Cork’s Pat Ryan: ‘I knew I was running on empty. I’ve only had two nights of unbroken sleep in the last year’

At the Cork banquet on the night of the All-Ireland final Matt Cooper conducted a Q&A with Pat Ryan. Before they appeared on stage Cooper met him in a private area upstairs to discuss how they would handle the exchange. Ryan told him that he could “ask him anything”. In his day-job as a current affairs broadcaster, Cooper is never sweating on that invitation, but this wasn’t a night for hard questions, and it wasn’t a night for answers. Nobody knew the answers.

“While he was very articulate [on stage] he was clearly in shock and in pain at what had happened that day,” says Cooper. “I can’t remember what I asked him or what he said but two things stick out. One was the genuine affection for him in the room, even love. He was cheered to the rafters. The second was the contrast to the previous year, when he gave a brilliant speech about how there were no regrets, no blame to the ref, they’d go again. I wouldn’t have been as gracious.

“Although it was an emotional day in an emotional year for him, he seemed so drained. I felt he looked like a man who’d gone as far as he could.”

For a few weeks, Ryan wrestled with those feelings. In his heart he knew he couldn’t continue. Too much had happened. Cards and letters and messages started dropping through his letter box and landing on his phone, many of them from strangers. He was showered with solidarity and support and kindness.

In the middle of it all he noticed that “seven or eight” of the Cork football team from the late 1980s had made contact. In their careers they had lost a couple of harrowing All-Irelands before they won two titles, back to back. Ryan didn’t know any of them, but they had gone to the trouble of seeking him out and sending a food parcel for his morale.

“Those fellas were on to me about sticking at it and driving on,” Ryan says. “They were saying, ‘We were like this in ’87 and ’88, drive on again, go again, you’ll get it done, don’t give up’. But it wasn’t a case of me giving up, it was just a realisation that I couldn’t do it. I never want to compare myself to Billy Morgan [manager of that Cork football team in the late 1980s and early 1990s] because he was a really, really special fella, the hunger that he had. But I just didn’t have that in me to go back this year.

“When I stepped away, I knew that Ben [O’Connor] was going to get the job and myself and Ben were really, really good friends from our time with Cork. I knew I wasn’t letting the players down because I knew they were going to get someone that was going to do the job properly and was going to give everything to it.”

The O’Connor brothers, Ben, Jerry and John, had also been friends with Pat’s younger brother Ray. At the height of the Cork hurlers’ strikes Ray had lined out in a few league games on teams that were cobbled together without the striking players. But when the conflict was resolved, Ray was invited to join the restored Cork panel. A lot of the players who had been part of the strike didn’t talk to him, but Jerry and Ben went out of their way to make him feel welcome. That kindness wasn’t forgotten.

In the middle of Ryan’s kitchen is a picture of Ray soloing a football in a Glanmire jersey. He died tragically on February 25th last year. In his eulogy at Ray’s funeral Pat spoke with warmth and wit and tenderness and love. The closeness between them was expressed in every line, brothers and friends.

A day later, Cork had a home game against Kilkenny in the league and with extraordinary strength, Ryan showed up. He dealt with the players and faced the media and brought a simple graciousness to the first, blind, tentative steps of carrying on.

“You just did it. Anyone who goes through tragedy will tell you, you just do it. Being from a GAA family and having played with Ray, he would have expected you to do it, you know what I mean? Like, he wanted Cork to win. He wanted me to be successful. He probably wanted me to be successful more than I wanted it myself.

“It was a huge help [being involved with Cork] because it gave you something to go to, you know, it gave you something to focus on, it gave you something to get up for. It was great for my parents, great for my brothers. It was great for Ray’s wife and his kids. The players and my fellow management were an unbelievable support. My club was an unbelievable support.

“But you never got a chance to grieve because you were so busy. I knew I was running on empty. The only two times I slept through the night since Ray passed was the night of the All-Ireland final and the Monday night after that when the tiredness just came over me. Other than that, I didn’t have an unbroken sleep since February 25th. To be honest, they’re probably the only two nights of unbroken sleep I’ve had in the last year.”

Did the grieving come later?

“Oh, it did. It did, yeah, it did. I went out sick from work a bit. Look, I’m very lucky, I have a brilliant family, a brilliant mother and father, brilliant wife, brilliant kids, brilliant people around me. There was a huge hole in our life and there will always be a huge hole in our life, but you just kind of keep going and you try to put one foot in front of the other, and you bring him with you wherever you go.”

When he stepped down from the Cork job, Ryan said that it would still have been “the worst year of his life”, whether Cork had won the All-Ireland or not. Though hurling was in a different chamber of his existence, the feelings it generated were no less authentic or meaningful or relevant. You couldn’t deny them. Heartbreak has a million expressions. In Croke Park on All-Ireland day, he suffered like everyone else by his side.

He hasn’t watched the game back, but he is very clear about what he witnessed.

“The disappointing thing was the collapse as opposed to the previous year when we died with our boots on. That’s what you want to do – die with your boots on. People talking about Tipperary’s sweeper and all that really irks me because we spoke about them playing with a sweeper and we had played against a sweeper loads of times.

“What changed the game were the two goals and the penalty. They all came from long deliveries that we didn’t deal with as well as we should have. The minute they got the penalty to go six points up and we were down to 14 men it was lights out. People might say that’s defeatist, but that’s what it was. Tipp won an All-Ireland against Kilkenny in 2019 when they were a man up and they’re just too good to play against with 14 men.

“The disappointing thing from our point of view is that instead of losing by six or seven points you lose by 16. But people need to be conscious as well, from a mental point of view, something you’ve dreamt of all your life is gone – you know it’s gone. That does creep into fella’s heads [on the pitch]: this is gone now.”

Anybody who has ever stood on the sideline with a team will have experienced helplessness. At intercounty level, the stable lines of communication between the sideline and the pitch have been cut. The kind of intrusions by water carriers or maor foirne that were tolerated for years have been outlawed.

Crisis management is a remote exercise now. You must trust your players to find solutions. That problem-solving must be part of their training. None of that was effective. In the second half, Cork were swept out on a riptide and everybody in red was lost at sea.

“They [Tipperary] were driving the exchanges, they were driving the contact, they were driving the collisions. We were being beaten in lots of positions. Who do you bring in, who do you not bring in? If you’re looking at it, you’re saying, ‘How can I get a message into Patrick Collins [about the puck-outs].’

“There were a couple of clips went around of the five of us [Cork management] standing around talking to each other and people were saying there were too many fellas there to make a decision. And I was like: ‘I make the decisions.’

“I don’t mean to say that the lads weren’t involved in anything, of course they were, but it came back to me. I’m the manager of the team and it came back to me what kind of decisions needed to be made. You were trying to drive fellas on from the line, but we were just fighting fires everywhere. The energy levels had dropped.”

Unlike the year before, or in 2021, Cork had gone into the All-Ireland final as raging favourites. They had won the National League and the Munster championship and at times their hurling had been devastating.

Their two victories over Tipp earlier in the season can be seen through a different lens now, but Cork had beaten them heavily in three of their previous four meetings and it was easy to trust that form line. Even though they hadn’t won an All-Ireland in 20 years, self-doubt is not native to Cork’s hurling supporters.

“Everyone from Cork was thinking we were going up there to collect the cup, and people were saying that got into our fella’s heads. I don’t think it did because I don’t think we would have got the start we got. When that [complacency] comes in, you get blown away at the start.

“We were extremely worried going into the game because everyone was writing them off, even though they were the team with the All-Ireland medals. They had five or six fellas on the field who knew what it was like to win an All-Ireland and that makes a difference.

“That must have been a help to Liam [Cahill] because when you’re sitting inside in the dressingroom or a team meeting, he could turn around to Ronan Maher or John McGrath or Noel McGrath and say, ‘Talk to them there about what it’s like on the day. How can we stay focused? What needs to happen?’ And, for us, that’s where you’re trying to break through the glass ceiling as a group of players. The first one is the hardest. But once you win the first one, having had these knock-backs ... I mean, it’s going to happen.”

When Ryan took over the Cork job for the 2023 season, they had finished third in Munster a year earlier and been eliminated in the All-Ireland quarter-final. Nobody expected him to win an All-Ireland in his first season, but rebuilding jobs in Cork are a bit like an episode of Room To Improve, where, come what may, everything must be sorted in an hour of airtime. In Cork, years of excruciating waiting has not led to patience.

The success Ryan desperately craved was on All-Ireland final day. The success that came his way was expressed in other forms. He created a team that stood out from the herd. They weren’t tied to the tactical conventions of the day. They hunted for goals and played with the kind of risk that made them exciting. Three full-time inside forwards, no extra defenders. How Cork played was a crystallisation of Ryan’s vision.

“You just look at the players you have and you can say, ‘Can we win this way? Is this the best way for my players to play?’ We pushed up on puckouts a lot, we pushed up on the opposition half-backs and fellas were saying, ‘Jesus, ye’re leaving yourselves wide open.’

“But we couldn’t play any other way. We had to play on the front foot. We had to play aggressively. The more we did that with our players, the more they were in the game. Like, I remember people complaining that we gave up too many scores. Clare scored 3-26 against us in 2024, but we scored 3-24 that day. Nobody was talking about Clare conceding 3-24.

“When you’re involved in Cork we have a huge support base that is coming with the team all the time and you just need to really, really harness that. Do you harness that by defensive play, or do you harness that by attacking play? What do people want? You have to be true to your identity.”

The defining rivalry of Ryan’s three years in charge was against Limerick. In the Kiely years, only Clare have beaten Limerick as often as Cork in the championship, four wins apiece. But three of those Cork wins came in a 13-month spell under Ryan’s watch, each one played for high stakes.

When Limerick came to Cork for round three of the 2024 Munster championship Cork were without a win in their opening two games. If they had lost that night Cork would have been knocked out and, in that event, Ryan says now, he would have walked away at the end of the season. The fortnight before that game, he says, was the only time he felt pressure in the role.

“The pressure wasn’t really from the outside, because you keep yourself insulated from that, but it was the pressure of like, you know, ‘This should be going better. We’re better than this.’ It was more about not letting yourself down.

“I always felt that Limerick wanted to put us away or put us out of the championship as quickly as they could. The way we viewed it, if we wanted to win the All-Ireland, we were going to have to beat Limerick. We had to find ways to stretch the field against them so that we could leave space in certain areas. For the last number of years, the All-Ireland has run through them, and that’s going to be the way again in 2026.”

Nobody misses training at this time of the year, with the drudgery and the darkness and the foul weather. But he knows he will miss it in April, when the season changes. For now, what he misses most are the people.

“I miss meeting the lads. It was the right decision to go because even now, the energy that you would need to put into it, I wouldn’t have had it for 2026. If you’re there, you have to lead it, you have to be front and centre, you have to be driving it. When you get out of the car at training, whether you’re at your lowest ebb or your highest ebb, you’re on. It has to be, ‘I’m positive, I’m in good form.’

“But I miss those relationships [with his management team]. I’m not a great man to be on the phone and ringing fellas, my own friends will tell you that. But you’d miss the craic that we had.”

Ryan will help out in Sars as the year goes on and next year he will immerse himself in a team again. His fanaticism won’t permit him to be a hurler on the ditch. “Once you love hurling, you don’t compartmentalise it. It’s who you are. You’re thinking about it all the time. It’s always on my mind. If I take over a team in 2027, they have to be better hurlers by the end of it.

“I think that’s something we can be proud of as a management team [in Cork]. We made them better players for the next group to come in. We gave them more experiences. We gave them the ability to compete with the best. Some brilliant wins, some brilliant days.”

The goodwill that followed him into the job was never lost or corroded. He carried it to the end. He was the right man.

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