Players — even Henry — may come and go but Kilkenny will never break
When Mick O’Dwyer’s great Kerry team were beaten by Cork down in Killarney in ‘87 the Bomber Liston pronounced the greatest football show on earth was over, that you could fold up the marquee.
Ger Loughnane borrowed the same phrase in a recent conversation with us when recalling his thoughts after his Clare team’s 2000 defeat in Cork to Tipp. And some thought you could have said the same about Kilkenny after their defeat to Cork in Thurles last year. Certainly they thought people said it. Yet it goes on. They go on, and the remarkable thing is it clearly will go on even after Henry.
It went on after DJ. In fact they would win the next four All-Irelands after he called it a day. With the competitiveness of the Munster counties the Cats won’t quite enjoy similar dominance after Henry hangs up his boots. But with the questionable competitiveness now of Dublin and Galway and especially the legacy the likes of he, Carey and especially Cody have established it’s impossible not to see Kilkenny playing into August and at least every second September for the remainder of the decade. It took Kerry five years to win an All-Ireland after Darragh but it shouldn’t take Kilkenny that long after Henry.
There have been some objections to Shefflin occupying so much of the limelight on Saturday evening. And certainly it is only right that JJ Delaney’s remarkable ninth All-Ireland should be lauded in its own right for the remarkable achievement it is. But Shefflin was entitled to whatever came his way upon achieving La Decima. After essentially winning nine All-Irelands for Kilkenny, it was only fitting that Kilkenny won one for him. Just as the Cork ladies triumph last Sunday was a tribute to the ethos their retired superstar Juliet Murphy had embedded, so was Kilkenny’s to the ethos enshrined by Shefflin.
Three years ago when I interviewed him before another All-Ireland showdown against Tipp he gave a huge insight into what drove him. That year he was coming off a cruciate ligament injury. His employers, Bank of Ireland, kindly gave him his own automatic car to help him get around to such places as the Hotel Kilkenny and its gym while he was off work rehabilitating. Every day he’d make use of that car, because every day he’d go to the gym. There was no Tuesday or Thursday morning when he slouched off, knowing no-one else would notice.
“When I was off work I saw the rehab as my work basically,” he’d explain. “Some other people aren’t that lucky, to get that time off from their employers, so I was going to respect that [privilege]. I just saw it as a job basically, to do my best to get myself right.”
That’s the epitome of the honesty Cody incessantly talks about. When your best player is your hardest-working player and your most honest player what excuse has anyone else?
Thanks to Henry Kilkenny will be fine without Henry. After performances such as his game-saving and changing intervention against Galway in the drawn 2012 All-Ireland final, it was loudly speculated how Kilkenny would fare after he was gone. And while that was a legitimate question, there were hints that they’d cope all right. Earlier that year they’d won the league convincingly without him pucking a ball. Last year it was a similar story. This year they won it again without him scoring in the final.
In terms of playing personnel Kilkenny remind us more of the great European Cup teams of Liverpool rather than Manchester United for all the comparisons Cody’s reign has prompted with Alex Ferguson’s at Old Trafford.
In the Anfield glory days they used talk about two in, two out every year; subtle, patterned evolution, transition even. So it is with Kilkenny.
Martin Comerford departs but Colin Fennelly comes in. Eddie Brennan retires but TJ Reid and Richie Hogan step up. Derek Lyng fades out, Michael Fennelly blends in. At the back Michael Kavanagh steps out but Paul Murphy seamlessly slots in. Tommy Walsh drops out of the starting line-up and his brother comes in. And so on. Cillian Buckley, Kieran Joyce and Conor Fogarty hurled last Saturday like they’ve been hurling in Croke Park and for Kilkenny forever. They all only made their championship debuts two years ago.
Of course were some of the olde brigade to go at once Kilkenny would wobble a bit. But they won’t; Cody will see to it that those departures are staggered; Graeme Souness he is not.
When he speaks about not believing so much in a settled team as a settled spirit he hasn’t been merely talking in the context of a standalone season. Over the years players may come and go, faces change, but the spirit won’t.
