Niall O'Leary: Cork keen to make home comforts count early on in Munster championship

Niall O'Leary believes Cork have to dig out results in their opening two Munster Hurling Championship matches at Páirc Uí Chaoimh to put themselves in position to progress.

The Rebels lost their first two games last year before rescuing their campaign with victories away to Waterford and Tipperary.

This year, those two counties will travel to Leeside in the space of six days, starting with Davy Fitzgerald’s Waterford on Sunday (4pm).

"It will be important to get a result in both of them," says the Castlelyons corner-back, who will captain the team in the absence of Seán O’Donoghue.

"It's a Munster championship, now that you can't be chasing. You need to get a result early on to do well in it."

With Cork the last team to enter the championship cauldron, league form is all we have to judge on.

They showed encouraging steel with experimental line-ups to grind out a series of stoppage-time results but limped out against Kilkenny at the semi-final stage.

"I don't think we started as well as we should have. We just didn't play up to standard. We were a bit flat. That was about it," says O’Leary.

Not that they’ve let the five-week break affect their preparations: "We've been playing a lot of in-house games and they've been every bit as tough as any of the league games we've played. We're lucky enough that they're so competitive."

That sense of places not being guaranteed to anyone comes from the influx of talent from Pat Ryan’s All-Ireland under-20 winning teams of 2020 and ’21.

"There definitely is a big step-up from underage level to playing senior for Cork. Now, to be honest, this bunch of young players who came in have really taken to it a lot faster than previous ages. They've done very well," says O’Leary, now in his fifth year on