Daniel Kearney: Centre of Attention

By Brian Murphy

One thing Daniel Kearney can never be accused of is not giving everything of himself. One of Cork's best performers in the drawn game against Clare, the Sarsfields man lasted 67 minutes before he was forced off with cramp.

The midfield dynamo, who finished the game with two points from play, was at the centre of the maelstrom until his body betrayed the demands the game had placed on him, and the incredible demands he had placed on his own body. He watched the final, dramatic moments from the sidelines.

"I was clearing a ball and my leg just went tight. I was covering a lot of ground alright, because every time they go forward you have to track the run," he says.

"If it's a different team, like Kilkenny maybe, the forwards normally take on the ball themselves, but Clare like to pop it so you really have to be tight on the midfielders and half-forwards coming through.

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"I just said to myself that if I was one-on-one and I got cramp, the game could be over because they could get a goal so I said I'd go off, because you could lose the game in a second."

Cork stopped using GPS technology to track the ground covered by their players last year, but Kearney's efforts in the final would surely have been off the scale. According to the most recent research, the average inter-county hurler covers just over 8km in a game; Kearney, though, is one of those players who would skew any such study.

"Croke Park is a massive pitch, and especially with a team like Clare, who are one of the fastest teams in hurling at the moment, it's helter-skelter for those 70 minutes and you wouldn't have much left in the tank after it," he adds.

That he went down with the signs of cramp tells its own story, given that under Cork physical trainer Dave Matthews, he has been trained like an 800-metre runner over the last two years, fed on a raw diet of interval sessions designed to leave him with the lactate tolerance threshold of an elite athlete.

Kearney lapped up Matthews' gruelling training, giving 100 per cent in every single session to the point that he had to be reined in by the Cork management team such was his enthusiasm and appetite for the tough stuff.

Those in the know reckon there are few - if any - GAA players in either code fitter than Kearney. A look at his statistics from the drawn game back up those claims: he made a total of 11 plays, had the ball in hand eight times and his personal tackle-count - excluding hooks and blocks - was nine. Conor O'Sullivan and Séamus Harnedy were the only other Cork players to make 11 plays or more (see left-hand panel for more detailed analysis).

Crucially, he won his personal duel with his direct opponent Colm Galvin (who made nine plays), hit 0-2 from three attempts, and the only time he got enough space in the midfield traffic jam to go on a trademark solo run, 17 minutes into the first half, Clare goalkeeper Pa Kelly made a terrific save to keep out his low shot.

"I was looking back at it and I don't think that I could have done anything else with it," he says. "I bounced it and it hit the top of Patrick Kelly's hurley, it was a great save.

"Some people were saying I should have passed it to Luke (O'Farrell) but when you're in 13 yards there's not much room for error in there and if you pop the ball it could get intercepted. I wouldn't have done anything different, it was just a great save."

At 5' 9", Kearney was never going to play a big part in an aerial duel dominated by the Clare half-back line, but one area he has mastered is hanging around the fringes of rucks and pile-ups picking up loose ball. He works as hard as any player on the field, his bobbing green helmet is just as likely to be found in his own full-back line, tracking back opposition runners, as it is at the other end of the field helping to pick off scores.

Guilty of three individual errors over the course of the game, his performance was not without its flaws, however.

"(I was) happy enough, I suppose. It's a team game and you just want the team to win, I'm just trying to work as hard as I can to get the better of my man and it's always going to be tough when I'm going to be marking a player who's so similar to me.

"With the way Clare play, you have to be tight on your midfielder because they're going to pop him the ball, especially when he's coming forward, they like to put it in front of him into space, so I know I have to be tight on him. I have to stop him getting the ball and trying to get as many balls as I can."

Kearney's nature is to push the boundaries, to take his body to the extreme. This year, he has learned to distribute his boundless energy more evenly over 70 minutes.

On his first senior championship start, in the All-Ireland quarter-final against Waterford last year, he used up so much energy in the first half that he had to be taken off at half-time, a yellow card and an empty tank forcing manager Jimmy Barry-Murphy's hand.

"I went out in the first half and gave it everything, just emptied the tank," he tells GAA.ie. "I remember going in at half-time and I was written off. I was on Stephen Molumphy and Philip Mahony for a while. It was my first championship start for Cork and I wanted to have no regrets."

An accountant with PWC, the 23-year-old is intelligent and a quick learner, always keen to better himself, to learn from his experiences and to pick up knowledge from others - in other words the kind of player any manager dreams of having in his squad.

A naturally gifted hurler, Kearney was not necessarily born with the physique of an inter-county player but has worked tirelessly on transforming his light frame into one that is capable of withstanding the ferocity of tackling and the big hits that are now part and parcel of the modern game.

"I would like to be thought of as someone who has worked hard at their game because any time I am not training I am always trying to do something that's beneficial to my game - whether that is going to the gym or going for a puck-around or watching a game," he says.

"I normally do two or three gym sessions a week or have a puck-around down in Sars' on a Saturday, or if there is a game on, I go down to the ball alley. It's one or the other."

Kearney has never been afraid of a challenge. He grew up in the Tivoli/Montenotte area of Cork city and hurled with the Brian Dillon's club on the northside before making the decision, aged 10, to transfer, along with his twin brother William, to Sarsfields, who are based in Glanmire, just outside the city.

Kearney's integration into Sars' was complete when he decided to go to secondary school in Glanmire and established strong friendships with several of the players that would form the core of the club side he captained to a Cork Minor Hurling Championship in 2007, beating a Midleton team featuring Conor Lehane in goals in the final.

A year later, along with the likes of current Cork team-mates Cian McCarthy and Conor O'Sullivan, he had graduated to the club's senior side, and Kearney played at wing-back on the team that beat Bride Rovers in the final at Páirc Uí Chaoimh to win a first Cork Senior Hurling Championship for the club since 1957.

Despite all the success at club level - Sars' won another county title in 2010 - Kearney was never picked for the Cork minors and recognition was very slow to come at inter-county level. It wasn't until the winter of 2011, when manager Jimmy Barry-Murphy was out shopping for the materials he needed to build a team capable of beating Kilkenny and Tipperary at a very different type of hurling, that the pint-sized midfielder's talents were spotted.

He played some of the best hurling of his life as Sars' lifted the league title that winter. A broken finger ruled him out of the 2012 Fitzgibbon Cup and the subsequent Allianz League campaign with Cork. But Kearney bided his time and eventually made his mark, and it was in the Allianz League opener against Tipperary back in February that he first revealed his true potential at this level.

On Saturday evening in Croke Park, he will be hoping all the hard works pays off and to make an even greater mark on the grandest stage of all.

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