Without enrolling for the class, Donal O’Grady gave Diarmuid O’Sullivan his first lessons in management. At the beginning of 2003 the new Cork manager excluded O’Sullivan from the panel. O’Sullivan was 24 years of age, a two-time All Star, a hard-hitting, swashbuckling darling of the terraces, and overweight. In O’Grady’s mind, only one of those of those things had any currency.
O’Sullivan wasn’t alone. Half a dozen players were rostered for punitive running in an antechamber to the main squad. All of them were All-Ireland winners. One of them was an All-Ireland winning captain. In that group, rank had no status. It was a test, but it was also a threat. There would be no presidential pardons.
After the guts of two months O’Sullivan was restored to the panel, but by then the only position available to him was at left corner back. O’Sullivan fumed. A pattern emerged that O’Sullivan would be switched to the edge of the square during the game, but he wouldn’t start there, and he wouldn’t wear the jersey. O’Grady had O’Sullivan on a leash, straining.
“He made me wear number four,” says O’Sullivan now. “Was he playing with my head? 100 per cent. He knew I’d be boiling. He knew it. I remember saying to Con [Murphy, Cork doctor] one day, ‘Con, what the f**k is going on here?’ He said, ‘Sully, I’ll tell you now, if you don’t play corner back, you’ll be playing nowhere.’
“It was well known that myself and Donal would have been at loggerheads over that and other things. We used to be sparking off each other. I often meant to ask him why he did it, but I hadn’t the balls to do it. I’d have been afraid what he’d say to me. I knew he’d have a good answer. We’ve laughed about it since. We’ve become really, really good friends now.”
The first game he started at full back that year was the All-Ireland final. At the end of the following season, O’Grady’s last as Cork manager, O’Sullivan was the All-Star full back again. In the battle of wills, who won?
It is only 20 years ago, but the game has turned a million revolutions since then. In O’Sullivan’s pomp, full backs staked their turf in tough neighbourhoods. Surveillance was sketchy. Crimes went unreported. Full forwards knew the score. It was better to be armed.
“You always got away with a pull or a drag on a fella, or a wrestle to the ground. There might be no badness in it, but it was the whole manly contest. I’ve always said, Ben O’Connor [former Cork player] was pound for pound the hardest player I ever marked because he had everything – hurling, a brain for the game, he had pace, and he was filthy, absolutely filthy. Have no doubt in your mind he was filthy – but he had to be. You had to be.
“Forwards had to protect themselves too. If you were a marquee forward fellas were constantly jabbing, poking, pulling and digging at you. What are you going to do? You’re going to bite back. [Henry] Shefflin had a stroke in him. Joe Canning had a stroke in him. For three or four years, Joe was probably the dirtiest forward in the game, but they had to protect themselves.”
In that environment weakness was preyed upon, ruthlessly. In the 2005 All-Ireland final O’Sullivan marked Niall Healy, the young Galway full forward whose three goals against Kilkenny made him the sensation of the summer. The only thing on O’Sullivan’s mind was self-preservation. Healy trotted towards his position and innocently extended his hand to the Cork full back. Like the fable of the scorpion and the frog, O’Sullivan couldn’t defeat his instinct.
“We were getting closer and closer and something came into my head. It was just a split second when his hand came out. I pulled him in, and his outside was a bit open. I jabbed the hurley up under the ribs and there was force in it. I knew I kind of half-hurt him. He was young, like, he was naive.”
In that guerrilla warfare, though, the guns could be turned on anybody. In a qualifier match in Killarney in 2004 the Tipperary forward John Carroll torpedoed him in the chest. O’Sullivan met the ground and rolled a couple of times, like he had landed in a parachute, but before he reached the advertising hoarding he jumped to his feet.
Inside, it felt like his vital organs had shut down. His only defence now was the great bluff of appearances. In that moment weakness was a greater enemy than Tipp.
“John was a big unit. He buried me, absolutely buried me. I got up and I could hardly f**king breathe. I was looking at the clock and there was 31 or 32 minutes gone. I was saying, ‘I hope to God no ball comes in here in the next two or three minutes,’ because I wouldn’t have had a hope.”
By the time O’Sullivan started coaching a decade ago there was far less scope for what he calls “the dark arts.” There were fewer close-quarter duels close to goal; instead, the game was being stretched by speed, and ball carrying and zippy passing and long-range shooting. City Hall had clamped down on blackguarding too.
“There’s no way you could take your playing attitude into a coaching attitude. You have to transition. The way I played the game wouldn’t cut it with modern-day players. You couldn’t coach in that way. The way we were coached was different. You have to be very respectful of the fellas around you and be mindful of your language, your terminology. The players are different now and everything has to change around them.”
When Kieran Kingston was appointed as Cork manager for the 2016 season, he asked O’Sullivan to be a selector. Of the players who had taken a prominent role in the player strikes of the previous decade only Mark Landers had been asked to work with the senior team up to that point, and that arrangement only lasted a season. O’Sullivan had been interviewed for the job of Cork minor manager that year too but had been passed over.
“It was mentioned to Kieran somewhere along the way, ‘You know he didn’t get the minor job, are you sure you want to bring him in?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m 100 per cent certain.”
The radiation from the Cork player strikes lingered in the atmosphere for years. During the first strike, O’Sullivan’s father Gerry was an officer of the county board. At home, they sat on opposite sides of the barricades and never discussed it.
The third strike was the most toxic of all and within weeks of it ending in 2009 O’Sullivan retired from the Cork panel. After 11 years in the jersey, he was spun out. He was 30.
“I was fed up with all the hassle that was going on off the field, all the turmoil. That was draining. It would drain the life out of you. I was tired of playing full back as well. To be honest, my belly was nearly gone for the whole thing. I remember going to a session in Mallow. Jerry Wallis was still involved and the session started at 100 miles an hour. After 25 minutes I said, ‘Jerry, I’m not feeling great.’ I walked into the dressingroom, and I knew in my head that was it.
“It’s funny now, but Conor O’Sullivan was inside togging out. It was his first year and he was late for the session. I shook his hand and said, ‘Conor, the very best of luck,’ and I walked out the door.”
Conor O’Sullivan is the Sarsfields captain in the All-Ireland senior club hurling final this weekend and Diarmuid O’Sullivan is their coach. His roots are in Cloyne, but he lived in Sars’ orbit for years and his two sons play for the club. His bridge into the senior set-up, though, was Johnny Crowley.
In 2021 O’Sullivan had finished his second spell as a selector with Kieran Kingston when the Cork U-20 job became vacant. O’Sullivan put together a management team that included Crowley, but there was a star-studded list of applicants and O’Sullivan was overlooked again. Sars saw their opportunity and seized it. “One door closed,” says O’Sullivan, “another door opened.”
The impact of Crowley and O’Sullivan was immediate. In the season before they took over Sars had failed to qualify from the group stages of the Cork championship; in their first season as manager and coach Sars won the county title for the first time in nine years.
“The players didn’t realise where their ceiling was. They were happy to play hurling with Sars and be a senior hurler, but some of them had never earned the right to be a senior hurler. So, we had to go away and break them down and make them earn senior hurling and earn the Sars jersey, which we did over time.”
In the 2023 Munster championship Sars had lost to Ballygunner by 17 points, and after they were beaten by Imokilly in the county final last October, they needed to decide if they had the heart for a winter campaign. No Cork team had won the Munster title in 15 years and the record of Cork teams going forward as beaten county finalists was deplorable.
After the county final, the management allowed the players to decide. They met on Wednesday and cleared the fog in their minds. “That Saturday morning we put on an incredibly tough session, just to see where their belly was at. We put bits and pieces in place, but the players drove the bus for the Feakle game [Munster semi-final] and they’ve continued that process.
“The Cork thing was secondary. We were representing Sars in a Munster championship and we didn’t want to be another statistic of a club not being successful because of a loss to Imokilly. We weren’t going to go down that road. It was Sars, first and foremost.
“Now, we made brave decisions in Munster as well [changing the goalkeeper and centre back]. The players drove it, but the management made the big calls. If that had backfired, it was on us.”
The performance against Ballygunner was the most spectacular by any Cork club since Newtownshandrum were in their prime. The All-Ireland semi-final against Slaughtneil was about elemental stuff.
“I know they’ve made the pitch bigger [in Newbridge] but as soon as the ball was thrown in the place just shrank. My mantra all week was to get the game to the point where our hurling will win. You have to be physical. You have to dog it out. You had to go to places where you’ve never gone before.
“It was always said about Sars that there was a soft underbelly about them, that they don’t like it when push comes to shove. Over the last couple of years, we’ve been answering all those questions. We’ve won a pile of narrow games.”
O’Sullivan played in the junior championship for Cloyne last year. Gerry had played in an intermediate county final when he was 42 and it was always O’Sullivan’s ambition to match his father’s longevity, at least. He’s 46 now and last year was his 30th campaign in an adult grade with Cloyne. A fixed point in the blur.
“You’re meeting younger players, but my head works a bit quicker. A lot of fellas are generational robots, as I call them. They’re so structured in their play, ‘I have to move here, to here, to here.’ But their reading of the game is poor because it’s not being coached any more. They’re coaching the instinct out of the game.
“I’m playing in the forwards, and I’ve done well enough at junior level over the last number of years. I always think old heads will beat young legs.”
It is a state of mind. O’Grady would understand.
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