Hurling shooting stars have left their mark
Tipp attacking the town goal and Shane McGrath driving a ball in towards top of the right. “The bould Lar,” as Kelly describes him, latching onto it, turning, surveying his options and playing it back towards the half-forward line to pick out Kelly. Nearer the left touchline than the right, the Mullinahone man veers onto his stronger side and puts the sliotar over the bar from 35 metres out.
He would never do it again in the blue and gold.
Eoin Kelly remembers his first point for Tipperary. A summer Sunday afternoon in Croke Park against Galway in the 2000 All Ireland quarter-final and the number 16 on his back. Yes, really: not a goalie’s number 16 jersey but an outfield jersey with 16 on it. Tipp attacking the Canal End. He doesn’t recall who gave him the pass (“although I remember plenty of lads over the years who didn’t give me passes,” he adds drily) but he took possession about 20 metres out, fairly central, and split the posts.
He would do it plenty of times again in the blue and gold.
He’d do it 367 more times, to be precise, in 63 championship appearances from Croke Park 14 years ago to O’Moore Park last July. Fourteen of them in one afternoon against Limerick at Semple Stadium in 2006. Another 13 in the 2009 All-Ireland final. As figures compiled by the hurling statistician Leo McGough demonstrate, the Mullinahone man was one of the wonders of the age. Not that you needed any stats to realise how wonderful. Time and time again, we witnessed that shake of the hips, swivel of the shoulders, that fluid follow-through off right and left — and lo, it was good, over and over and over.
Kelly wasn’t the only contemporary scoring machine, of course. There was Henry Shefflin, the man who’s rewritten all sorts of records. Leading championship scorer, leading championship pointscorer, leading championship pointscorer from play, leading championship pointscorer from placed balls. He also won a few All-Ireland medals while he was at it.
And then there was a man one might not immediately or automatically have assumed to be another scoring demigod. Our old friend from De La Salle, John Mullane. Fast and flashy and compulsively watchable and hit plenty of scores in his day, obviously, including three goals in a Munster final. But a maker of records?
Absolutely. The numbers leave no room for dispute. His goals included, Mullane averaged 3.63 points from play per championship appearance. It is a staggering figure. For a member of a team that never won an All-Ireland it is even more staggering.
Now consider his other personal stats. Mullane found the target from play in all but three of his 49 championship outings and managed two or more scores from play in 36 of those 49 appearances. No cooking of the books there or atoning for failures against the big guns with turkey shoots against the also-rans. His brilliance was matched by his consistency; Mullane did it every day and he did it in defeat as well as in victory. Not least with his 0-4 in the 2008 All-Ireland final: the boy on the burning deck.
It can fairly be argued that Mullane, surrounded by Big Dan and Flynner and the other Eoin Kelly, had greater scope to shine in the mid-noughties than did the Mullinahone Kelly, at the time a squadron leader without a squadron. If Kelly wasn’t going to score, then Tipperary weren’t going to win. But even if hurling folk are obsessed with comparisons, trying to choose between the pair is a fatuous exercise. Let’s not bother.
By the same token, it can be argued with equal legitimacy that Shefflin had a fine old time of it playing in the team he played in — so why wouldn’t his scoring totals be off the scale? Thing is, among the man’s sundry virtues was his utter absence of interest or going to town on beaten opponents or bloating his stats for the sake of it in the manner of a less ego-secure player. For Shefflin in the second half of his career, giving the assist was as important as hitting the point: as long as the sliotar went over the bar. Sometime around 2006, he embarked on a change of career and veered from the role of painter to that of architect, with an amount of navvying thrown in. Heaven knows how frequently he’d have worked the umpires if he truly put his mind to it.
All three men would have been scoring robots in any era. What helped augment their output, in particular that of Kelly and Mullane, was the installation and subsequent extension of the back door. Of Kelly’s 15 seasons in the inter-county arena, Tipperary required passage through the back door in 10. More games and more opportunities to shine.
The mind boggles at how many championship appearances the stars of yesteryear would have racked up had such a dispensation obtained back then. Eddie Keher was around the place for 18 years but only made 50 championship appearances. Christy Ring was there for even longer but didn’t get past 55.
If the cold numerals do both men an injustice, it’s unavoidable. Who’d have thought that Ben O’Connor was the fifth highest championship pointscorer (white flags) of all time, two places above Ring? Or Laois’s James Young, admittedly one of the finest strikers of a sliotar most readers have never seen, the 10th? Similarly, few who’ve seen both men would deem Shefflin to be a superior free-taker to Keher. But Shefflin has had 21 more outings than Keher had and that’s made the difference.
Pick a Best Ever Hurling XV even now and not only is Keher a gimme, he’s also the free-taker. Every season from 1960 to 1972 bar one — 1964 — he hit more than 100 points. For three decades, his championship total of 35-334 in 50 appearances stood alone. His total from play was 19-135, close to 0-4 a game. In his 10 All-Ireland finals, he hit 7-74. He scored from play in 94% of his championship outings and he scored a goal in 34 per cent of them.
Thankfully he’s not an in-my-day merchant. Keher observed a couple of years ago that because of the improvement in equipment and pitches, hurling “has to be better and it is better” than it was half a century ago. Better, faster, more scientific — and far, far higher scoring. Compare the 17 scores (1-9 to 1-6) of the 1954 All-Ireland final with the 54 scores (3-22 to 1-28) of the drawn production 60 years later. Actually, one can’t, for there is no comparison.
A portion of the scribes in that antique land busied themselves for years afterwards trying to persuade their readers — or perhaps themselves — that Cork/Wexford 1954 was a classic. One suspects that a modern audience, were they to be whisked back in time, would collapse in fits of laughter at its lumpenness. “You think this is good, lads? Step into that strange-looking contraption with me, I’ll set the dials for 2014 and I’ll show you what good hurling really is.”
Even in the space of two decades the sound barrier has been smashed. The 1995 All-Ireland final yielded 24 scores and the 1996 final 28 scores; the 2009 All-Ireland final yielded 47 scores, the drawn 2013 All-Ireland final 44 scores plus an aggregate of 50 points and the drawn 2014 All-Ireland final 54 scores. Same venue as 1995-96, same 70-minute match duration and same — or at any rate, similar — sliotar. How long this non-nuclear arms race can continue is anyone’s guess.
Keher’s free-taking technique, incidentally, entailed a roll-lift rather than a Shefflinesque jab-lift due to the sad, frequently sodden state of the pitches; the roll-lift was safer. What would he and Ring average from frees were they around today? Decrying old hurling is not the same thing as decrying old hurlers. Some of the stars of yesteryear would be not simply be stars today but superstars.
Nor, off the radar though it is, should we overlook the achievement of Brian Carroll, the man who hit the first point on Sky Sports and who boasts an average of 2.21 points per game from play on a team that doesn’t reach All-Ireland quarter-finals or provincial deciders. As for Joe Canning (see Table 1), how many more points would he have to his name on a successful Galway outfit?
Mullane and Kelly have departed the stage. Shefflin is not much longer for it. Yet we’ll carry on, hoping to see worthy successors to this mighty trio. The history of the sport demonstrates that the watchers of the skies ever get dazzling new planets swimming into their ken, often when least expected. Tipperary supporters who lamented the passing of Nicky English soon had Eoin Kelly to wrap their dreams around. DJ Carey hadn’t vacated the stage before Shefflin had taken up residence in the centre.
And if you’re from Clare, take heart from this. Tony Kelly, Hurler of the Year at the age of 19 with Mozartian precociousness, boasts 0-32 from play in his 13 championship appearances. All going well, how much will he have hit by — putatively — his 50th?
