Cork footballers have had to set up their own makeshift gym to train in
Retired Cork footballer Paddy Kelly has revealed that the county's senior footballers have had to set up their own gym in Fermoy for training sessions.
Kelly was part of Peadar Healy's senior panel last season which often had to beg and scramble for a pitch to train on.
This year, the team have block-booked a field in Fermoy but with no available gym nearby for strength and conditioning work, the players have set up a makeshift gym in a warehouse in the area, moving in equipment themselves and painting the place.
Kelly admires his former teammates' initiative and ingenuity but says the setup is hardly ideal.
Speaking in a wide-ranging interview with Kieran Shannon in Saturday's Examiner Sport, in which he is critical of the Cork county board, Kelly says: “You think of the state-of-the-art facilities other counties have developed.
"I know Páirc Uí Chaoimh will be ready this summer and it will be fantastic, but still, it’s a main pitch and then an all-weather pitch. Derek Kavanagh wrote an excellent article last year in the Irish Examiner where you should really have eight to ten pitches together, with the county minors and development squads training alongside the senior team, creating a sense that ‘This is Cork.’
"Instead you now have a situation where the Cork senior footballers are tucked away in a warehouse in Fermoy.”
An All-Ireland winner in 2010, Kelly contrasts progress in Cork with the work done in recent years by current champions Dublin.
“You look at Dublin and all the sponsorship partners they’re able to attract. You look at Kerry and the fundraising efforts they’ve done, going abroad, getting people involved. You look at Club Tyrone. The Tipperary Supporters Club. All these external bodies who are supplementing the county effort. In Cork we don’t have that.”
