Kerry players will have even more reasons than usual to fear Eoin Cadogan this weekend, while Jason Ryan wasn’t dishing out pats on the back at HQ on Sunday.
Cadogan ready for battle
Cork and Kerry have always been the most familiar of rivals, but since the introduction of the qualifier system they’ve been encountering each other more than ever and it wouldn’t be stretching it to say that the familiarity has spawned a fair bit of contempt.
Certainly, the physical stakes have been raised in their more recent meetings and with that in mind, the Kerry lads would want to be particularly wary of dual star Eoin Cadogan in Páirc Uí Chaoimh on Sunday.
The dual star is something of a fiery character at the best of times, but with the Rebels’ much anticipated Munster SHC meeting with Tipperary only a fortnight away, his preparation for the meeting with the Kingdom will involve him wielding a potentially deadly stick right up until the day of the game.
“I go to the ball alley an awful lot – I try to go up a couple of times a week,” Cadogan is quoted as saying in The Daily Star.
“Even in these two weeks before the Kerry game, I’ll have to get up a couple of times.
“I can’t just drop a hurley for two weeks and expect to pick it up before a Munster semi-final.”
With sparks set to fly on Sunday, Cadogan may be best advised to bring the hurley onto the pitch with him, if not as a means to protect himself, then to help separate Paul Galvin and Noel O’Leary when the pair of them inevitably go to battle once again.
Jason Ryan is a very hard man to please
We know it’s been a couple of days since Longford and Wexford played out a fairly entertaining draw at headquarters, but on a day when GAA activity is pretty thin on the ground, we felt it no harm to revisit a few quotes from Jason Ryan that have gone relatively unnoticed in the past couple of days.
Free-scoring wing backs are ten a penny in these days of packed defences and half forwards more concerned with making defences as claustrophobic as possible as opposed to doing damage on the scoreboard.
Emmet Bolton and Davy Harte have been two of the best exponents of attacking half-back play in recent seasons, but we can’t remember any of them ever matching the exploits of Wexford’s Adrian Flynn, who popped over five super points from play.
With the man of the match award also tucked under his arm, Flynn was entitled to feel content with his display, but Jason Ryan wasn’t about to add his handprint to the many that surely reddened Flynn’s back in the Croke Park dressing room.
“He is a threat. He kicked over some great scores and released some great ball,” said Ryan before immediately making sure that Flynn’s feet were firmly cemented to the ground.
“There were moments in the first half of the game that when he analyses it he won’t want to see again. That is the way he plays, he plays the game on an edge. I would rather have him with us than against us.”
It was certainly from the Geoff Shreeves school of post-match analysis, so if RTE or TV3 are ever looking for a type of character to lend their GAA coverage a hard, unsympathetic edge, they know where to look.
