CORK FOOTBALL:PRESUMABLY ALAN Quirke recognises the situation. An injury-disrupted league campaign has meant watching on as Cork goalkeeping rivals Paddy O'Shea and All-Ireland under-21 winner Ken O'Halloran pressed their claims.
“A couple of injuries coming into the league meant I was struggling for a lot of it,” says Quirke. “He (manager Conor Counihan) used different players in every position really. You want to have a situation where there are at least two players fighting for each position. Both Ken and Paddy played very well in every match they played, so it’s been a positive.”
A positive?
“Look, certainly you’d be worried when you see fellas playing well, there’s no doubt about that. We get on well, the three of us, so there is no ill-feeling or anything like that. We train hard together and then on the day of the match, whoever has taken possession of the jersey will get the good wishes of whoever is there.
“All three of us want to play, obviously, but there is only one goalkeeping position.”
The imposing Valley Rovers player goes back a long way with the Cork seniors having won a Munster medal in 1999 as understudy to Kevin O’Dwyer, a role he held for three years before his army career took him abroad.
He didn’t waste time on his return, winning an All-Ireland medal with the Cork juniors in 2005 before slotting in as O’Dwyer’s successor.
Agile for a big man, he has been a good shot stopper, covering the goal well and good one-on-one. His fielding of high balls is excellent and although an uncharacteristic fallibility clouded his first senior All-Ireland final three years ago he had enough resolve to put the disappointment behind him and resume his A game.
This weekend he faces into his 11th championship match against Kerry, all in the space of four years. You sense his weariness at the question, a delicately phrased version of, “given that you beat Kerry in Munster and then lose to them in Croke Park, does Sunday strike you as pointless?”
“No it doesn’t. It’s grand to say in retrospect, ‘we won the All-Ireland coming through the back door; that’s what made us as a team’ but I think it’s too big a risk to take, and I think if you asked the Kerry lads, they would say the same. They have done that, they have come through the back door and won it but they had some fairly close scrapes along the way and I don’t think it’s a route we want to take, anyway.”
With Counihan introducing younger players to the team the hope is that the folk memory of disappointments in Croke Park against Kerry (there have been none against anyone else since 2004) will fade. The sequence has been routine and crushing and any character formation surely has to have taken place by now?
“Yeah, we probably are tired of learning things alright. The options are that we pack it in or we keep trying. We’re going to keep trying, keep trying to do our best, and if we can put those lessons into practice, we’re confident that we might get there eventually.
“All we can do as a group of players is try and improve every year, and try put into practice all the things we’re doing off the field, and on the field at training. We can’t do any more than that, just try keep improving individually and as a group, and if that’s good enough it’s good enough. If it’s not, we can’t have any complaints afterwards. Tactically, you’ve got to understand that Kerry are very versatile and they can change their game plan from time to time.”
So the wheel turns again. Cork play Kerry knowing that defeat will be seen as a loss of momentum after a strong league, culminating in the Division One title and victory will look almost like an extension of the nightmare. Complete awakening is only on offer in August and September and Alan Quirke and his team-mates can wonder all they like about the future and that overlay of the past.
“But right now,” he says, “we’re facing the All-Ireland champions in Killarney and we’re not looking beyond that. Anybody who is looking beyond that is a fool.”
