Pat Ryan delighted with Cork display

By Paul Keane

In his brief time as Dublin manager, Niall O Ceallachain has run up against some pretty slick inter-county outfits; Galway, Kilkenny, Waterford, Limerick.

The Cork side that he and his Dublin players encountered at Croke Park this evening, however, were at an altogether different level.

Asked after his side's 20-point defeat if that was the best he's come across as a manager, O Ceallachain nodded enthusiastically.

"By a long way, yeah," he agreed. "I don't want to do Cork a disservice by overhyping them before the final, every game is different. But what I will say is that's by far the best hurling performance over 75 minutes that I've seen this year by a long way."

In O Ceallachain's estimation, it's going to take some team and some performance to stop the Munster champions on July 20. Kilkenny or Tipperary will be their opposition.

So how did Cork do it, what did Pat Ryan do to whip a team into the sort of shape to win both the first and the second halves of an All-Ireland semi-final, in front of a packed out Croke Park, by 10 points?

"Our key was to make sure that we were at our level, or as high as possible as we could have got it," said Cork manager Ryan. "I don't think we were as high as where we should be, or where we need to be if we want to win an All-Ireland. But we were at a level that was going to really put it up to them today, and that's the way it turned out."

With 4-13 in the first-half and 3-13 in the second-half, Cork simply never let up. And each of the goals came as hammer blows to a Dublin side doing their very best to remain competitive.

"We're targeting goals all the time, we're targeting fast starts all the time," said Ryan. "That's the goal of it, that's the game. Lads were pretty clinical today even though I felt we probably left an awful lot of scores behind us as well, points, though that's maybe me being a bit over-critical. Those are some things we'll go after but overall delighted with our fellas. We came out of here 51 weeks or so ago and for us to get back into a final now shows the strength of character and the strength of the commitment to the jersey that the lads have.

"We knuckled down after last season, got them back in, probably refreshed the panel a bit more, looked at the areas that we didn't do well as a management team, our S&C, physio, all that side of things where we could improve and spoke to players about that and just really went after it. We went after good performances in the league and tried to make the panel as competitive as we could.

"But to be honest, a small little thing is that the weather was much better this year. Fellas were looking forward to going to training. If you're not really following it, sometimes you might think the weather is the same all along but the weather this year was fantastic and that made a huge difference in Pairc Ui Rinn and Pairc Ui Chaoimh for a lot of the year. There was a great buzz about that and the year kind of flew."

Cork certainly looked like a team playing with the sun on their backs at Croke Park. Their touch, strike, angles of attack and execution in front of the goals were all of the highest order.

Alan Connolly represented the sharpened point of their attack, sniping a stunning 3-2.

"Alan was probably carrying a couple of injuries at the start of the year," said Ryan. "Momentum has made a difference to him. He had a bit of a heel issue, a bit of an Achilles issue and he was playing through them a small bit.

"We could see a different Alan over the last while. He was hungry, in the Munster final his work-rate was top class, his tackling from behind, just that hunger. Today, he probably didn't work as hard from behind with the tackling, because he was winning more ball and that's where I'd be critical a small bit at times. But look, he was really sharp at training over the last three to four weeks and we expected a huge performance off him.

"But he needed to deliver that because Shane Kingston and Conor Lehane and Jack O'Connor and Robbie O'Flynn, all of these fellas, they're playing really well in training and you just need to be performing the whole time."

Dublin's season is over but it has been a summer of fun for O Ceallachain and his Sky Blues crew. This was their first All-Ireland semi-final appearance since 2013 and they couldn't be faulted for lack of effort or commitment despite this 20-point reversal. Cian O'Sullivan finished with 2-5 while free-taker Sean Currie's 0-7 haul has left him in pole position to be named the Championship's top scorer.

"I think there was only one or two in it in terms of the shot count at half-time," said O Ceallachain. "But if you concede four goals, you're going to be in kind of a tricky spot and that's obviously where we were. Did we set up right at the back? I'm sure that question is going to come. We found it very hard for long periods then in that second-half. I thought we showed a good bit of fight to get back into it a couple of times but it felt like each time we did, there was a sucker-punch of a goal. That's the summary of the game."