Cuala’s Con O’Callaghan puts football ambitions on long finger

For Con O’Callaghan, there’s a chance this group interview could stray into delicate territory. He’s here to give a bit of air to Sunday’s Leinster club hurling final against O’Loughlin Gaels but there’s a subtext bubbling underneath and it’s to do with some awkward conversations that may have to follow if the result goes Cuala’s way.

To many in the county, O'Callaghan is the future of the Dublin football forward line. The summer just gone earned him his first All-Ireland medal and, ordinarily, the 2017 league would be the place where he plants his flag in earnest. But if Cuala are involved in an All-Ireland push in February and March . . .

He plays it with an admirably straight bat for someone still under-21 next year.

“Ah look, I don’t know if we will win on Sunday, you know. If you start thinking too far ahead, this match will run by us like it did last year. Maybe there were too many lads thinking about the All-Ireland semi or the Christmas break or whatever. We have to focus everything on this match.

“As I said, I’m focusing completely on the hurling for the moment. In terms of next year [with Dublin], I’d love to push on in terms of experience. I didn’t get much league time last year but hopefully I can build on what I did last year. Everyone on the panel will have ambitions to play and start for the team. Hopefully I can build on the small things I’ve done this year and push on for next year.”

Mugged

Cuala were mugged in this fixture last year by an Oulart the Ballagh side that had felt the sting of a Leinster final defeat in four of the previous five seasons. They consider themselves well warned here as a result.

“Last year we felt we let ourselves down in the Leinster final so this year we’re hoping for, at the very least, an improved performance,whatever about the outcome. I suppose we waltzed into the final last year, although we’d a tough game against Clara . . . I don’t know what went wrong but we expected it to happen when it came down to it. It just slipped away and it’s so easy for that to happen in finals. Hopefully this year we’re going to take our chances when they’re given and work hard.

“We went down by six or seven points and we were just a bit stunned. I don’t know if we weren’t expecting it but Oulart had lost a couple of finals and had a lot of experience. They probably knew what it took to win a Leinster, and knew better than we did because they came out fighting. It was probably nearly a little too late, we tried to claw it back but it took a lot of effort and it slipped away.

“We expected to win but Oulart the Ballagh expected to win as well. They had come from losing a good few finals and they probably saw weaknesses in our game. They fancied themselves probably much in the same way as O’Loughlin Gaels will.

“Favourites tag doesn’t mean anything. It comes down to the day, expectations don’t mean anything. We keep to ourselves and we try not to get involved with whatever people are saying about expectation. At the end of the day, it’s irrelevant. It’s down to performance on the day.”

Driving force

Overseeing said performance will be Mattie Kenny, Cuala’s driving force on the sideline. There was speculation that Cuala might have lost him to Galway last winter but he stayed with the Dublin side and O’Callaghan has felt the good of it along with everyone else in the club.

“Mattie is an incredibly ambitious guy and last year he might not have stayed with us unless he saw that we were as ambitious as he was. And he is not happy to settle for anything less than success.

“He just brings a certain atmosphere to training and he expects an awful lot from us, as any good manager has to. He knows what he wants and he will do anything to get it. He is just relentless in the pursuit of excellence. We beat Borris-Kilcotton, but against [Kilmacud] Crokes, we dropped our scoring for 10 or 15 minutes and that had happened to us against Lucan as well, so we really had to address certain periods of our performance that hadn’t been good in previous matches. He is very good at identifying what we need to improve on and he is relentless on making us improve on those.”