Rebel rising: The story of how Cork turned the ship away from stormy waters

“We have a saying around here: ‘I don’t want to hear about the labour, just show me the baby.’” – Bill Parcells, legendary NFL coach

Sorry now, Bill. This one’s very much about the labour. If you want to check back around tea-time tomorrow, then and only then might there be a baby to take a gander at. And it’s entirely likely that there might not. Either way, the labour ain’t done yet.

“I’d say Limerick are laughing their heads off,” says Kevin O’Donovan, chief executive of Cork GAA. “They’re five years down the road ahead of us. Cork have won no All-Ireland at senior yet and no All-Ireland at minor yet. This is still at a very, very early stage. The self-congratulation stuff, I’m not buying it for a second. We’re not even half-way towards where we want to be.”

They are, however – and at long last – pretty sure that they are going in the right direction. The story of Cork hurling now is one of progression. Of roots having been put down and foundations poured. Of genuine introspection leading to sincere and evidence-based action. Of player pathways and manager pipelines and all the deeply unsexy grind they talk about in seminars and conferences.

To reach this point, they had to do the Shawshank stuff first. The tunnel was long and there was plenty of shit to crawl through. Take your pick of it down the years. The strikes. The stadium debt. Hammerings on the pitch. Endless crank and bother off it. Money spent beyond the budgets. Money found that nobody knew about. The sleeping habits of the Ayatollah. All water flowing underground now.

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Because if you are a Cork hurling person, you may find yourself this week taking in not one, but three All-Ireland finals. And you may find yourself having already enjoyed the winning of the first one, the under-20s rinsing Galway in Thurles on Wednesday night. And you may find yourself reflecting on how Cork have played 10 championship matches at senior, under-20 and minor since the start of July and won them all, every last one of them.

And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did we get here?”

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Meetings. There were lots of meetings. John Considine wouldn't attempt to put a date on this specific meeting but you'd have to go back over a decade anyway. And maybe it wasn't a meeting so much as a kind of a workshop. There were lots of those too.

At this particular one, there was a guest speaker. A few, in fact, but one that sticks in Considine's head was Stephen Aboud, the IRFU technical director at the time. Aboud had spent years shaping the way rugby is organised, coached and played in Ireland. He started as a development officer with Leinster away back in the early '90s and had worked all the way up – elite player development, coaching development, structures, academies, the whole bit.

In the room as he began to talk were coaches from all over Cork. City and county, football and hurling, from clubs and colleges and all the rest of it. As an ice-breaking exercise, Aboud stood at the top of the room with a flipchart and invited suggestions from the audience as to what might be the key attributes of a successful coach.

There is no easy touch in Munster hurling now which may have been there in the past. That's gone

He started writing them out as they came from the floor. Organisational ability. Tactical awareness. Knowing your players. Time. Drills. Authority. Plenty more besides.

“And he started playing to the crowd,” Considine remembers now. “He was going, ‘There’s something missing. I think. I don’t know now, I’m not a hurler, you’ll know better than me. I just feel we’re forgetting something here.’ And he waited a few seconds before going, ‘Would good players help at all?’ That got everyone laughing.”

Good players were never a problem. Which itself was part of the problem. Every couple of years a gang of four or five would bubble up and because the hurling world is small and the summer is short, that was sometimes all it took.

Cork were Munster champions in 2014, 2017 and 2018 – as many provincial titles as Limerick, Clare and Waterford put together across the decade. If you were of a mind to make the case for Cork’s tradition eventually bringing the good stuff through, you wouldn’t be long entering them into evidence.

“Yeah but that kind of thing only works for Cork when other counties don’t have their houses in order,” O’Donovan says. “You look at Munster hurling now. Look how competitive it is. There is no easy touch in Munster hurling now which may have been there in the past. That’s gone. If traditional counties expect tradition to do it for you, it has been proven to fail. The evidence is there.

“Now, where tradition will hopefully be of huge value is when we do get our house in order. When we have our structures right and when all the things we’re trying to put in place are functioning, then we will have the advantage of numbers. The wave will come. But that’s like old money under the mattress at home. It’s no good unless you go out and spend it properly.”

So what does that mean, exactly? Well, as O’Donovan stresses multiple times during our conversation, it doesn’t mean any one particular thing. There’s been no silver bullet, no bolt of lightning. It has been a load of small, incremental improvements made across the board. Week upon week, month upon month, year upon year.

You could point to the setting up of Rebel Óg in the late 2000s or the overhaul it went through in the early 2010s. You could point to the improvement in Harty Cup performances by Cork schools over the past half-decade or the self-evident success at Fitzgibbon Cup level where UCC have won the past two iterations.

If Tony Kelly puts the ball in the net in the quarter-final, it doesn't mean that everything we have done is wrong

Or you could go even deeper again and look at the reorganisation of the games programme at every level. The recognition across the board that coaching is a waste of time without the provision of regular meaningful games. The shake-up of the county championships, whose dividend hasn’t even had the chance to come to fruition yet because of the pandemic.

Or you could go granular and look at the specific roles filled by specific people. In the past 18 months, Cork have appointed a commercial director, a finance manager, a full-time underage secretary, a football project manager and a high-performance director. For the latter role, they got Aidan O’Connell to leave Munster rugby where he had worked for 15 years, most recently as the senior S&C coach.

"Cork will win and lose matches now and again," says O'Donovan. "The results don't make everything right or everything wrong. If Tony Kelly puts the ball in the net in the quarter-final, it doesn't mean that everything we have done is wrong. No more than Patrick Collins making a great save makes everything right. But if Cork keep throwing enough darts at the dartboard, we will be competitive."

The point is, it was all of this. It had to be. Nothing else will do the job. Considine has seen Cork hurling from every angle – as a player, as a manager at all grades, in UCC, in his club. Over the years, he has always been a candidate for getting dragooned on to this committee or that taskforce. Respected by all, objected to by nobody. Capable of sitting quietly and listening to ideas and recognising the best of them. No daw when it came to history’s actual worth, either.

“This is a collection of strands that are coming together after a lot of years of work,” he says. “The work that these people have put in is recognition that the work has to be put in. The stuff that would have been thrown around about Cork, that just because they are Cork, they can play hurling – that’s no good to anybody.

“Look around the coaching conferences and look at the people you see there. People would look at Diarmuid O’Sullivan as a player and they would have this fixed idea of who he is. He’s this big swashbuckling full back coming out with the ball and knocking people out of his way. But his years as a coach with Cork at all levels have been about learning as a coach, upskilling, improving.”

All of this would be just fine words, of course, if it wasn’t all leading to success. It don’t mean a thing if you don’t take that bling home from the last game of the year. Which is why this summer feels like such a tide in the affairs of Cork hurling.

"Winning sustains belief," says Considine. "It keeps people going. It stops the rancour and the infighting

The vagaries of the Covid calendar means they have tucked away two All-Ireland under-20 titles in the space of a month – their first at the grade since 1998. If they beat Galway in Saturday night’s minor final in Thurles, it will close off a gap of 20 years since the last title. And if the seniors find a way to beat Limerick, that’s a 16-year chasm filled in. Talk about taken at the flood.

"Winning sustains belief," says Considine. "It keeps people going. It stops the rancour and the infighting. If they win on Sunday, first and foremost I think people everywhere will be happy for Patrick Horgan and nearly relieved that a player as magnificent as him gets his All-Ireland. But on the ground in Cork, it would help sustain all the effort that has gone in. The people doing all that work over the years would feel good about continuing to do it."

And O’Donovan is right, of course. All the reforms and structural changes and decades of coaching can be defeated by the hop of a ball, the whoosh of the wind, the whim of a referee. These things will either go your way or they won’t. Also, the other crowd go to coaching conferences too.

So in one sense, winning and losing against Limerick doesn’t matter. The work goes on regardless. But you wouldn’t want to get too caught up in the theory of things either. This is the real world. It’s an All-Ireland final. Winning and losing matters like almost nothing else.

“Look at Offaly now,” O’Donovan says, just a couple of days after that county’s All-Ireland under-20 football victory. “Look at what a bit of success is going to do for them. It suddenly mushrooms and it allows the people in Offaly to get a load of reforms passed in that county. People are hungry for change.

“We are kind of in that phase now. I won’t say it’s easy to get things passed but we can all see that proposals you bring to the county board now are getting an incredibly fair hearing. Success brings a bit of credibility. Too long without success and it all gets so much harder.”

They know that story too. They don’t want to go on telling it forever.