Kilkenny show difference between greatness and brilliance
He wasn’t exactly all Waterford and John Mullane and Eoin Kelly about it.
He wasn’t even Shane McGrath about it. But clearly one of the things he took from last year’s All-Ireland was that Tipperary had been dominant in virtually everything, including their body language, and taken great energy and pride in winning and making certain plays: a dirty ball here, a hook and a block there.
When Brian Gavin blew his whistle while Jackie Tyrrell was emerging with a ball down by the old Canal End having shipped a couple of hefty challenges, Tyrrell greeted it by also giving the lion’s roar, leaping into the air.
As it turned out, Gavin had awarded a free against rather than for Tyrrell but it was a telling moment nonetheless. Whenever Kilkenny felt they had made a statement, they were determined to let those Tipp upstarts know they’d made a statement and that culminated in making the biggest statement of all — that they are the best. Ever. Tipperary might be brilliant but there’s a difference between brilliance and greatness and on Sunday Kilkenny illustrated the distinction.
This column tipped Kilkenny to win the All-Ireland from the outset of the championship, mostly on some advantages they had over Tipperary.
One, no team with such a core of young players becomes great this soon — and make no doubt about it, beating this Kilkenny team in back-to-back All-Irelands would have constituted greatness.
Kerry might have come along in 1975 but then had to endure the hurt of ‘76 and ‘77. Mickey Harte’s Tyrone tyros lost in 2004either side of winning All-Irelands. Even after 1999, Cork had to wait until the middle of the noughties rather than the start of it to become a real championship team. The origins of this great Kilkenny team was rooted in the humble lessons of 2001. It is a measure of this Tipp team that they even got back to the final and that they had enough grit and composure to extend the contest into injury-time, but they do not yet have the sense of mastery that all great teams do.
That is perhaps as much due to their management not being duly seasoned enough as much as their players. At the outset of the championship this column argued that for all the huge weighting that player talent carries, the edge is leadership; it is what makes some teams fight above their weight and others well below it.
The season transpired pretty much along those lines. Sparrow, Colm Bonnar and Denis Walsh couldn’t get the best out of their teams. Anthony Daly and Donal O’Grady could. Declan Ryan and Tommy Dunne did a manful and respectable job, consolidating Tipp’s status as a top-two team, but the reality is Tipp went from having a magical setup last year to merely a very good one this year.
There’s no shame in that. Liam Sheedy wasn’t available this year. Neither was Nicky English. Even those two, for all their great work in their first year when they each won a league, have admitted they were still a bit naïve back then. Ryan will now have a better understanding of what’s involved. A rookie won’t be put on Henry Shefflin. He’ll rotate his forwards around like Jack O’Connor does until he creates the right mismatch: a Declan O’Sullivan at full-forward, or keep Tommy Walsh pinned in at full-back.
Kilkenny have the master. Just as Henry equals Ring, Cody has now equalled Micko. Incredible.
The only thing is he should have a bit more competition next year. It’s overplayed, this idea Kilkenny are going to fade away over the next year or two — you can already see next September’s papers and Cha Fitzpatrick talking about how being marginalised in 2011 was the making of his 2012 — and Tipp are going nowhere. Yet we can see someone else next year coming along to trip up one of that pair, if hardly both of them.
Waterford will be fresh and up for the fight if they and Davy each have the sense to say thank you and goodbye. Galway will be replenished by a wave of new young players. Four of the proposed Cork management team were in Croke Park on Sunday as members of the honoured 1986 jubilee team and would have left the ground feeling they can produce a team that could at least be competitive in Croke Park in the next year or two. Would Gearoid Ryan walk onto the Cork team? Bonner Maher? In the likes of Conor Lehane and Aidan Walsh, Cork have men of the boldness and the stuff of Padraic Maher.
But as even he realised on Sunday, it’s another thing again to go on to be the stuff of a JJ or a Henry.
* Contact: kieranshannon@eircom.net
