Cork manager Pat Ryan at peace with missing jubilee festivities

Even if Cork had lost last weekend’s All-Ireland SHC semi-final to Limerick, manager Pat Ryan would have been at Sunday’s final.

The Cork panel that won the 1999 title will be the silver jubilee team in Croke Park but more pressing commitments mean that Ryan and selectors Wayne Sherlock and Brendan Coleman will be unable line up alongside their colleagues of 25 years ago. Ryan isn’t too sorry to be missing it.

“Waving at the crowd, yeah, thank God I got out of that!” he laughs, “that’s one saving grace.
“It’s fantastic for the lads that we were involved with. There’s three of us, obviously, Brendan Coleman and Wayne Sherlock was involved as well on the 1999 team. So look, that’s a fantastic day for a group of players that was there.
“And there’s still great friendships in that group, that’s an exciting day for them. I think [Mark Landers was delighted there’d be a crowd there for him anyway, so that was the main thing!”

That victory was of course masterminded by Jimmy Barry-Murphy, one of a number of top coaches Ryan was lucky to work under.

“The one thing that I remember of that,” Ryan said, “and I’m not the best to remember those games because I try to move on from them, but 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.
“You try to take things from everybody that you’ve been involved with. I was lucky to be involved with Kieran Kingston for a couple of years and the way he dealt with people and the way he was straight-forward with people was fantastic as well.
“I’ve been very lucky with the managers that I’ve had myself as a player. We try to take all of that on.”

And, as a sub for that year’s championship campaign, does it help in dealing with players in a similar boat now?
“Yeah, look, it does,” he said, “but what we would value here all the time is the panel.

“That would be my own experience of that. I always felt that sometimes I was playing and sometimes I wasn’t playing but I always felt that I was making a contribution and always felt part of the group.
“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.

“It’s hard. Everybody wants to be on the 26, everybody wants to be on the starting team, so it’s hard but as long as you’re honest and straight forward with fellas they’ll try to come with you.”
Since the 1999 win, Cork have only added two more All-Irelands, in 2004 and 2005. It means that Ryan’s side will be looking to end a 19-year wait against Clare on Sunday – but it’s not necessarily something he will try to protect the players from.

“I don’t think you do protect them,” he said, “I think you just have to embrace it, to be honest with you.

“That’s the way I’m looking at it. As I said to the lads, there’s no pressure here. This is where you want it to be.

“We’ve had lots of fellas who have 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 these two weeks.”

Ideally, a longer time period than a fortnight would be welcome.
“I think probably it’s hard to say,” Ryan said, “I don’t know how, that’s up to the powers to be.

“I think from a promotional point of view, I think even three weeks. You have an All-

Ireland football semi-final this week, so that will take the focus, and rightly so, of the media and of the eyes within the GAA public and then you’d have two weeks to focus on an All-Ireland hurling final. Then you’d have two weeks to focus on an All-Ireland football final.
“I suppose from our point of view, we have a huge Cork public here, you know, it’s so rushed.

“Traditionally, you would have an open day, you would leave the kids in, leave the schools in, whatever you wanted to do to leave people in to see the thing.
“But we have four training sessions between the semi-final and final and they’re just so valuable you couldn’t give them over to a kind of an open day. So that’s a bit of a disappointment.”