Brian Cody dismisses talk of any replay advantage

Brian Cody doesn’t believe Kilkenny hold the upperhand heading into next Saturday’s replay given yesterday’s result was achieved despite spending the majority of the 70 minutes on the back foot.

Kilkenny led only once in this semi-final contest – that after 12 minutes when Colin Fennelly pointed to move the Cats 0-5 to 0-4 ahead. It was a lead that lasted less than a minute, with Kilkenny forced to chase the game thereafter. Waterford were five clear after 54 minutes and held a three-point advantage when Walsh buried to the net two minutes from time.

Even subsequently, Conor Fogarty was required to step up to the plate to preserve their championship involvement almost four minutes into injury-time.

Surely, it is opportunity saved for Kilkenny, opportunity lost for Waterford?

“I don’t look at it that way at all. For the next day’s game, today will have no bearing on it. Who knows what’s going to happen the next day? Who plays, who doesn’t play? All the things that can happen in between, how fellas recover.

“It’s a short recovery time and how the bodies are and everything else will matter, but there certainly won’t be any excuses.

“Waterford will not be happy because they didn’t win the game, no more than we’re not happy because we didn’t win it. So both teams are going away disappointed that they didn’t win. The majority of people will suggest that they had victory in their sights more than we had, which is fair comment, they had. But that doesn’t matter really now.

“I’m sure they’ll be looking at being better the next day so we’ll wait and see because not only are they a very good team, but they have huge potential to go on because even age-wise they’re very good.” Cody, not surprisingly given the collective flatness of his team, reckons there are several areas where improvement can be made.

“There is an overall improvement in the team [to be made]. What you look for at the end of the day is what you always look for — a genuineness, a workrate and a keep-it-going-until-the-very-end attitude. That can’t be faulted because Waterford were simply flying and were picking off terrific scores. You could buckle, but it is a great sign of the lads that didn’t happen. We just drove it forward and we live to fight another day.”

Encouraging too is Kilkenny’s record in replays under Cody. Played five, won four.

“I don’t think that is going to be factored into the equation this time because what happened in previous years goes out the window. “Look, if Waterford had to prove anything to anybody before today, they certainly don’t have to be proving to anyone after today. They didn’t have to prove anything to me.Today merely embellished that further.”

Where does he feel they have improved since their last championship meeting 12 months ago?

“A lot of them are young and you get natural improvement with a lot of experience and they have got more experience, obviously. Their enthusiasm and their effort to just constantly go and support each other was top class. Again, that wasn’t a surprise.”

The Kilkenny boss cited Walter Walsh’s goal and Conor Fogarty’s injury-time levelling point as the key scores. Important too was the Hawkeye decision to rule wide a Kevin Moran point late on which the umpire initially flagged over.

On the latter, he commented: “We don’t have any shares in it, that’s for sure. They tell me it is fool proof, I don’t know. He’s doing ok.” He continued: “We were chasing the game and never really got ahead. The first time we weren’t behind was at the final whistle. It took a huge effort to stay in touch, to fight it out and to grind it out.

“As the game went on, it was apparent that we needed a goal to really strike a bit of a blow because whenever we got within a point or two, they picked off some terrific long-range points. That gave them that breathing space, but we did get the goal, a really good goal. They responded with a point and we got a point then to level it. We almost had another point to win the game.

“Conor showed great responsibility [to level it]. He has been doing that for a long, long time. It was an excellent score. A wide at that stage would have been very, very serious. You have to have the courage of your convictions to stand up and take that chance. He did and fair play to him.”