On the night before the Munster final the Sars manager Johnny Crowley rang Conor O’Sullivan offering him a Bushtucker Trial. Something to do with cockroaches, fish guts, giant mealworms, a tightrope and a gang plank.
“Johnny goes, ‘How do you feel about marking Dessie Hutchinson?’” says O’Sullivan, staring at Ant and Dec with his mouth open.
“If he was ringing you on Saturday night somebody else must have said no,” says Daniel Kearney, O’Sullivan’s friend, laughing. “It was a last resort.”
“Sure, I couldn’t say no,” says O’Sullivan.
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In the warm-up the following day he had gone beyond terror and was in a state of Zen. He looked for his wife and kids in the stand.
“I gave them a hug and got a big kiss off them. ‘Best of luck Dad.’ Daniel Hogan was mocking me in the warm-up but I just felt in the moment. You just make the most of it, you know.”
Kearney was tormented. He wasn’t happy with his form or his preparation. He didn’t believe they could win. His negative thoughts were founded on good reason. A logical mind is a curse.
“I was in the warm-up and I was like, ‘I shouldn’t be here at all. I don’t have the work done’,” says Kearney. “That was my impostor syndrome in the warm-up. I’ve never felt that bad. Just never felt that lack of confidence in myself – not in the team, in myself.
“But, you know, it’s that fear and self-doubt that drives most of the best players. It’s like, sometimes the fears and the anxieties are a good thing. I still knew, when the ball was thrown in, I was going to fight for my life.”
Within seven minutes Kearney had scored two points from play. Seven minutes later he scored a third. Making a liar of himself. Running riot.
Three minutes after that Hutchinson scored Ballygunner’s first goal. When the ball landed O’Sullivan was alone in a dark alley with one of the most lethal forwards in hurling. Hutchinson mugged him. O’Sullivan pleaded that Hutchinson had played his hurley.
“One hundred per cent he did,” says O’Sullivan, “100%. He did it enough that I could complain about it, but not enough that he would be caught.”
The laws of the jungle have no truck with justice.
“At the higher levels, you never use playing the hurley as an excuse,” says Kearney, sinking the butt of his hurley into O’Sullivan’s ribs. Still no free.
Hutchinson didn’t score again until the third minute of stoppage time. By then, Ballygunner were drawing their last breath.
“Like, I was by myself with him, on an island [of space] and on a normal day you’re cleaned out,” says O’Sullivan. “But we pushed up, man to man [out the field], and the boys were like animals out there. So, the ball coming in to him then was cat.”
Sport is full of gloating hindsight. Underdogs triumph and strut like peacocks in the afterglow. When Sars beat Ballygunner there was no trace of that. To win, they needed to reach an accommodation between humility and trepidation and conviction. Ballygunner had humiliated them a year before; Imokilly had beaten them in the county final; no Cork club had won the Munster championship in 15 years; Sars had never won it; Ballygunner had won three in a row. The circumstantial evidence for a Déise success was overwhelming.
“I had the feeling going into the game that, honestly, [losing] by 10 points would be good here now,” says Kearney.
“You know, they beat us by 17 points the year before. They way they’d been going, especially the way they beat Doon, I was like, ‘no one’s going to catch them’. But if we didn’t turn up there was going to be a huge respect issue. People would be going, ‘look at this crowd again’. You were playing out of fear, and I suppose, anxiety.
“The bookies had them at 1/14. I think that kind of spooked us a bit in terms of the bookies don’t get it wrong. I’ve never played in a game where the odds were like that. Nowhere near that.
“There’s more of a focus because you’re representing Cork so everything is just amplified. I carried that burden, and I think everyone else did too. I was worried about our form. We’ve trained better, put it that way. Like, I suppose, Johnny [Crowley] and Sully [Diarmuid O’Sullivan, coach] might have been the only two fellas who believed we could do it. They’re really good at convincing us.”
“You talk to people in Sars, and no one thought we would win,” says O’Sullivan. “But then everyone, apparently, had us backed.”
O’Sullivan and Kearney have been hurling together for 25 years. Kearney joined from Brian Dillons, a club on the northside of the city, when he was nine years of age. He will be 35 next week; O’Sullivan was 35 in March. Kearney is godfather to one of O’Sullivan’s children. They’ve been friends for as long as they can remember. Sars has been their parallel universe.
“Bar marriage and children, the best memories of my life have been in Sars or with the boys from Sars,” says O’Sullivan.
“And the worst memories of my life are in Sars or with the boys from Sars. Like we came out of college, you know, 2008, 09, when the economy wasn’t great. None of us emigrated and I think Sars probably had a big part [to play] in that. I think it kept a lot of us around the place.”
O’Sullivan and Kearney came through with a wave of good young players and won a minor championship in 2007 that nobody had expected. Crowley was their manager then too. That relationship has gone through different stages, but first impressions were powerful and enduring.
“He wanted us to play an expansive game,” says Kearney. “He gave us license to throw the ball around. He was encouraging us to take risks.”
“He managed us to win a senior county in 2010 [three years after they won the minor title] and we were looking up to him in awe,” says O’Sullivan. “He’s a really personable and charismatic fellah. Like, I remember the first speech he gave at the start of last year and you’re hook, line and sinker straight away.”
Kearney and O’Sullivan never played minor for Cork, but they made it as seniors, usurping the modern preference for big men. When Cork reached the All-Ireland against Clare in 2013, O’Sullivan was corner back and Kearney was centrefield. For eight years, they shared lifts to training.
In 2019, they both finished, though not on the same terms. By then O’Sullivan was a squad player, unsure if his name would appear in the match day programme; Kearney quit with people wondering why he had gone so soon.
“In the moment, I always felt hard done by,” says O’Sullivan. “But when I look back on it, I’d say I had an average career, and I probably didn’t get too far away from what I was capable of. You [turning to Kearney] would have been on a different level to me.”
“I never thought I’d be good enough to play with Cork,” says Kearney. “Only for Jimmy [Barry-Murphy, former Cork manager], he gave me a chance when I don’t think anybody else would have. Then you get on a bit of a run, and you play a couple of good games and all of a sudden you feel like you’re at this level.
“In terms of not winning All-Irelands it’s obviously disappointing, but I have three Munster medals, I played a lot of good games. It’s very hard to look back and say you regret a whole lot. When I stopped playing at 29 it was just the time commitment. Like, it was seven days a week. I was happy to come back with Sars and have something left over rather than feel like I was at the end. I wanted to enjoy playing with the lads and make sure we had that time.”
When Kearney and O’Sullivan won their first county medal in 2008, Sars had gone more than 50 years without winning the championship. In the long span of their senior careers, they have played in nine finals now and won five. Munster was the next frontier. Every expedition ended in failure.
Pat Ryan, the Cork manager, is a passionate Sars man and led them to a couple of county titles more than a decade ago. One night he showed them a flip chart listing the achievements of Crossmaglen Rangers, Nemo Rangers and one other giant of the club scene that O’Sullivan can’t remember now. It doesn’t matter: the message was clear.
“He was like, ‘This is where we need to get to,’” says O’Sullivan. “But I’ve been saying the whole time we get a bad rap for our performances in Munster. Every team that beat us won the Munster final after. Like, we lost to Kilmallock in Kilmallock, by a point, after extra-time. We lost to De La Salle, twice, by a point – once after extra-time. It wasn’t as if we were getting beaten by 20 points. Bar last year.”
In many ways it has been a gruelling year. Three days after the 2023 county final their facilities were wiped out by Storm Babet. The recovery was slow and painstaking. The club gym didn’t reopen until late in the summer and they didn’t return to their pitch in Riverstown until a week before this year’s county final. For the last 12 months they led a nomadic existence, depending on the goodwill of Ballinacurra and Brian Dillons and others. Every match was away from home.
“You know, you always feel hard done by when something tough comes about,” says O’Sullivan. “But I definitely think it galvanised us a bit without us even realising.”
The tests kept coming. Imokilly blew them away in the last 10 minutes of the county final, but as a divisional team they couldn’t represent Cork in the provincial championship. Sars had a month to gather themselves. Against Feakle in the Munster semi-final they had no idea what to expect. Crowley and Sully made their minds up.
Diarmuid O’Sullivan has ties to the area now, but Cloyne is his club and when he arrived in Sars as a coach at the start of last season he was seen as an outside appointment. He has made a difference.
“When we were with Cork with Sully [as a selector and coach] he was what you thought Sully would be,” says O’Sullivan. “But he’s way more chilled out now.”
“As an outside coach, if you wanted a template, he would be it,” says Kearney. “You don’t get respect, you earn it. And he’s earned it.”
The bookies make them slight favourites against Slaughtneil in the All-Ireland semi-final on Sunday. Sars have learned that bookmakers are fallible. The Derry champions have been contesting All-Ireland semi-finals for the last decade: three in football, three in hurling. Same core players, more or less. To win, Sars will need to be as good as they were against Ballygunner. The bar hasn’t dropped.
“You couldn’t do this if you didn’t enjoy it,” says Kearney. “We’re lucky with the calibre of players that we have. The type of game we play is enjoyable. I’m 34, nearly 35, but I think I’ve never been better – in terms of my experience and how I feel. I don’t feel I’m any less good than I was when I was 20. I still think I could beat anyone.”
When O’Sullivan and Kearney were breaking through with Sars, Newtownshandrum were the dominant team in Cork. They won three Munster titles in the space of six years and in one county final they beat Sars by 16 points. They were the benchmark.
“When I was younger, I always thought playing senior with Sars was achievable,” says O’Sullivan. “Winning a county was achievable. Playing with Cork was even achievable. But I used go to Newtown’s matches when they were winning Munsters and I was like, ‘That’s unachievable’. It was just too far to get there.”
But they made it.
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