Cody would push envelope

Wednesday evening brought the go-ahead to root out our heavy jumpers from the back of the press. The first reliable portent of encroaching winter; Manchester. Champions League. A laboured home draw. Something fundamentally wrong. Dunphy.

Only this year, the long-running pantomime offered a twist. City.

Javi Garcia earned special mention as the ‘big donkey in midfield’ and the conclusion was eventually reached that the English champions are not a team and that Roberto Mancini is a bad coach who cannot manage people.

It’s at this sort of juncture that Eamo ordinarily sets the bar by rolling out his Litany of Saints — John Oxx, Aidan O’Brien, Brian O’Driscoll and the rest — but on this night, just one name fitted the bill.

“Man City need Brian Cody.”

And with that, perhaps the year’s most intriguing mental image formed in many minds; Cody dealing with Balotelli.

Picture Mario sauntering up to Nowlan Park in his first year out of minor, already a young lad with a reputation around the town, with whispers he’d gone off the rails altogether since the club lost the county semi-final. And did you hear the one about the bangers he let off in Langtons?

By the dawn of spring, Mario would either be long gone or be breaking his back foraging for ball out around wing-forward, not a peep out of him. And when his natural exuberance did, inevitably, present itself, after he embroidered a selfless shift with 1-2 from play, it would only be to lift the black and amber, unveiling a T-shirt emblazoned with the legend; “Ah sure I got the few breaks, thank God.”

A slip, all the same, that would ensure he’d not return to the panel until he was 23.

What else would Cody do for City, if he could, as they appear to be labouring with a task that has proved beyond every Premier League champion besides United and Jose Mourinho; retaining, repeating, maintaining momentum through the inevitable drag of satisfaction?

His greatest gift, you suspect, would be that unfailing ability to live in the now. While many recall that famous 2009 All-Ireland final interview for the flooring of Marty, Cody’s first words that afternoon were ones to live and hurl by.

“It’s not four-in-row, right now. It’s just the game. We’ve won the game.”

A mantra he trots out so often it grows beyond cliché into a belief system.

All of us are perhaps too keen to lace Kilkenny’s successes into sequences of twos and fours and nines, in the process rather demeaning every fresh puzzle solved by Cody’s men of the moment.

It wasn’t Andy Comerford or DJ Carey wearing down Galway’s proud resistance last Sunday, or even Martin Comerford and Eddie Brennan providing the cold twist of the knife once blood was scented.

Sure, there have been constants, magnificent ones like Shefflin. But every new day has demanded everyone involved leave yesterday long behind.

It is, you can’t help think, no coincidence that Kilkenny unravelled most notably the one year the media got hold of an epithet to hang round their necks, tethering them to the past. The Drive For Five. That year they fielded injured men and maybe leaned a little on the crutch of history. It’s not a mistake they have made since.

On a practical level, Cody would probably have ensured City improved rather than simply fattened their squad this summer. Will people like Rodwell, Sinclair and even Maicon convince last year’s heroes they must reach new levels or simply provide them with stand-ins for the softer days?

It’s a route Blackburn and Arsenal have travelled in the past. In ’95, Rovers not only lost their manager, but augmented champions with squad-fillers like Matt Holmes and Billy McKinlay.

Arsenal added only Nelson Vivas and the unheralded Freddie Ljungberg in ’98, just Pascal Cygan and Gilberto Silva in 2002 and bolstered the invincible ’04 collective with Mathieu Flamini. Creatures of comfort.

Mourinho, in contrast, lifted his winners back onto their toes by adding Essien and Crespo.

That was sometimes Ferguson’s way too. Other times he banished yesterday with mind games.

“I’ve got a number of names in this envelope and these names will let us down if we allow them to think we will do it again just because we have done it once.”

If you were in Cody’s envelope, chances are you were already yesterday’s man.