In the previous four seasons, between 2012 and 2015, Cork got to a final each year, in the league or championship, and memorably came within a point of winning the All-Ireland in 2013. They also won the Munster title in 2014.

“If you take away last year, which is admittedly a hard thing to do because we weren’t impressive, I think before that we were seriously competitive,” said the former All-Star.

“We got to a few Munster finals, an All-Ireland final, league finals, and they’re not easy to get to.

“Last year was disappointing, no question. Starting off this year, you try and forget about it really and just try to improve ourselves.

“If we listen to everyone else, we’ll only stay down.”

It’s not the first time that Horgan has pointed to an apparent overreaction to Cork’s results in 2016 though he shrugged when asked why the criticism is so severe.

“I’m not sure. I think that we were probably at a high level and, for a team to fall off that level any bit, it’s maybe easier to see. I’m not sure, but we’ll try and put it right in the next couple of months.

“We just want to get consistency in our game. Last year, we played Dublin in the championship and were really good. In the next game (against Wexford), we were really bad. We need to find a level that we’re always at.”

Cork have started 2017 with gusto, winning all three of their Co-Op Superstores.ie Munster Hurling League games to lead the table.

They scored 7-22 in a drubbing of Limerick and on Wednesday evening they disposed of Waterford — albeit an experimental Déise line-up — with Horgan nailing 0-13.

However, the Glen Rovers man denied that the criticism of their 2016 season has been used to motivate the group or will feature in their team-talks this year.

“Will we use it? Nah, there’s no-one really cares about what anyone else says outside our dressing-room because if you listened to it your head would be fried.”

Kieran Kingston has used January so far to assess his options with Horgan notably flanked in the full-forward line by Michael Cahalane and Robbie O’Flynn against Waterford.

“There’s a few fellas in their first year on the panel,” said Horgan.

“The slate was cleaned from last year. There was no-one entitled to be on the panel this year. The management put 35 together. It’s our panel now and everyone deserves to be there. They’re the best 35 in Cork.

“What we’ll be working on is improving every time we go training. Don’t leave the training session unless you’re a better player. If you don’t do that, and if you don’t take that approach, you’ll only lose ground to the other teams.”

Horgan suggested that Cork were unfortunate at times last year.

“Against Kilkenny in the league we were playing them off the field, they are a serious team and we know that we played them off the field for how long, 50, 60 minutes?” he said.

“The last 10 minutes we dropped off and they came back and snuck it.

“It’s so competitive you actually can lose every game in the league because teams are that good. That could happen to anyone this year.

“The one thing we showed last year was when our backs were to the wall, when we had to go to Galway for a relegation (play-off) and they had beaten us by 13 points the last time we were up there, we ground out a win that was huge for this year and gave us seriously competitive league games again.”