Cody’s diehards come up trumps
Easily explained. They were the aftershock of the minor quake that hit the sports desks of the various national newspapers when the Kilkenny team was announced.
A man who never gambles had gone to Vegas and put his house on black. Or, at any rate, had gone to Nowlan Park and put his house on two U21s in black and amber. Hold the back page! Hold the front page if that’s possible too! Brian Cody making two changes for the replay? This was news, news for all manner of reasons. And that was even before the James Skehill episode went public.
First and foremost it was a handsome compliment to Anthony Cunningham, an acknowledgement of the extent to which he had been setting the terms of engagement. After so many years in which everyone else played by Kilkenny’s rules, the Leinster final and drawn All-Ireland showdown took place according to Galway’s dictates. How strange a sensation that must have been for Cody.
But there was more to it. Cillian Buckley and Walter Walsh for Colin Fennelly and Aidan Fogarty was a tacit acceptance that Kilkenny were no closer to cracking the puzzle devised by Cunningham, a subtle indication that the personnel and formation that had brought the defending champions back into the argument in the second half on September 9 were deemed insufficient for the purposes of finishing the job the next day.
Hence the decision to spring one young man barely out of his teens and another young man — this one from a junior club — without a single minute of championship action to his name.
Very, very un-Codyesque. A small step for most managers. A giant leap for a man who picks his XV on what he sees in training and once the game starts leaves it up to them, a man who has in the past been accused, when Plan A isn’t working, of reaching for Plan A.
But this, for once, was the Lesser Spotted Flexible Cody. Plan A was patently misfiring, so he’d felt compelled to come up with a Plan B.
If nothing else, Kilkenny would at least have two decent subs to bring on, a pair who’d made their mark in the championship before. Better to start and fail with Walsh and Buckley than bring them in and, if it came to it, have to take them off again.
Cody was gambling, yes, but gambling with small stakes. In fact, scratch “gambling” altogether; this was a judicious investment with a limited downside. And lo, how it paid off.
It had already paid off by half-time. Walsh not only had two points to his name at that stage but had also — shades of the attention Kilkenny accorded Seamus Hickey in the 2007 final — paid his way by helping disarm one of Galway’s most potent and stirring weapons: Johnny Coen’s sallies out of defence. Job done. The point and goal he added in the second half constituted the sprinkles on the icing.
Buckley’s was a more low-key presence, largely because the play bypassed him for the first half. Twelve minutes after the restart, however, he had the confidence to let fly from midfield and found the range. His point put Kilkenny four up. Moments later Cyril Donnellan was off and Galway were sending up the distress flares.
Statistics cannot tell the story of a game, merely illustrate it. But ponder for a moment these three stats and the wealth of meaning behind them.
First, Richie Hogan’s point in the 26th minute. It was the closing score in that withering burst of Frankel proportions which yielded an unanswered 1-6 over eight minutes and it meant all six Kilkenny forwards had now scored. Implication: these boys were, for the first time against Galway this summer, on their game.
Second, Michael Fennelly’s point in the 50th minute to bring the winners’ tally to 1-16, the equivalent of their 0-19 three weeks earlier. And there were still 20 minutes to go. Implication: same as above, on top of which they were clearly not about to draw stumps any time soon.
Finally, Joe Canning’s two points in injury time. They were, believe it or not, the first points from play by a Galway forward all afternoon. Implication...
Well, several implications, actually, the most obvious being the total and utter collapse of the challengers’ attack. (And we’d thought it was bad that four of their forwards failed to score in the drawn game.) Still, pointing fingers is a futile exercise in the circumstances and an irrelevant one. Galway’s problem here was not so much that their forwards weren’t at the races but that the match was simply a bridge too far for them.
(As an aside, this has been the worst championship for forwards for many a year. Fancy selecting the six All Star forwards? Knock yourself out. Take the morning. You’ll need it.)
As we said here on Saturday, hurling is a numbers game, and all the more so when those fellas in stripes are involved. Three meetings in the same championship against Anthony Cunningham’s men? Be logical. The guys who’d won five of the past six titles were bound to get it right sooner rather than later. End of.
The law of averages. The law of diminishing returns. Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters and eventually they’ll produce the works of Cecelia Ahern. Give Henry Shefflin, Tommy Walsh, JJ Delaney and Cody’s other beasts enough cracks at any opponent and eventually they’ll find a way.
None of which detracts from Galway’s achievements these past four months. They’ve been the glorious surprise of a competition that looked beforehand like it might die of predictability, the team of the summer under the guidance of the manager of the championship. The uncertainty over their goalkeeper can’t have helped their state of mind in the 36 hours leading up to throw-in, moreover, although it has to be said that on the day David Herity looked no surer of himself than Skehill did.
But now the real work must begin.
Reissue, repackage, re-evaluate, refine. Scour the county for candidates to do some of Canning’s navvying for him. Decide once and for all where the Portumna man is best deployed. (Clue: catching puckouts at midfield is not that place.) Cunningham’s Galway were the Donegal 2011 of the hurling summer. It’ll be fascinating watching to see if they can become the Donegal 2012 of next summer.
Would they have been better off had Barry Kelly not awarded Davy Glennon the match-saving free last month and thus ended the year gallant losers? The topic will make for interesting existential discussion come the long winter evenings.
Thankfully yesterday’s outcome, and its margin, has spared us one pain in the neck. The debate over whether Henry Shefflin should or shouldn’t have gone for goal from the penalty last time around is now dead, deceased, an ex-debate. That great argument, so beloved of the old-timers, from the 1954 All-Ireland final — would Wexford have beaten Cork had Bobby Rackard not been forced to go full-back after Nick O’Donnell had departed injured? – remains a topic by itself. Phew.
And so the first of the levelling-off championships ends with eminently predictable champions. Yet this, hearteningly, was no triumphal procession, and the fact that Kilkenny reached El Dorado by circuitous routes rather than straight down the blacktop made it a more satisfying, more meaningful title for them.
Along the way they looked uncharacteristically human. The drubbing in the Leinster final, the rocky first half versus Limerick, the even rockier first half on September 9, the very notion that Cody felt forced to roll the dice on Friday night. It was different, it was refreshing and it was genuinely interesting.
He got there in the end, of course. The man usually does.
