Enda McEvoy: A front row seat to Kilkenny's past, present and future

Glory days: Kilkenny's Henry Shefflin, left, celebrates with manager Brian Cody after the game. GAA Hurling All Ireland Senior Championship Final Replay, Kilkenny v Tipperary. Croke Park, Dublin. Picture credit: David Maher / SPORTSFILE

The first time the officers of the Kilkenny county board began to view Henry Shefflin as management material was in the immediate aftermath of the drawn 2012 All-Ireland final. This is not as strange as it may sound.

After all, they’d been observing him in stripes for 13 years at that stage. Why worry about the dim and distant future, and a putative second life on the other side of the whitewash, when the present shimmered with days of silver and gold? A cat in the hand and all of that.

But then Galway led the champions a dance for the first half of the 2012 showpiece and led by five points at the break, a healthy advantage in a low-scoring affair. From centre-forward the Ballyhale man brought Kilkenny back into it through sheer force of personality. Cajoling, leading by example, bending the proceedings to his command, dragging his teammates with him on an afternoon when the music wasn’t flowing. “An immense performance by Henry Shefflin during the second half,” Ger Canning declared on the RTÉ commentary.

Three minutes from time with the sides level Eoin Larkin won a penalty. Shefflin, who three years earlier had turned an All-Ireland final with another penalty, looked to the sideline for guidance. His manager gave him none, Brian Cody freely admitting afterwards that he wasn’t going to tell Shefflin what to do.

In the event Shefflin did the right thing. Of course he did. Where a lesser player might have tried to make a name for himself by going for goal he stuck the ball over the bar and put the pressure on Galway to equalise at the death.

They did. How piquant that Shefflin’s most celebrated display in the stripes did not result in a victory.

But it gave the Kilkenny county board executive food for cogitation and in the replay Galway were disposed of without fuss and a few days after that, when the hubbub had died down, the winners’ management team dined in the Royal Spice restaurant in Patrick Street. The one player with them was Shefflin. “He’s the on-field manager in everything but name,” one fellow diner observed.

Here’s another one from around the same time, a conversation in the media room in Croke Park the day of some Leinster championship match and the eternal question – even then it appeared like we’d been discussing it for years – arising as to how long more Cody would stick at it.

“He’ll stay until Henry retires,” one of the Kilkenny local radio lads mused. “After which Henry will come back as manager.” Well, it seemed a perfectly reasonable hypothesis at the time… The two men meet again on Sunday. Just the 20 All-Ireland medals between them as a manager/player combination, with an extra, post-Shefflin memento for Cody in 2015.

The sanctity of the dressing room being what it is, one can only guess at Cody’s innermost thoughts on certain of his players. Yet some reasonable surmises can be drawn.

His fellow James Stephens man Eoin Larkin was one of his pets, at least according to Tommy Walsh as cited in Larkin’s autobiography. Walsh himself Cody would have adored but kept a hawk’s eye on to ensure the pot never bubbled over. The likes of Brian Hogan and Derek Lyng, ambitious white-collar types off the field but with a blue-collar mentality on it, he’d have admired and been grateful for as great triers and setters of standards. Richie Power would have irritated him: blinding skill not complemented by commensurate effort. With TJ Reid he wondered if the penny would ever drop.

With Shefflin there could never have been anything other than full confidence and absolute faith. His Don John of Austria, his Neil Armstrong, his commander in the trenches, his on-field avatar, his freetaker from the age of 20.

Even in the closing stages of the 2008 All-Ireland final, as more than one Waterford player has testified, he was still wiring in, contesting and arguing over every ball long after what started as a contest had become a rout. It was Shefflin at his most infuriatingly competitive. Regardless of the digits on the scoreboard the next ball was the only ball that mattered. Cody’s man.

The championship debut of the one as manager coincided with the championship debut of the other as player. For every match from the 1999 Leinster semi-final against Laois to the 2012 All Ireland replay against Galway they were twin cities, Romulus and Remus, Cologne cathedral with its double spire.

Through victory and occasional defeats. Through three Hurler of the Year awards and 11 All Stars, eight of them in succession. Through temporary form loss (yes – 2005) and two cruciate injuries. Through marriage and babies. Through 62 consecutive championship appearances in which Shefflin racked up 27 goals and 480 points.

(Stat heads may be interested to know that when the run came to an end after Shefflin missed the 2013 provincial quarter-final against Offaly he would make only nine further appearances, eight of them off the bench, adding 0-4 to his tally.) It was a pairing made in paradise. Both of them modest, both of them simultaneously possessed of a healthy ego they took good care to conceal, both of them obsessed with winning. Shefflin went to Galway for one reason and one reason only. To win an All-Ireland. Failure to do so will be precisely that. A failure.

As further proof of his exalted status he was one of very few Cody players, even among the made men, who got to leave on his terms. As JJ Delaney also did. As DJ Carey and Tommy Walsh and Jackie Tyrrell and a dozen others didn’t.

Cody’s beloved son, with whom he was endlessly pleased, and his obvious, his inarguable, his inevitable successor. But not necessarily his immediate successor.

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WHEN Galway’s coup was announced last October some presenter on some radio show wondered “what tactics” the new appointee would employ. It was a question as predictable as it was idle, leaving aside the fact that GAA folk talk about tactics when they usually mean strategy.

Unless his name is Davy Fitz, someone who’d developed all sorts of tactical wheezes amid the smoke and fumes of the Fitzgibbon Cup laboratory, a manager adapts his strategy to his players rather than the other way around. Derek McGrath may be hailed as one of the high priests of the seven-man defence but he didn’t come into the Waterford job preaching any such gospel. It was only when they began leaking goals in the 2014 National League that he took drastic action, installed additional mobile fortifications and in due course succeeded in turning necessity into a virtue.

Shefflin has always existed on a diet of commonsense hurling, heavy on protein and carbs, devoid of tactical legerdemain and rococo flourishes. His Galway will be everything you expect them to be, with nothing hidden under the bonnet. They’ll work hard and they’ll get their hands dirty and they won’t try to be too sophisticated, not least because their manager does not preen himself as a visionary. Neither did his former manager, hence (in part) his longevity.

The exaltation of the time-honoured Codyesque virtues – honesty of effort, resilience, spirit – can be taken as read. Shefflin is aware of the value of a solid backroom team; Noreen Roche was Kilkenny nutritionist when he started and is still there.

He’ll differ in one regard in that he’s bound to be more conscious of the pastoral care aspect of things. Shefflin’s 15 years in an intercounty dressing room doubled as a degree course in psychology; he’s seen enough to know when to deploy the stick, when to offer a carrot and when to throw an arm around a shoulder.

His two national triumphs as Ballyhale manager might be dismissed on the kneejerk basis that “anyone could have won All Irelands with those lads” but shouldn’t be. Anyone could have failed to win All Irelands with those lads too. Try instead to imagine the instant reassurance his presence provided. With this man over us how can we possibly fail? And Richie O’Neill, his number two, was highly respected in Ballyhale – the most discerning of audiences - for the rigour and clarity of his coaching.

The ball has already taken one kind bounce for him with Joe Canning’s retirement. The presence of a fading Canning around the place would have constituted a nuisance. One parable to emerge from the Kilkenny dressing room of the noughties was that – as per a maxim of Alex Ferguson, in his turn an unavoidable exemplar for Cody – the manager has to be the most important person in the set-up. For all his hyperstar status Shefflin never assumed he was the main man, and if he had he’d have been summarily disabused of his error. Uno duce, una voce. It is no leap to view next Sunday as a dry run for the Leinster final. In the event of a Galway defeat the blowback for Shefflin will be negligible. In the event of a Kilkenny defeat the blowback for Cody will not be negligible but it will be temporary. By 9pm on June 4th we’ll know a good deal more about Shefflin the manager.

Even then myriad questions will hang in the ether.

How long will it take him to return? Will Cody stay on as president for life, reappointing himself annually after a conversation with the mirror, or will the county board eventually summon up the nerve to defenestrate him should the restlessness of the natives grow too loud to ignore? Might Shefflin get tired waiting? Could winning an All-Ireland with Galway damage him back home? Could failing to win an All-Ireland with Galway damage him back home?

And the most important issue of all: how good, bad or downright mediocre will Kilkenny be when Shefflin does take over? Even a man with 10 Celtic crosses can only be as good as the tools at his disposal.

He’s playing senior hurling now. Again.