Red admiral is still flying high

In Profile/Cork's Seán Óg Ó hAilpín: When you mix supreme talent with tireless determination you get an irresistible, fervid and irrepressible concoction. Tom Humphries talks to a player who has enviable supplies of both ingredients.

So it begins. The season after the year before. A game with Limerick, another in the long list of fixtures which delineate a career. Maybe someday when he's old he'll dust down the memories of last year's sublime summer and he'll sit back and enjoy them. For now, it's scrapbooked and shelved. You know he means that. A man who goes out for a long run on the morning after winning an All-Ireland final seldom looks back.

Still. As the league creaks away from the station Seán Óg Ó hAilpín and the Cork hurlers are the only ones aboard who have everything to lose. Player of the Year. Team of the Year. It's like having your face on a Most Wanted poster.

The minds are focused though by the familiarity of the task. The league contains, as usual, a few dates when they'll be requiring their Sunday best. The championship starts at 100 miles an hour. Waterford on May 22nd.

The team were away in New Zealand for most of January and Seán Óg, who stayed at home to work, reckons two things. They are probably a couple of weeks behind most intercounty teams. The taste for the sun which the lads acquired Down Under and the need to catch up those two weeks is making training tougher. Or maybe it's just always tough at this time of year.

In this weather, the physical men do their work, harrying and scolding and cajoling. The younger guys in the panel bust their guts every night, proving something or catching the eye. On their off nights all players are required to go to the gym.

After all he's been through there are nights when Seán Óg thinks it would be easier not to follow them, to cruise a little. Always, though, the session catches him and as captain he has to put up a show anyway.

"To be honest I hate it," he says with a passion that's surprising coming from such an exemplar of commitment. "I don't mind when we get out and we do the running and the work, but the cold and the dark and the rain. You do so many seasons of it and it doesn't get any easier. If we did that work on sunny evenings I'd love it. I don't mind what work we do, but the winter? I hate it."

They train under watery light out at Carrigtwohill. Seven sharp. Which means being on the pitch at five minutes before seven. Which means lads start arriving at any time from quarter to six onwards, looking for strapping and physios and rub downs.

Seán Óg generally negotiates the city traffic and arrives at the 6.30 mark, in time to get a rub down and so many layers of clothing on himself that he looks like the Michelin man.

He hates this time, but he knows the necessity of it. A trainer will occasionally shout through a tempest that the players should take the evening and store it away and remember how they trained on a night when civilised people wouldn't put a dog out.

And Seán Óg rolls his eyes. Yet, he knows that there'll be a day in the summer when he'll be thankful for all this, there will be a time when Cork will find themselves stronger or fitter or tougher and he'll think back to Carrigtwohill, perhaps to a night when the showers were bereft of hot water. He'll be 28 on May 22nd, on the day that Cork and Waterford collide.

Venerable for a hurler these days, but just coming into his athletic prime. He looks back to the early days in the Cork jersey sometimes and remembers almost with surprise that he played with the Ger Cunninghams, the Tomás Muls, the Teddy McCarthys. Then there were careers which had almost their entire arc while he played with them, the Barry Egans, the Ger Manleys.

Now he looks at John Gardiner and remembers presenting him with medals when Gardiner was a promising juvenile player in Na Piarsaigh. He's watched his brother Setanta arrive and leave, more than halfway a legend, and he can't stop remembering when he used to bring his gangly kid brother to training to collect sliotars behind the goal. Half-jokingly, he'd have to scold him on the way home when Setanta would show him the couple of nice balls he'd pocketed.

These days early in the season, when the lads have forms to fill out, he writes down his own year of birth. 1977. Then he glances around. Unless he's looking at Brian Corcoran's handwriting he usually feels quite pre-historic. Yet, it drives him, this imminence of hurling mortality.

"If you're a player in Cork, a hurler, you know that you've never won enough. You look at a fella like Ring. You know you'll never be that good, I wouldn't be making that comparison, but you look at everything he won, the Munsters, the All-Irelands. You put your own little few medals beside that and you know you don't measure up. You can never be happy. You have to keep driving on. Then you only get so many seasons anyway. There'll be a long time when you'll be wishing you were young again."

He doesn't say so, would scarcely entertain the thought, but the captaincy seems a natural addition to his duties. Cork did some work before Christmas, selected players coming on for a few sessions, others who'd had a long season being rested.

Seán Óg, whose season was longer and more excellent than most, clocked in every night. While the lads were away in New Zealand, eight Cork players worked away anyway. Seán Óg's card was punched every evening. He wouldn't think to have it any other way.

"Sure, after the county championship when we (Na Piarsaigh) lost to Toomevara I had a good six or seven weeks off anyway. When the lads were in New Zealand we got to do some individual work, some time to work on a few things as players that you wouldn't usually get to work on. A change is as good as a rest."

As for the change on the regime, nobody has yet noticed anything radically different between John Allen and Donal O'Grady. The same detail. The same work ethic. The same goals.

"Well," says Seán Óg, "teachers are a breed apart. John is a teacher. Donal is a teacher. I don't suppose it was going to change much! The same people are around. If there's a difference, Donal was more in your face with his intensity and what he needed from you. John is quieter, but what he wants is clear. You wouldn't want to let either of them down."

SOME NIGHTS, when the rain gets inside the collar and the cold gets inside the bones, they find themselves hoping that John Allen will be a softer touch than Donal O'Grady was and that he'll blow the whistle and tell them to go home to a warm fire.

Seán Óg has learned not to wish too hard. Never comes true. Last year, Donal O'Grady missed two nights at training through sickness. The first night was a surprise and they were edgy all evening, expecting him to lurch around a corner.

The second night there was a creeping feeling of luxury afterwards, and on the third evening when they arrived for their rub downs they speculated that maybe he'd miss another and they'd really enjoy this one. Of course, Lazarus arose. With a list of things to do in his hand.

Cork's pre-eminence last year was based on a disciplined style of play and built on O'Grady's passion for the basics of the game. There is no suggestion yet that John Allen's philosophy or requirements will be different, but then the winter is a time for managers to leave the talking and barking to the physical fitness men.

Challenges have been low key, and generally the teams Cork have put out have been 50 per cent experiments and 50 per cent experienced. They've played Athenry, Clare and last Sunday, in a hurricane, they met Galway at Newtonshandrum.

The panel has changed slightly, a few fringe players have vanished. Four new names have been added, the most interesting perhaps being the recall of Ballyhea's Neil Ronan.

Training these nights and for the foreseeable future is the dog-hard stamina work that intercounty teams take for granted now, the relentless investment of sweat and blood in the hope that there will be a dividend later. The team work in groups. Halfdoing running for 15 minutes, the remainder doing a ball drill. Then they switch and switch again. The sharpness will get grafted on later.

Seán Óg knows that after last summer in Thurles Waterford will no longer fear them. "After last year's Munster final, we know that they'll have the confidence. And after what happened after that they'll have the hunger too, but we can't look at what Waterford are doing or even think about it. Being All-Ireland champions just means that you have to get better to stay where you are. We can only worry about making ourselves a a better team."

Whatever happens it will have to be momentous to rival the excitement which 2004 brought to the Ó hAilpín household in Blarney. The Hurler of the Year. An All-Ireland title. Seán Óg, Setanta and Aisake playing together on a Na Piarsaigh team which reclaimed the Cork championship. Aisake following his brother to Australia. And, of course, Fermanagh.

"Dad has adopted Cork as his county down the years because of us playing and because he lives there, but blood is thicker than water. I've never seen him so excited as he was last summer with Fermanagh doing well. What it meant to him. Tears in his eyes when they beat Cork. Fermanagh waited so long. You just had to look at him when they were playing to see what it meant."

OF HIS BROTHERS Down Under, he's happy for them. He calls them only every two or three weeks and watches what he says. "Sometimes, you'd call and you'd talk and give them all the news from home, and you'd think afterwards was that the right think to do. If they're going to make it down there they have to live the Aussie way of life, they have to think the Aussie way.

"They can't have their brains here in Cork and their bodies down there. They were told that if they were looking at the time down there as a long holiday before they went home again that they might as well make it easier and head straight home."

The house in Blarney is quiet without three of its sons. Teu lives away and played for London's footballers in last summer's championship. Aisake and Setanta grew up sharing a room together. The four of them hurled a million matches beneath the shadows of the goal post in the back garden. Semple.

"It's quiet alright. Too quiet. We miss them. They're at different stages with the Aussie Rules. Setanta had the headstart and would have had much more of an interest in the AFL when he was growing up. He knows who is who and he'd know more about the game. Aisake was always hurling first, a bit of football second. He's having to learn the game and build himself up. They both have different targets for the season, but Setanta would be hopeful of getting some playing time. They always remind him that it took Jim Stynes four years to make the first squad and another couple of years to really establish himself as a player."

He misses the boys and he knows that Cork will miss them too. Twin towers in the forward line would be no harm at all, but he, like the team, doesn't dwell on it. The lads did what any other young lad would do. If Seán Óg had seen the chances of professional sport dangled in front of him he'd have been gone too. Wherever. The sun would have been a bonus. Those left behind for wintry nights and muddy fields count their blessings and add up all the good things.

None more so than Seán Óg. Since Christmas, in accordance with John Allen's wishes for the team, he has pulled away from the light and declined all extraneous demands on his time. But when the team were in New Zealand and one of their physical trainers, Gerry Wallace, who is from Midleton, called on him, it was emotion more than obligation which prompted his quick answer. Yes.

Little Robert Holohan was missing. Wallace reckoned a name like SeáÓg's would help keep the case's profile high. He wound up speaking at Robert's funeral.

"I don't like to say anything about it. I know what it took out of me. I left Midleton and was supposed to go and do a session in Cork and just realised I couldn't. Out of respect, and because my heart wouldn't be in hurling. That was me, so I can't imagine what Robert's family feel. There's two families left behind in Midleton with their lives ruined."

It took a while for the the glorious distraction of hurling to touch him again. He feels a little guilty occasionally for all the passion that he gives to a game; more often, though, he thinks of those few days in Midleton and what gaps are left behind.

His life goes on. The summer beckons. You never know what's on the next page. He's thankful for it all and renewed in the determination to make of it everything he can.