The story of Patrick Horgan is inseparable from the story of Domhnall O’Donovan. One man who finished his career as the top scorer in the history of the All-Ireland senior hurling championship was denied an All-Ireland medal by the only point another man ever scored in that same championship.
When Clare beat Laois in the qualifiers in 2013, O’Donovan was the only Clare outfield player not to score from play. He played for six seasons and scored precisely one point. As Horgan departs stage left, after 18 glittering seasons with the Cork hurlers, some questions might remain. If he was so great, why does he retire without an All-Ireland medal? The true greats stand up when the need is greatest – if he doesn’t have a Celtic Cross, surely it stands to reason Horgan didn’t do it when it mattered?
Only, of course, Horgan did. Forty-five seconds into the two minutes of injury-time allotted at the end of the 2013 All-Ireland final, Horgan hit a wondrous point on the turn to put his team ahead by one. With the clock running down, Cork got the ball to their shooter and he did what he had to do. That Clare then got the ball to pretty much the last man they wanted to give it to, a player who scored the equaliser regardless, is hardly a knock on Horgan. But there it is.
That is the blatant unfairness of All-Ireland medals as a metric for greatness in a nutshell. Horgan did his job. But he wasn’t out there alone.
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This isn’t basketball, where a great player makes up 20 per cent of your team and can be expected to carry journeymen to championships. He’s not Harry Kane or Matt Le Tissier – you can’t slate Horgan for not taking his talents to another dressingroom where his ambitions might be met and his skills challenged.
The man is a Glen Rovers clubman and a Cork hurler, which hardly qualifies as a tragedy of geography. And yet his 18 years in red coincided with their longest winless streak in the history of the All-Ireland championship. You could hardly blame him for all that. But it’ll be there, knocking around in the background as his legacy is formed in pubs and GAA clubs around the country over the winter. He didn’t win the big one.
What weight should we put on that?
If John Mullane had been born 10 miles further north, he’d probably have eight All-Ireland medals (although that scenario would have necessitated John staying on Brian Cody’s good side). Instead he played for Waterford, won five All Stars, and retired with no All-Ireland title.
Mullane played with some of the best hurlers of all time ... just not enough of them. Joe Canning won his All-Ireland in 2017, but even he wrestled before and after that year with the idea that the medal would fulfil him, or move him to a different stratosphere in people’s minds.
It might be different for the likes of Mullane and Canning. They play for counties that are not expected to win All-Irelands. Waterford and Galway have seven All-Irelands between them in nearly 140 years. That’s one fewer than Eoin Larkin won.
They came from counties that were well used to watching brilliant hurlers play in teams that weren’t quite up to their standard. How those players were viewed had to be more balanced than the simple binary of the years they won an All-Ireland and the years they didn’t. People from counties such as Wexford, Waterford and Galway have to take things more in the round than others, because that’s just what history has taught them.
It is a different story in counties such as Cork and Kerry. David Clifford had his All-Ireland from 2022, but going into this year’s final that rather bare larder was just one of many external pressures bearing down on him. Maybe, in a perverse way, Clifford’s example is instructive for Horgan.
If O’Donovan had decided to glance at his prior record of championship scoring before attempting that shot, and Clare hadn’t equalised in 2013, and Cork had won that All-Ireland after all, Horgan’s sole medal would still probably be held against him.
“Sure doesn’t Ring have eight? JBM has five ... Cummins and Cashman and Heffernan have four. Are you telling me a man with one All-Ireland in two decades is better than all them?”
The likelihood of daft sentiments like that being expressed should, in a weird way, give Horgan some comfort.
It hardly needs to be stated that the fact Mullane wasn’t playing with Larkin, Eddie Brennan, Henry Shefflin and Richie Power enhances his reputation. It doesn’t diminish it. You win multiple All-Irelands because you’re a great player, but also because you’re surrounded by other great players.
[ Denis Walsh: Patrick Horgan leaves a gaping hole that Cork will struggle to fillOpens in new window ]
I would have Canning and Reid and Shefflin ahead of Horgan as a player, but this absence at his career’s heart is not part of my thinking. In the last 100 seconds of the 2013 All-Ireland final, and in the last two decades, Horgan was not out there by himself. He was one of 15. Numbers don’t tell the full story, but they can speak loudly enough all the same. Zero All-Irelands. Ninety championship appearances. Thirty-two goals. 683 points. 8.65 points per game. Number one all-time.
