Kieran Shannon: There has been no one like Brian Cody

If Cody goes with the same team that started last Saturday, it will mean Cian Kenny will be the 69th different player Cody has entrusted to start in an All Ireland for him

ONE OF A KIND: Kilkenny manager Brian Cody shakes hands with Tommy Walsh of Kilkenny after their side's victory in the GAA Hurling All-Ireland Senior Championship Semi-Final match between Kilkenny and Clare at Croke Park in Dublin. Pic: Harry Murphy/Sportsfile

There’s been nothing like him. Not even Micko, Mickey or Boylan.

As young as Maurice Fitz was lighting it up in his first Munster final back in ’88, becoming an automatic All Star after only his second-ever championship game, he’d been five years old when his manager would have first got the Kerry job 13 years earlier. 

Any Kerry player who played under O’Dwyer would had some memory of ’75; indeed a few of them had been and stayed around long enough to play at both the start and end of his time over the county.

Michael Carey had yet to be born when Brian Cody was appointed Kilkenny manager in the autumn of 1998. He didn’t come along until the following year, a year in which his father, a certain Denis Joseph, won another All Star and reached the All Ireland final playing under that rookie boss.

Now that same rookie manager is preparing for his 17th All Ireland senior final (19th if you include replays), this time with DJ’s young fella on board as one of his wing backs.

Think of all the players that have sat behind Cody on a Kilkenny team bus heading into Croke Park on the last day of the hurling year. For all the experience John Kiely has as a manager of the biggest day of all, only 18 players have previously started for him in an All Ireland final; this year it might extend to 19 if David Reidy gets the vote to walk behind the band. 

If Cody goes with the same team that started last Saturday, it will mean Cian Kenny as the last man in that parade will be the 69th different player Cody has entrusted to start in an All Ireland for him and for Kilkenny.

That’s almost five different teams, which is rather fitting, because in a way that’s how many All Ireland-contending teams he’s built. 

There was the pre-2001 iteration; the Peter Barry team that won two consecutive All Irelands and reached a third before another semi-final Galway defeat prompted another reinvention; the four-in-a-row team; the team that won the 2015 All Ireland whether you think it began in 2011 or 2014; and now this one.

Throughout all those years some seemed more special, or at least sweeter, than others. Foiling Cork from winning the three-in-a-row in 2006. The empire striking back in 2011 when Tipp were meant to rule the decade. Beating them again in 2014 when at the start of the championship the rest of the decade was meant to belong to Clare. Winning in ’15 when Henry and Tommy were both gone. 

All had claims to being The Sweetest Yet and all were proclaimed at the time as such. It’d be fair to say though that with it being seven years since he last got his hands on Liam McCarthy, this would be undeniably the TSY of all TSYs.

Even in these seven supposedly lean years he’s managed to keep his county relevant, competitive. 2017 remains the only year in that time in which he didn’t manage to reach an All Ireland quarter-final and the only year in his 24-season-and-counting reign that he didn’t either win a league, a Leinster or reach an All Ireland final – and even that year they would bring an eventual All Ireland finalist, Waterford, to extra-time.

All the other years there were titles or scalps. 2016: keeping Galway down for another year to win Leinster, somehow staving off Waterford over two epic semi-finals to reach the final themselves. 

Tormenting Tipp again to win the league in 2018 before pushing Limerick as hard as anyone would in that year’s championship. Actually beating Limerick in ’19 to reach another final. Winning Leinster in 2020 and '21. And now back in another All Ireland in 2022.

In the aftermath of his team’s demolition of Clare, he and a couple of his players mentioned the hurt of losing two consecutive semi-finals and how they couldn’t tolerate a third.

You can take it so that he’s mindful of and equally allergic to what has happened to his team when the past two times they’ve made it to the last game of the year. Tipperary beat his team by 10 and 14 points, the kind of trimmings his greatest teams in their pomp used to routinely dish out to others.

Limerick have the capacity to be similarly ruthless as Cork and Waterford can testify. There is a suspicion that the gap between Kiely’s team and the pack has narrowed this year, underlined by how close Galway ran them last Sunday. 

But it’s been overlooked that in 2020 Galway also pushed Limerick hard in the semi-final and lost by virtually an identical scoreline, 27 points to 24. Limerick tend to keep their best performance for the last day of all.

They are a smarter, steelier team than the one that was ambushed in 2019.

But so is this Kilkenny team. They won’t launch aimless balls like they did against Tipp that year or Clare did to them last weekend.

They’ve adapted. He ultimately always adapts. That’s why he’s still and always there at the top of that bus, coaching fathers, coaching sons.