O'Sullivan not rejoining Cork panel

CORK’S THREE-TIME All-Ireland winning full back Diarmuid O’Sullivan has announced his intention not to return to the senior set-up for this year’s championship.

O’Sullivan missed all of Cork’s league campaign, initially because of the players’ strike, but then decided to continue his focus on rugby, playing with the Highfield club.

The 30-year-old did recently return to club hurling action with Cloyne but, as time appeared to be running out for a call-up from new hurling manager Denis Walsh, he announced last night that he was effectively retiring from intercounty action.

Meanwhile, the sight of Dublin hurler Alan McCrabbe being awarded the first Opel/Gaelic Players Association monthly award for 2009 was another reminder of the greater expectations facing the county ahead of their championship date with Antrim on June 7th.

McCrabbe was honoured yesterday – along with Tipperary footballer Hugh Coghlan – for making the most outstanding contribution to hurling so far this year (hitting 1-50 in their Division One campaign), as decided by fellow GPA members.

The awards will now continue on a monthly basis and Dublin’s hope is McCrabbe won’t be the only metropolitan hurler to be honoured before the year is out.

“Ah there’s a bit of pressure on us alright,” he said. “We regard Antrim as a side that always give us a good game. They beat us in 2007 when we were going for the league semi-final. They beat us up there in Belfast so we’ll treat them as good as any other team. We’ll take it one game at a time.”

Dublin got a timely wake-up call last weekend when they suffered a heavy defeat to Cork in a challenge game, evidence perhaps of the big difference between league and championship hurling,

“Oh we did get a bit of a lesson. They were probably playing at championship pace and we were still on league pace. There’s a big difference.

“I suppose we were missing nine players and they had a full side out so there’s a big difference.

“But I think we needed that extra wake-up call going into championship. We’re playing Waterford in two weeks so we’ll probably have to play that at championship pace to see where we are.”