Future is now as Cork minor notes reach crescendo

ALLIANZ HURLING LEAGUE DIVISION ONE SEMI-FINALS:John Considine tells MALACHY CLERKINwhat he saw in three 2010 Cork minors

IN THE high summer of 2010, John Considine couldn’t help it sometimes. Whenever he’d be asked about how his Cork minor team was shaping up, he’d do the whole hope-for-the-best thing for a minute or two before letting just a little of the water leak through the dam. “A few of them will play senior,” he’d assert. “A handful of them.”

He didn’t want to be throwing names around like crumbs at a duck pond but he knew what there was to hand. There was Conor Lehane and Jamie Coughlan in the forwards, there was Darren Sweetnam in midfield. There were others too.

But then, as Arsene Wenger icily puts it, everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.

And when Cork went out of the Munster championship at the semi-final stage after a replay against Waterford, Considine’s bold talk looked a little previous. Had Waterford gone on to clear all before them, then the form would have been franked at the very least – as it was they were done within a fortnight. On the face of it, just another tattered tale sewn into the dun tapestry of the last decade of underage hurling in Cork.

Considine knew he had money in the bank though. That campaign seemed cursed, for a start. In the drawn game, they’d been whistled off the park by the referee – all but three of Cork’s 24 points had come from play while 1-12 of Waterford’s 2-18 were from frees. “And in Cork too, surprisingly!” he says now.

The replay took place on a Wednesday night three days after seven of the squad had won Munster minor football medals. They were flat as day-old pop and went 2-7 to 0-2 down after 15 minutes, a debt they never cleared.

To make matters worse, had they lost in the first round or in the final they would have seen another day out. But defeat in the semi-final meant the end of them.

“It’s gas the way it goes,” says Considine. “You get beaten in the championship and people go, ‘What the hell was he talking about? Sure none of these lads can hurl at all.’ And now, all they’re saying is, ‘Jesus, how did we win nothing with those minors?’ ”

Those minors have been the talk of the league. Nothing gets the toe tapping like a young team on the upswing, full of moxie and with no real notion of where its boundaries lie. Of the 15 Cork players who started against Tipp in the last round of the league, only four were older than 25. The oldest scorer for Cork that day came off the bench, John Gardiner whipping a defiant point near the end as a reminder that he’s not done yet. Methuselah at just 29.

For the league semi-final in Thurles tomorrow against the same opponents, Jimmy Barry Murphy has decided to take a pull on the reigns. Sweetnam is six weeks away from his Leaving Cert and, though named on the bench, his load is expected to be light until his exams are done.

As for Lehane, his surprise exclusion can be taken as nothing more than a canny manager who was once a child star himself recognising the need to remove the klieg light, if only momentarily.

Lehane came into the league like one of those internet indie bands around whom there’d been some local buzz; he leaves it a headline act. From the Saturday night he scored seven points from play against Waterford to the 1-2 he managed to mine out of an off-day against Tipp, Lehane has become the most ballyhooed youngster in the country in the space of just five games.

His place tomorrow goes to 22-year-old clubmate Luke O’Farrell, but it’s inconceivable we won’t see him at some point.

“There’s no point in trying to deny it anymore,” said Paudie O’Sullivan after the Tipp game. “We’ve all seen over the last few games what he can do, he’s definitely been our best player, if not the player of the league.”

Lehane had a run in the league last year under Denis Walsh but was left alone to do his Leaving Cert when the summer came. Considine has long been taken with his skills but is especially impressed with the things he ought not be good at but is. For a not especially big man, he’s a force under a dropping ball. For a whip-crack, silver-wristed new kid, he took a waterboarding from Michael Fennelly 24 seconds into the game against Kilkenny and brushed it off. They came for him that day but he was ready and no less a foe than JJ Delaney had to be switched off him before half-time. None of this was new to Considine.

“The year I came in it didn’t matter what the game was, Conor stood out,” he says. “Challenge games, championship games, whatever – no matter where we went, everybody identified him. Richie Mulrooney in Kilkenny, Donal Maloney in Clare, everybody. They’d walk past you at half-time and go, ‘Jesus, who have you got there?’ ”

As ever with these things, the cuter members of the chorus Down There push the merits of the other pair more forcibly. Coughlan and Sweetnam are more physical beings than Lehane and in a Kilkenny-Tipp world they won’t shy from the shelling.

Where Coughlan is a wizard in around the goal, Sweetnam is a hard-yards midfielder who covers acres of ground. An under-16 hockey international who is also on the Munster rugby radar, Sweetnam is the youngest of the three and won’t be 19 for another fortnight.

“The first time Sweetnam played for the Cork minors,” says Considine, “the game against Tipperary went to extra-time. That’s 80 minutes for minors. In those 80 minutes, he touched the ball 41 times. That’s phenomenal.

“He’s an exceptional athlete and he has an innate sense of where the ball is going to be. Watch him when there’s a scrap for the ball – he goes down, spreads the legs and gets over the ball so that it takes a lot to move him.

“Whether he got that from rugby, I don’t know. We didn’t teach it to him, that’s for sure.

“Coughlan is strong out. I wouldn’t say he relishes the physical confrontations but he doesn’t back down either. He uses his physique, which is unusual for a young player playing older. But he’ll put the hip in and he is very savvy. He has an intuitive sense of where danger is and he makes sure he is there to finish it off. He got the goal in the Fitzgibbon final that took it to extra-time and you could nearly argue that he threw it in.

“I was standing below behind the goal and he knew he wasn’t going to get a big huge shot at it so he got a small, instinctive touch on it that you’d barely notice.”

In any other place or at any other time, it’s highly probable that only one or possibly two of them would be being given his head this early.

Certainly not all three in a team that already has a 23-year-old full-back in Stephen McDonnell, a 21-year-old wing-back in William Egan, a 22-year-old midfielder in Lorcán McLaughlin.

But time and tides have had their way. Cork grew older than was workable and when JBM came in and had a look at the kind of shot he had, youth wasn’t a bad club to draw from the bag. The key to it though is that he wasn’t drawing blind. Along with having Considine’s right-hand man from the minor days Seánie McGrath on the ticket, he came into the role well-briefed. Considine reckons that long before he ever took over the senior side, JBM was running the rule over what was around.

“I used to see him hiding down in one corner of the pitch when we were training, sitting there on his bike. Jimmy was at close hand on 50 per cent of their training sessions as minors. He knew them well and he knew what he was doing in bringing them in at the start of this year.

“He gave them a talk one time. He said to them, ‘Look, you never know how things develop over time but I see fierce talent in this group.’ They went away knowing that he knew who they were and so when it came to his time in charge, he knew where to look. People thought he was just plucking them out of thin air but that wasn’t it at all. Jimmy knew what he was getting.”

Everything’s relative and expectations are pruned accordingly. The Kilkenny team they beat kept Tommy Walsh warming his toes on the bench for the full 70 minutes that day so nobody is fooling themselves about Cork’s place in the world just yet. But all you can do with a young team is set it new tests and tomorrow they take on Tipp with something more than league points at stake. The last thing Declan Ryan wants is a Cork team getting notions about itself so JBM’s youngsters will find the gas turned that notch or two higher in Semple Stadium.

A day that matters then. But with the likes of Lehane, Sweetnam and Coughlan in the tea leaves, there’s finally confidence rather than hope that days that matter more lie ahead.