It’s back to reality as Cats finish job
There was a very late goal alright but it was scored by a man in stripes, not a man in maroon, and at that stage nothing that happened on the field or the scoreboard was going to affect the outcome.
In an attempt to get rid of that damn stone in his shoe, Brian Cody had opted for sensible, conservative footwear. It worked. There was no high heel to snap under pressure in the last five minutes this time around.
A Kilkenny team that was only revealed minutes before throw-in, unprecedented in the 16 years of Cody’s reign, showed four changes from the programme. Conor Fogarty and Joey Holden in from the tundra to which they’d been consigned after the National League; Brian Hogan wearing 18 but lining out at six; and Aidan Fogarty — inelegant, unstylish, perpetually in motion — at full-forward.
It mightn’t have clicked but it did. There were any number of reasons why, the two most notable being as follows.
Hogan’s reappearance allowed Jackie Tyrrell to go back to roam in his natural habitat, the left corner of the defence, where he carries out his twin roles of number four and Kilkenny’s bouncer.
Covering and sweeping and picking up loose ball and taking it into contact and hopping off lads and turning onto his left and driving the sliotar down the field.
Hogan was no better or worse at centre-back than Tyrrell had been six days earlier, but Tyrrell being back on his old beat gave the favourites a far greater degree of presence, and therefore of security, in the full-back line.
What may happen to a Kilkenny defence containing Tyrrell and Hogan on a hot afternoon at Croke Park against a jet-propelled young forward line is an entirely different matter.
But this was a case of horses for courses and an evening for comfortable old shoes. It was also an evening that spelled the definitive end of the Tyrrell-at-centre-back wheeze, one of Cody’s very few patently misguided ideas.
Then there was Pádraig Walsh. Seemed after the league to have secured a championship berth at right-half back, the place where the Kilkenny U21 management of a couple of years ago always reckoned he’d make it.
Hurled midfield in the drawn game. Now operating at centre-forward, the place where that U21 management had been forced to employ him for dearth of better options, and thriving. Walsh junior has a very simple trick that’s stupendously effective. He gets the ball, takes a couple of steps sideways, hits it a mile up into the sky without obvious strain — and almost invariably it goes over the bar. After landing two points the previous Sunday he managed three here and led the line in style. Kilkenny’s 3-19 was close enough to their 3-22 of the drawn tie and, regardless of their opponents’ failings, implies a reasonable consistency of performance.
Now for a stat to make one wonder what the hell is happening of an evening in Nowlan Park.
Over the course of the 140 minutes against Galway, the Noresiders used no fewer than 24 players — literally a team and two thirds. Even allowing for Cody’s frequent insistence that he prefers “a settled spirit” to “a settled team” it is jaw-dropping. A team and then two thirds of another team? Janey.
Such turnover prompts a slew of questions, among them the following:
Has he actually any notion of his best XV? Has he concluded that all that new-team-building stuff he spent the league at was in fact a waste of time?
Is he operating on the principle that if he throws enough players at a wall, then some of them are bound to stick?
More critically, how many fires will need to be fought simultaneously when Kilkenny come up against better teams than Offaly and Galway?
Not even Cody can use 24 men on a given day.
It is a cliché that replays rarely adhere to the same script as draws. Omit the last five minutes of the first encounter and Saturday was an exception to the rule. Galway had 1-17 on the board with the clock showing 70 minutes where the previous Sunday they’d had 2-16 on the board with the clock showing 65 minutes. Not that much of a difference, is it? Granted, they’d hurled a little better for the first three quarters yesterday week. Here, once Kilkenny had gone 1-4 to 1-3 ahead after 13 minutes, they were always chasing and seldom convincing.
Iarla Tannian had a thunderous opening 10 minutes, leaving Tommy Walsh a bystander, but faded thereafter. Jason Flynn took Tyrrell for 1-1 early on but faded thereafter. Andy Smith started brightly, making the incision that resulted in Flynn’s goal, but guess what? Yep...
Eight points down entering the home straight, Galway once more reached for the blunderbuss. On this occasion Kilkenny refused to allow them force the powder in. David Herity flew from his line to block Conor Cooney at the expense of a 65’. Joe Canning, confronted by a thicket of stripes, tried to place a close-range free but put it low and wide. By then, Galway were reduced to attempting to bullock their way through against a Kilkenny defence happy to stop them by conceding frees.
Canning? Nothing like the Canning of six days earlier but not getting a lot of help either, Cooney excepted. TJ Reid and to a lesser extent Richie Hogan, both of whom are in the form of their life, kept her lit again; none of Galway’s key men did likewise. It’s not about doing it on the day, it’s about doing it every day.
Still, a trip to Tipperary on Saturday is precisely the restorative therapy an enlightened doctor would prescribe. Either Anthony Cunningham’s men mope for the week or they try remount the horse immediately. An evening in Semple Stadium is a fine opportunity to do the latter.
And so the attendance in Tullamore on Saturday received more or less what they’d been treated to six days earlier, with one obvious difference: another unremarkable game, this one sadly without a remarkable finish. Then again, it was too much to expect the gods — Canning, Shefflin, Tommy Walsh — to descend from the clouds a second time and walk among us before our disbelieving eyes.
It was as though, having landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day and liberated Paris, we were back in Yawnsville, Iowa for the next 50 years. Normality came dropping once more on Saturday night.
For Galway most of all.
