his first retirement in 2014. “He had ideas, Cork seemed to have one idea. And this dummy teams lark...”