'Do the people in Cork football and the board really care about doing something this time?' 

'And he’s a footballer who’s had a very tough time of it. A lot of people, including myself, have been questioning his moral strength when it comes to these games. 'When he stood up to take the penalty a lot of people around me said, someone else should take it, but it took a lot of guts to step up.'

Joe Brolly, The Sunday Game, August 22, 2010.

DONNCHA O’Connor is watching a Sunday Game clip from the night Cork took the Dubs down in 2010.

The tagline ‘Cork mental strength’ fills the top of a screen that shows him miss a handy free, then kick three decent ones and that game-changing (career-changing?) penalty and he smiles at Brolly’s description above.

Those doubts seem out of touch and a lifetime ago now but they lingered for the longest time. His own first and strongest.

He didn’t play senior for Cork until he was 25 and there’s the famous story of O’Connor driving away from his first senior trial a few years before without having set foot in the dressing-room, racked with thoughts of not belonging at that level.

When he did come into the senior set-up in 2006 it took a few months to properly commit as he thought it more likely he wouldn’t be there for long and he can still recall the actual surprise night after night as he kicked two or three points off various Cork defenders that maybe he did belong after all.

He started the Munster final that year against Kerry, won the first four or five balls kicked in, tried and failed to shoot the lights out - “I was shooting on sight that day, I’m not sure why exactly” - but something clicked in his head.

O’Connor recalls: “I just became aware that even against some good defenders, and those Kerry defenders were good, I was able to win ball, that no matter how good the defence you’d always find ball if you kept moving, and just that it was up to me how far I could go with this, that there wasn’t anything too complicated about it. It was only then I probably started paying attention properly to training, to games, to what I was doing.” 

And still, banishing those doubts almost defined O’Connor’s time with Cork. He torched Meath for four points from play in an All-Ireland semi-final in ‘07 before a collapse to the old enemy in the final. When the same happened two years later it felt terminal.

“We had the chance against the team who’d beaten us in the final and we lost again, so we did begin to question ourselves then, wondering was it ever going to happen?” If 2009 took a few weeks to get over, 2010 brought its own script, that part of the movie where our hero hits rock bottom. Munster final down the Páirc, Cork a point up with time almost gone, a free out in the middle of the pitch. You can almost hear the horror music in the background.

O’Connor takes over. “I still blame Colm O’Neill for this,” he laughs, sort of.

“He made this run where his marker went completely the wrong way and he was through on goal but the ref stopped me when I went to kick it, to book someone I think. So I was there waiting for the run again and his man obviously copped it.

"The crowd started shouting and I got jumpy thinking the ref might give a hop ball so I ended up just trying to hoof it wide and miskicked it up the air to Mike Quirke. 

"They went and scored. It was absolutely the worst thing I could have done.” 

He says he can laugh now but the hurt stuck deep. O’Connor wouldn’t have been one for watching games back but he had a knack to be able to picture a game in his head afterwards so there was always an endless loop in his head, nights wondering why he didn’t do something else in his own kind of post-game analysis.

This time it lingered, knowing Cork had been one possession from beating Kerry in a Munster semi-final. If it felt for a while like he couldn’t go on, he went on. Sports psychologist Kevin Clancy’s group sessions helped.

The lack of any mention of it from the players or management helped and eventually he figured if everyone else was knuckling down then there was no point in feeling sorry for himself either. If anything it made more of a focus on the little details, that every free and kick mattered, and it wouldn’t be long to prove that point.

Dublin was redemption and if there is a moment in his career then it’s probably somewhere in the sheer bloody-minded conviction of those kicks in the last 10 minutes of that semi-final. He’s watching those frees now and you ask if he felt that pressure at the time and all he can recognise is routine and focus and practice all playing out.

“There’s a picture at home somewhere of me kicking a free against Dublin with the clock and scoreboard up behind me but honestly I don’t think I was even aware of the score at the time, it was just routine, take the free, move on, next ball. Like, there’s two Dublin defenders right next to me on that last one and I don’t remember that at all, I wouldn’t have been aware.

"It just came from every night after training, me and Daniel or whoever was taking frees, kicking 20 or 30 or however many frees over and over. Placing the ball, stepping back, locked into that same kicking zone over and over. Like if you do it so many times it just becomes natural and you’re confident because you’ve done it before, every single night at training.

"There’s no thought of not being able. Same with the penalty, again, taking 15 penalties every night at training on the goalkeepers. I’d have decided then the night before the game which corner I was hitting, no changing.” 

There were influences. He recalls Ronan O’Gara at training one night talking to the kickers about embracing the challenge, about earlier in his career when he’d dread his team getting a kick at goal and then becoming so confident that he actively wanted the team to get a penalty so he had that opportunity to let out all the hard work on the training pitch.

Ned English noticed he was completely changing his run-up in trying to force the longer frees (he admits he couldn’t find 55 metres naturally like Colm O’Neill or Goulding); hours and hours up in Kanturk and Kilbrin rectified that technique so he struck every free the same no matter the distance. 

Cork and Donncha O’Connor were different after those kicks against Dublin and even a nothing 20 minutes in the final against Down couldn’t really stop them. O’Connor stepped up after half-time that day with some huge scores again but he talks of the final as if it felt inevitable even then.

He says, “It’s hard to explain but I never felt that game was going away or that we wouldn’t have a spell where we could win it. I think the work Kevin was doing with us then we weren’t even aware of the score in games, it was just about playing and doing the right thing until the end.

"I suppose we were together so long that there was only one goal at that stage really, an All-Ireland. There was a huge desire to win that.” 

That win brought relief and verification and then, well, not entirely what O’Connor would have expected. Ask what went wrong since and the first thing he’ll say is he doesn’t have all the answers. 

Were Cork slow to move with the game tactically? Too easy to blame, he counters.

Take Donegal’s sweep of 2012 (possibly Cork’s strongest year of performances for three and a half out of four games) where there was some flak going about using Paddy Kelly as a wing-back; O’Connor points out the detail and idea were perfect, just that Cork completely forgot the execution throughout a panicked second half of bad decision-making on the ball.

It hasn’t felt to him like Cork were always as far off as people make out (he says he’d have loved a crack off the Dubs even this last few years, just to see where they were, but accepts now maybe he was getting carried away with that one); again he points out there’s no way he’d have hung around this past few seasons for the laugh if he didn’t think Cork could be competitive.

Still he can’t ignore problems when they keep repeating. He remembers Conor Counihan getting some grief for overfocusing on the league almost but felt it was a massive factor for their development, playing big league semi-finals and finals every year in Croke Park against the top teams and he can only see Cork building a run at the summer by getting a run going in the spring first.

He wonders a little about the mentality of the players coming in now in a few different ways. One, mental scars. He saw some of them particularly devastated after the Tyrone game.

“They were really questioning themselves, which is natural and hopefully a good sign as they’ll want to avoid that again. But it’s there now for whoever comes into that dressing-room next year, an awareness of those heavy defeats.” 

Two, that winning culture, the difference between a group that wants to play for Cork and that wants to win for Cork.

“It’s not that the players don’t care about Cork. But there’s a difference between just doing enough, like the minimum two nights a week training and doing everything it takes.

"Like, we had a meeting at one stage and somebody said, ‘We need to have a life as well’ and nobody wants to take that away but there are levels of what players are prepared to give to Cork football and Ronan probably needs to have a full group now of players who will give everything they can to win games for Cork again. There is that group there.” 

 And still he doesn’t want to come off all preachy and negative here or as writing off a bunch of players in that dressing-room that he knows work hard and are seriously talented; it’s just that frustration at the same problems not being fixed. He sees new managers and new strength and conditioning coaches come in with certain ideas and then it takes them a year to realise what needs to actually be done.

He sees a club structure that’s not really set up to produce driven players - teams going up senior and then just stagnating for years, clubs with lack of ambition beyond survival which can’t but transmit a sense of not needing to improve and he recalls tough games for Duhallow against the likes of Beara and Bantry and Muskerry when he started playing compared to some games now where clubs can win first round ties by 20 points.

Has anyone from the county board or anywhere in Cork ever asked his opinion? No.

And here’s the thing. He’s not entirely sure there’s that appetite there to make the changes necessary.

“I think it’s time now to take it seriously and that’s the main questions I’d ask really, if the county board or whoever can get the people together between some ex-players and coaches involved with clubs and intercounty and have a look at this properly.

"Like there was a county board meeting the week after the Tyrone game. But is this just going to be someone from a club standing up and saying it’s a disgrace and the board saying, oh we’re going to address it and then nothing? Even if Cork come back next year and say beat Kerry, there’s no point thinking everything’s suddenly ok.

"Kerry never really suffer a huge dip. I don’t think Dublin are going to. Do the people in Cork football and the board really care about doing something now this time?” 

The end played out up in Portlaoise a few weeks back, where instead of chasing a score or trying to win a game O’Connor found himself with time to reflect on his last moments in a Cork jersey amid the carnage of another wrecked season and he called it “strange, emotional actually” as a new feeling hit home: this was his last game with Cork football.

The feelings of the last 12 years came in bursts.

Regrets?

At a push, that period from 18- to 22-years-old where he didn’t quite get the application and drive needed to make it as a Cork footballer, though he reckons he always knew, even when going to Munster finals with his father and the rest of his family supporting Kerry, that he’d play for Cork.

Memories?

Beating Kerry was always special. Mainly the team, the craic, the journeys to Dublin and Fintan Goold’s quizzes, staying out in Malahide and coming down the Sunday morning of the game to listen to Dr Con’s stories. That bus journey back to Cork after beating the Dubs in 2010, the feeling of a job done and back in an All-Ireland final again.

“It wasn’t even noisy and most people weren’t saying anything hardly. We were all just sitting there, smiling. That’s the sort of thing that sticks with you.”