NEW Cork hurling manager Ben O’Connor says there was ‘no bust-up’ with new coach Niall O’Halloran before the latter’s early departure from the role – simply two different ways of operating.<\/p>\n
In an interview with The Echo on Saturday, the straight-talking Newtownshandrum man said: ‘There were no issues between us but it was [a case of] what was the point prolonging it when it wasn\u2019t going to work long-term?”<\/p>\n
O’Connor explained this was a straight-up case of two coaches with different philosophies coming to a mutual realisation before it was too late and ultimately counter-productive.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was after looking at Niall\u2019s CV and, obviously, it was a very good CV, I got Niall involved and I was delighted he came on board \u2013 and it just didn\u2019t work out. Two different ways of operating,” O’Connor told The Echo<\/p>\n
\u201cI said to Niall one day, \u2018We\u2019re not going to work together,\u2019 and he said, \u2018Probably not.\u2019 He said, \u2018You won\u2019t be happy and I won\u2019t be happy and that isn\u2019t right.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe parted there, he wished us the best of luck. That\u2019s the way it finished, everything was amicable. There were stories going around that this happened and that happened \u2013 we had an honest conversation and we agreed that it was probably the right thing for the two of us to split.\u201d<\/p>\n
The new Cork boss admitted: \u201cDid I ever think I\u2019d be involved with Cork? Probably not. It never entered my head until Jimmy Barry got on to me one day, saying, \u2018Would you ever think of getting involved with the under-age? I think you should have a shot at the 20s.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI put my name forward for that and got it and I suppose it all kicked off from there. The bug was after landing and I was mad for road.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cWhen it became clear that Pat (Ryan) wasn’t going forward, it was very simple – \u2018You\u2019re being offered this now \u2013 if you don\u2019t take it, you might never again get a chance, so it’s either take it now or forget about it,\u2019 that’s the way it was.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy main job is to make sure fellas are happy. If you have fellas happy and they\u2019re enjoying it, I think you’ll get more out of them, so that’s the main thing that I’d be looking at.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’d be looking to have a happy camp \u2013 you’re not going to keep everybody happy all the time, but we\u2019ll try and keep as many of them happy for as much of the time as we can.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn fairness to Pat and his crew, they have a lot of the heavy lifting done – out of their three years, they were in two All-Ireland finals.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously, the All-Ireland final second half has to be addressed – that doesn’t have to be addressed by me at all, the players will do that themselves, and we’ll just forget about it, because that’s done and dusted, we can’t do anything about that, and we’re looking forward.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW Cork hurling manager Ben O’Connor says there was ‘no bust-up’ with new coach Niall O’Halloran before the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1964,61,60,112],"class_list":["post-201919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-cork-gaa","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201919","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=201919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}