Former Cork star Joe Kavanagh believes a stint in the Tailteann Cup for Keith Ricken’s side “wouldn’t do them any harm”.
Winless after four League games, Cork currently occupy the relegation places in Division Two along with Down and should they make the drop they face the prospect of playing in the second tier competition this summer.
The only way they could avoid it, if relegated, would be to beat Kerry in the Munster semi-final, which would earn them a spot in the qualifiers at the very least, but that appears an unlikely prospect against opposition that had 22 points to spare on them last year.
Following last Saturday’s eight-point defeat at home to Galway, Cork travel to face Meath in Navan on Sunday week before rounding out the campaign with a home tie against Down and a trip to Offaly. Crucially, each of those opponents are very much relegation candidates too.
Kavanagh said: “We all want to be in the All-Ireland but we’re not going to win that anyhow.
“You still don’t want to go down to Division Three. We went down a couple of years ago, we bounced back up but you want to be doing what Armagh have done, what Derry are doing.
“You need a couple of years of regrouping and you want to do it definitely in Division Two against better opposition and then, like those guys, try and get out of Division Two into Division One and start mixing it. It’s going to take a number of years.
“Do we need to go down to the Tailteann and play in it and win it? It wouldn’t do them any harm, this bunch of guys. Long-term, if you look at the bigger picture, that wouldn’t be the end of the world.”
Before a ball was kicked, Kavanagh was hopeful that Cork would contend for promotion to the top flight along with Roscommon and Galway.
“You would have been looking at those three, two out of that three. We’ll fend off Clare, they’re coming but we’ll fend them off, Derry are only coming up through the ranks, we should be better than them, it didn’t turn out that way obviously.
“We were terrible against Derry, we were lucky to get a draw against Clare but then the first half of the Galway game looked very positive, to be fair to them. They looked very good but then the second half they were just brushed aside.
“It’s the conditioning of the teams that are on the road a number of years. These guys, some of them are first-time tasting senior football and a lot of them are just out of the under-20 grade which is worlds apart so it’s going to take a number of years no matter what way we look at it.
“Would it be the world’s worst if we were in the Tailteann Cup? Possibly not.”
Kavanagh is confident that Cork will avoid relegation but added: “They have the potential to win those three games but, the way Cork are slipping, they have the potential to lose the three of them as well.
“It’s a learning curve for them but you have to learn at some stage too. You have to stop throwing that out, ‘It’s a learning curve, they’ll be the better for it’.
“They’d want to hurry up and be the better for it, that’s the consensus down here now.”
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