The Loughmore-Castleiney chairman Joe Ryan rang him last December. No back channel inquires, no third party teasing out; a cold call. Donal O’Rourke was heading into his third season as Cork coach and Ryan reckoned the pitch he was about to make had the over-the-counter value of a lottery ticket.
There is no way of quantifying luck. As the conversation progressed Ryan felt a bite on the hook. “He knew everything about our team,” says Ryan. “He said to me, straight out, ‘I have to come up and talk to ye at least’.”
O’Rourke needed to square it with Pat Ryan and he required clearance at home. They know how he rolls. Being up to his neck in teams is his natural state.
There was one season, 2021, when he coached the Galway camogie team under Cathal Murray and the Erin’s Own senior hurlers in Cork and maybe that was too much. From his home in Lismore, he travelled to both places three times a week. Galway’s training base moved around, but the nearest location was two hours and 20 minutes away. One way or another it was the road less travelled.
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“It was a tough ask,” says O’Rourke. “It was daunting, to be honest with you. It was flat out. I remember one night we were training in Pearse Stadium, it was nearly quarter to nine, halfway through the session, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m three hours from home here.’ It really hit me that night. I wasn’t going back for a second year, Cathal knew that. But the gamble paid off because we won the All-Ireland. I had to make sure we won it.
“I’m really interested in winning in this game. I’m not interested in anything else. I put an awful lot of time into making sure my teams are as prepared as they possibly can be. Winning is the big buzz for me. That keeps me going.”
Pat Ryan said once that O’Rourke was “24/7, 365 days a year hurling.” O’Rourke says that Ryan is “equally obsessed”. They became friends about 20 years ago, when O’Rourke spent a couple of years living in Cork and transferred to Sarsfields, Ryan’s club.
O’Rourke was a talented young goalkeeper who by then had spent five years on the Waterford under-21 panel. Gerald McCarthy called him into the senior set-up for a few weeks while he was still a teenager and after that Justin McCarthy and Davy Fitzgerald looked at him too. Ultimately, that breakthrough never came.
“I never stopped thinking about it. I had to take my chance when I went in there and, I have to be brutally honest, any time I was in there I was just too eager and it didn’t happen naturally. If I had left it happen naturally, looking back on it, I could have had a good career with Waterford because they were struggling for goalkeepers at the time.”
Coaching, though, filled his cup. In the couple of years that he played for Sars he still ran the minor team in Cappoquin, his home club. Ryan was wired in the same way. “When I left Sars,” says O’Rourke, “we became unbelievably close.”
After Ryan accepted the Cork job in the summer of 2022, everybody who had been part of his under-20 management team agreed to join him. The addition was O’Rourke. In hurling, Cork had no history of outside interventions. Part of that was tradition, most of it was vanity. Every home-grown problem was deemed to have a home-made solution. Ryan departed from that tramlined thinking.
“He said to me ‘I need a different outlook.’ He knew that I had a rounded view of the game. As coaches, the way we believed the game should be played was fast and forward. Full blooded stuff, high intensity, high octane hurling. Pat and me had a saying: ‘If you’re moving the ball fast, you’re moving it too slow.’ We put all our eggs into one basket and we went after it. It was our vision. We were blessed with the players we had and they really bought into us. We knew we had weaknesses but we really went after our strengths.”
For three years, the Cork team they created was a ball of fire. After years of elite teams playing with four and a half forwards, Cork reverted to six midway through year two. They went retro with long puck-outs, flying in the face of the tactical fashionistas, and in an era when Limerick drowned teams with points, Cork stacked their chips on goals. They were distinctive and daring and vulnerable, and the brilliance of their best days was a blinding light.
Limerick were still regarded as the benchmark and the smartest boys in the class, but in those three years nobody beat them more often than Cork. Their mission, though, was to win the All-Ireland; they lost by an inch, and they lost by a mile.
“I look back on the Clare game [2024 All-Ireland final],” O’Rourke says, “and we left it there in extra-time. I would be very disappointed with our execution. We had the ball in our hands to win the All-Ireland and we didn’t take it. We can have no complaints. Clare were getting scores off our mistakes. We just didn’t fully perform.”
This year, they were swept away in a flash flood. Cork had possession 36 times in the second half and were stripped of the ball 29 times. They scored twice and shipped 3-14. They conceded a penalty, missed a penalty, had a man sent off, hit the frame of the Tipp goal four times and were razed to the ground by Tipp’s tackling. None of that begins to explain it.
For Cork, only the first half makes sense. “We were six points up. I was thinking back to the year before when we scored 1-11 in the first half against Limerick [All-Ireland semi-final] and 1-12 against Clare [in the final]. We’d just scored 1-16 against Tipp. I was walking in at half-time thinking, ‘We’re 12 points away from winning the All-Ireland.’ That was my mindset going in.
“I watched it back that night. I watched it back a few times since. There was a lot of barstool analysis after the game. A lot of the talk out there was that the sweeper spooked Cork. That wasn’t the case. Pat saw an interview with Liam Cahill in the week leading up to the game where he said Liam Cahill’s teams never play with sweepers. Pat rang me and said, ‘He’s double-bluffing us here.’ We had done so much work on sweepers. The sweeper wasn’t bothering us.”
Cork’s second-half performance attracted a million lurid descriptions but scarcely an explanation. Into that vacuum flooded fantastical yarns of a half-time bust up. Social media is now the paper that never refuses ink. Through their concussion, the Cork players and management were dealing with a kangaroo court too. The verdict was in.
“I had people trying to convince me about rumours. I knew it was rubbish. I wasn’t even in the head space to think about that because I was so devastated we had lost the All-Ireland. The one thing that I’m a little disappointed about is that the Cork county board knew that [the rumours] were pure and utter false. They could have come out and quashed that very, very early. Players’ names were mentioned. It took until Pat’s resignation for the first person to talk about it. That didn’t sit well with me. It went all over the place and it got legs and legs.”
Ryan stepped down a month after the All-Ireland. They had been in touch nearly every day after the match. Nothing was settled until everything was settled.
“When he told me he wasn’t going forward for a fourth year I got an awful shock. It hit me really hard that he wasn’t going back. I was devastated. There were rumours going around that he had to change his back-room team. Pat certainly wasn’t going to change any of his back-room team. Why would he change his back-room team? He had won seven trophies in five years [under-20 and senior]. He was so loyal to all of them.
“Look, Pat obviously had a very trying year personally and that took an awful toll on him. He was incredibly close to Ray [Pat’s brother, who died tragically in February]. I’ll never forget the Tuesday morning when he rang me and told me the news. I had to address everyone in the group that night. He said get the message back to the group that nothing was to change in preparation for the game against Kilkenny. Under no circumstances was training to be called off.
“What he had to do on the Friday – bury his brother Ray, Lord have mercy on him – and then stand on the sideline the following day and represent Cork. That took incredible strength. That will tell you the man he is. Pat loves Cork, he just loves Cork. That’s the bottom line.”
Three days after Ryan resigned, O’Rourke was approached by Wexford. A day later the Waterford manager Peter Queally got in touch. “When it’s your own county, I came alive.” For the coming season he will be their lead coach.
[ Donal O’Rourke joins Peter Queally’s Waterford management teamOpens in new window ]
In the background was Loughmore-Castleiney. They didn’t return to training seriously until April and in the first half of the year O’Rourke only made sporadic appearances. By the time Cork reached the All-Ireland final he reckons he might have been there 15 times, at most. After the All-Ireland, the shackles were off.
“I’ve been lucky enough to deal with brilliant clubs, but I’ve never seen anyone so passionate about their club as they are. When they approached me, I was thinking, ‘These boys wouldn’t be a million miles away from winning the championship and going deep in Munster.’ That was probably the lure.”
Up to his neck.
