![\"Niall](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/4899698_2_articleinlinemobile_EOHLisgoold07_1_.jpg\" "\\"Niall")
Niall O’Halloran (red) had great success with clubs like Fr O’Neills, Bandon and Lisgoold. Picture: Eddie O’Hare<\/p>\nIn late October 2023, over five months after Cork had exited the Munster hurling championship, Pat Ryan sat down with Denis Hurley of this newspaper for an extensive and wide-ranging interview.<\/p>\n
Cork had been extremely unlucky in that championship when losing to Clare and Limerick in their last two matches by one point. A draw against Limerick would have stamped their ticket into a Munster final, but the thrust of Ryan\u2019s insights and comments in that interview was on making sure Cork learned enough lessons from the experience ahead of the 2024 season.<\/p>\n
That applied to the management as much as the players. Being better organised in how they reassessed games, and in how they managed players during the Munster round robin was Ryan\u2019s key starting point going forward.<\/p>\n
\u201cDonal O\u2019Mahony (selector) was probably the only fella with previous experience of the round-robin system and the block of games,\u201d said Ryan in that interview. \u201cThere\u2019s a nice bit of organising in it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ryan admitted that they got their preparation completely wrong for the six-day turnaround between the Waterford and Tipperary matches. Yet there were learnings everywhere the management looked during their post-season debriefing.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne thing that really caught us was the lack of communication that you can get on the field,\u201d said Ryan. \u201cObviously, some teams were better at it than us. They had different scenarios going on \u2013 people in the stand or communicating with hurley-carriers \u2013 that we didn\u2019t have. And that probably affected us a bit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Despite the huge experience Ryan had already accumulated heading into that first season in 2023, having been part of Kieran Kingston\u2019s management team in 2016 and 2017, and 2020, and having led Cork to successive All-Ireland U20 titles in 2020 and 2021, taking over as senior manager was a whole different level again.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a big eye-opener,\u201d said Ryan.<\/p>\n
No matter how much experience a manager has, it\u2019s only natural to underestimate just how much of a beast the senior job actually is, of how much that animal can scratch, bite and chew you up at every opportunity.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard for a new manager to get a full appreciation of what it actually entails until they are fully exposed to that wrath. Yet the beast is bigger in Cork than anywhere else. And after losing the last two All-Ireland finals, the beast has become gargantuan.<\/p>\n
Before the season has even warmed up, Ben O\u2019Connor has already been scratched. O\u2019Connor wouldn\u2019t see it that way. He\u2019d have viewed losing a backroom team member as just a minor nick, but shedding a coach long before the needles have been shed from the Christmas tree is more than just a little scuff.<\/p>\n
Niall O’Halloran (red) had great success with clubs like Fr O’Neills, Bandon and Lisgoold. Picture: Eddie O’Hare<\/p>\n
Whatever happened between O\u2019Connor and Niall O\u2019Halloran, any potential clash of ideas, culture or philosophy between the pair should have been thrashed out long before Cork went back training.<\/p>\n
\n That should have been seen to by the manager but both men had never worked together before O\u2019Connor recruited O\u2019Halloran.\u00a0\n <\/p>\n
He is highly regarded as a coach but it was always going to be difficult for O\u2019Connor and O\u2019Halloran to have the same compatibility that Pat Ryan had with Donal O\u2019Rourke for the three previous years because Ryan and O\u2019Rourke had been friends for such a long time.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Rourke also shared the same vision as his manager in how they both wanted the team to play. O\u2019Connor and O\u2019Halloran clearly weren\u2019t on that same page.<\/p>\n
If Cork were to lose their coach, it\u2019s better for that to happen now than later in the season when the coaching principles and style of play would have been more deeply embedded, and when the players would have been used to how the coach ran sessions.<\/p>\n
\n Cork do have people with plenty of coaching ability in their backroom team but it\u2019s extremely rare now for an inter-county team not to have a head coach overseeing the whole practise.\n <\/p>\n
O\u2019Connor may take on that role himself in some capacity, especially when he has such a strong background in coaching, but he\u2019d want to be careful too not to underestimate just how much modern inter-county management requires from a single individual.<\/p>\n
After Real Madrid were beaten by Manchester City in last week\u2019s Champions League, Thierry Henry said that Xabi Alonso\u2019s management style may require some tweaking if he is to hold onto his job as Real Madrid manager.<\/p>\n
“He’s coaching too much, for some people, and not managing enough,” said Henry. “I feel sorry for Alonso because you can see what he did with (Bayern) Leverkusen when he was able to coach a team who was going to listen to what he was going to do.”<\/p>\n
O\u2019Connor was always going to do things his way, no matter what. Cork need to find a new direction but one of the biggest disadvantages the current management have to deal with is that none of them had been exposed to inter-county senior management before.<\/p>\n
Since Jimmy Barry Murphy was first appointed Cork manager in 1996, every other Cork manager in the meantime had some involvement in a senior inter-county management before taking the job, either as a coach, selector, or a previous inter-county manager; Bertie \u00d3g Murphy, Donal O\u2019Grady, John Allen, Gerald McCarthy, Denis Walsh, JBM again, Kieran Kingston, John Meyler, Kingston again, Pat Ryan.<\/p>\n
Walsh didn\u2019t have any senior hurling managerial experience before being installed as full-time replacement for Gerald McCarthy in March 2009 but Walsh had managed the Waterford senior footballers for two years between 2001-\u201902.<\/p>\n
The new senior management did guide Cork to the 2023 All-Ireland U20 title but stepping up to inter-county senior is a whole new level again. It is an eye-opener.<\/p>\n
And a completely different beast. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In late October 2023, over five months after Cork had exited the Munster hurling championship, Pat Ryan sat…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":195851,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1965,1964,61,60,112],"class_list":["post-195850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-hurling","tag-cork-gaa","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}