No time like now for Murphy

GAELIC GAMES:WITH ANTHONY Lynch's injury having sidelined him for nearly the entire season, the doyen of the Cork football panel is Carrigaline's Nicholas Murphy. He faces into a fourth All-Ireland spread over the past three decades.

“When we reached the final in ’99 I was 21,” he remembers. “I suppose it was naive but I was thinking, ‘here we are in an All-Ireland final. We should be here for another couple of years’ but the next one didn’t happen until 2007.

“That’s eight years. For the younger players there’s no point in playing finals for experience. You don’t know when you’ll be back.”

Murphy’s All-Ireland mantelpiece has plenty of room apart from a medal for the 2004 intermediate hurling championship – he was even speculatively linked with a call-up by hurling manager Denis Walsh back in March.

This has been an awkward year for him. Sidelined for long periods with a persistent back injury, a stress fracture of the lower spine, he had a staccato league campaign when attempts to convert him into a full forward were disrupted by fitness problems.

“At the start of the year I tried it but it never really worked out because of the back problem. I’d say I got about 10 minutes. I suppose they wanted to look at different options but it didn’t really work.”

Anyway his career has been concentrated on centrefield duties, occasionally giving way to spells at half-forward, as Cork have re-arranged to optimum effect their impressive hand of physically imposing target men.

His displays in the Munster championship against Darragh Ó Sé and Kerry were sufficiently notable that he was singled out for special treatment on the many occasions the counties renewed provincial rivalry in Croke Park – most notoriously last year with the “Cop that. It’s different this time, boys,” intervention by Kerry’s Tadhg Kennelly.

This season, however, Murphy has been held back in matches as an impact replacement, a major cog in the fine tuning Conor Counihan performs on the team’s engine for the final quarter of the contest where his ability to secure possession and use it intelligently is of critical value.

Although on Sunday his contribution is again set to be from the bench, he acknowledges the importance to the team of competition for places.

“The likes of Aidan Walsh, Ciarán Sheehan and these guys have brought it on to another level. Any competition is great and I’ll be pushing them on as much as they’ll be pushing me on. Anywhere across the pitch there’s someone to replace everyone.”

Looking back over the 12 years of his career he believes the biggest changes in football concern the science of preparation.

“I suppose the training aspect has really come on. When I arrived first it was just doing weights over Christmas and then you were training with a lot of long-distance running. Now you’re doing the weights all through the year and doing shorter runs. Everything has moved on; you’ve dieticians and sports psychologists – all for the better.”

One hardy perennial is the media although the number of outlets has increased exponentially over the years. One piece of advice that sits incongruously at a press conference is a general caution about coverage of big matches.

“We would be advised to keep away from the media side of it and not to be reading papers. Small things can get into your head and you’re trying to concentrate on what you’re trying to do.”

Asked had match preparation been disrupted earlier in his career by media attention he reconsiders. “I suppose you wouldn’t be used to dealing with the media when you’re young and maybe a bit naive. A lot of managers try to protect players from that point of view but it’s part and parcel of the game now. The media have a job to do and we have a job to do so you try to respect both sides.”

For all of his team-mates and especially for Murphy himself, the match is all about winning and exorcising the ghosts of previous defeats. He rejects the pessimistic characterisation of Cork as out-of-form and vulnerable, preferring to see the bottle as half-full.

“We’re still putting up reasonable scores: 1-16 against Dublin and against Roscommon. Certainly there’s more in the tank and we’d be hoping to improve on the Dublin performance and we’ve been working on that.”

Nicholas Murphy

Position: Centrefield

Club: Carrigaline

Age: 32

Occupation: Proprietor National Flooring Ltd

Height: 6ft 5in Weight: 14st Honours: Munster SFC (1999, 2002, ’06, ’08 and ’09), NFL (Division Two 2009, Division One 1999 and 2010), All Star 2006.