The AIB provincial club players' awards were presented at a lunch hosted by the bank at its Dublin headquarters in Ballsbridge yesterday. Among the recipients was Colin Corkery, fresh from last Saturday's heroics in scoring all of Nemo Rangers' winning total of nine points in the All-Ireland semi-final win over Charlestown.
Corkery has been back in training this season after recovering from a coronary illness that had prevented him from training. "This year has been good. It's been a thrill to go training in a sense. We had a six or seven-week break over Christmas and that's the only break I've had so far."
St Patrick's Day will be his third club final. Eight years ago, he won a medal in the defeat of Castlebar Mitchels. Last year was a different experience against Mayo opponents as Crossmolina won the title for the first time. After nearly 10 years at the top of the game, Corkery has a particular fondness for the club championship.
"To be honest it comes first before anything else. I've always said it down through the years, if it came down to club or county, my club is first and that's it. In this day and age you have to find a balance between the two. Certainly the club is more appealing to me because we've been successful with the guys we've grown up with. We don't classify anyone in Nemo as being better than anyone else. It's just a good community spirit and club spirit and that's what I prefer."
Nemo Rangers lead the All-Ireland roll of honour with six titles. With such a distinguished history, do the achievements of past teams at the club create pressure on younger generations of players?
"I don't think it's a burden at all," he says, " because when you go through those past players who've won those honours they're still in the club coaching or still around helping out. The pressure is on ourselves to perform but if we're beaten on the day by a better team we can't do anything about it. We're trying to perfect performance so that we can go out in every championship game and perform, not to have a situation where we're crying into our pints afterwards saying we didn't play well."
At yesterday's lunch there were also special awards for coaching and games development presented to Dr Dave Geaney and Matty Foley. Geaney's father, Con, won an All-Ireland medal with Kerry in 1932 and he himself maintained the family tradition in the 1959 defeat of Galway. Dave Geaney also won three county medals in Cork with UCC. As a coach his work with home club Castleisland culminated in All-Ireland success against St Vincent's of Dublin in 1985.
Foley was on the Buffers Alley team that won the All-Ireland club title in 1989, defeating O'Donovan Rossa of Antrim in the final and in the process earning Wexford icon Tony Doran a club medal. Matty Foley has taken charge of all the club sides from under-eight upward as well as working with national schools in the Kilmuckridge and Monamolin area of the county.
Wexford's Paul Codd is set to miss the entire National League campaign and could also miss the championship. Codd, who had a shoulder operation in January, could be absent until May at the earliest.Wexford's opening championship game is against the preliminary group winners on June 10th.
