ENDA MCEVOY: Tribe have knack of hurting Cats
Irrelevant in the long run, of course, because the house that Cody built won out in the end, as it usually does. But the emblem of the day that mighty fortress was shaken to its foundations nonetheless.
Two minutes into the Leinster final at Croke Park last July and Damien Hayes, foraging behind his own lines, lays off a ball to Iarla Tannian. What Tannian does is instructive. There is no attempt to put sliotar on stick, bring the ball into contact or take on Kilkenny physically. Instead, from inside his own 65, Tannian hits a left-handed delivery that goes high and....comes steepling down on the All-Ireland champions’ 14-metre line.
Which, we suddenly see with a gasp, is inhabited by only two players. The other Galway forwards have made themselves scarce and taken their markers with them, wasp-striped defenders away from the honeypot, thereby creating a one-on-one between Joe Canning and Jackie Tyrrell. Canning outfields Tyrrell, lands, turns and rips one past David Herity.
It is the first fissure in the fortress wall. By half time Galway lead by 14 points. By full-time all sorts of records have been shattered and one of the fortress towers has collapsed.
And yes, come the last day of September the tower has been rebuilt, the fortress stands strong again and the championship pennant once more flies from the battlements.
But here’s the thing. That goal of Joe Canning’s was not a one-off, a fleeting wonder, but rather a taste of things to come.
It’s what Galway have been doing again and again to Kilkenny this past year. Making them look vulnerable in the one area they never look vulnerable: under the dropping ball.
Not since the summer of 1940 over south-east England has the assumption of one side’s aerial supremacy been so comprehensively demolished.
Two goals in the Leinster final. Another two in the drawn All-Ireland decider. Three in the replay. Another three when the sides met in the opening round of the league at Salthill in February.
“They were goals we shouldn’t be conceding,” Cody lamented after the league match. Nor were they; two of the three arose from Canning deliveries from distance that, notwithstanding the pace and trajectory of a typical Canning delivery from distance, ought to have been dealt with.
Yet the champions cannot say they weren’t warned. Remember the one-two Galway hit them with early in the replay last September, a pair of the most beautifully crafted All-Ireland goals ever?
For the first, Tannian despatched a ball from the 65-metre line that zeroed in on David Burke and Jackie Tyrrell, isolated on the edge of the square. Once more the other forwards had done a disappearing act to fashion the space; there wasn’t a maroon shirt within 40 metres. So calibrated for length and line was Tannian’s lob that it only need a touch, and Burke provided it.
For the second, Canning popped up inside his own 65 to unleash a missile that dropped on the opposition D. Kilkenny had enough men to defend the first ball but lacked someone to track Damien Hayes’s run from the wing. Cyril Donnellan beat JJ Delaney overhead, Hayes caught Donnellan’s layoff and switched the sliotar back inside for Burke to find the net again.
This hook and uppercut combination was all the more meritorious because it sprang from a dearth of possession rather than a surfeit. How many hours were the goals in the planning and the practice? We may never find out.
This much we can be sure of, however. Anthony Cunningham has spent session after session girding his troops for overhead combat.
“Being competitive in the air,” is how Tom Helebert, one of the Galway selectors describes it, and the county’s recent success in that department is the product of nothing more esoteric than hard work on the training field.
It’s a matter, says Helebert, of addressing the ball early and of getting to the pitch of it.
“It’s about an understanding of positional sense. Of attacking the ball so you’re not on the back foot. Of building the confidence to attack it.”
At half-time in the league game in February, Sean Walsh of Galway Bay FM was just about to remark that Joe Canning had done very little when it struck him that all three Galway goals had been created by the Portumna man, string-pulling from deep. That, according to Helebert, was unplanned.
“It just happened on that particular day that Joe found himself in the right place to pick up possession and pick out the right pass. You’d be expecting that from him. The trick is to create the bit of space.”
And when you’re facing Kilkenny, he doesn’t add but might, long balls from out the field also have the not inconsiderable effect of reducing Tommy Walsh to the status of a chap looking up at a plane soaring overhead.
“It’s about the swiftness of the ball, the swiftness of the hands,” Helebert goes on. “Get the ball into the threat zone as quickly as possible.”
The inverse, in other words, of the Davy Fitzgerald school of thought. The trade-off, Helebert accepts, is the potential for imprecision.
“You have to make sure it’s reasonably advantageous. So we’ve been trying to drive it into the players to make good decisions, whether it’s with the long ball or the shorter, possession-retention game. And good players make good decisions.”
Anthony Cunningham and Kilkenny. He beat them — nay, murdered them — in the Leinster final. He stymied them on the second Sunday of September. In doing so he became the first opposing manager to beat Brian Cody in the championship and not be beaten — still less be beaten out the gate in an elaborate act of revenge — the next time the sides met.
And with his players hitting those identifiable flying objects to detonate around the Kilkenny 20m line, he’s still asking them questions they can’t answer.
