The undercats
As he comes to meet the ball it’s deflected by someone’s hurley; Delaney goes to turn, but his knee gives way underneath him.
“As soon as he turned you could nearly hear something click,” recalls Jackie Tyrrell, the Kilkenny captain. “He went down in agony and we all feared for the worst straight away.”
Kilkenny’s defence, criticised after the All-Ireland quarter- and semi-finals, would face Cork in the decider without their star defender. It would break their year or drive them on.
KILKENNY started 2006 by saying goodbye. DJ Carey’s departure wasn’t a huge surprise, but he left a gap. So did Peter Barry. So did John Hoyne. Manager Brian Cody acknowledges the uncertainty that followed.
“Those were physically strong, experienced players, and I know I kept saying it, but we were in transition. We had to see how their replacements would do.”
He took encouragement from the league. John Tennyson was good at centre-back. Aidan Fogarty did well up front. JJ Delaney thrived at full-back while Noel Hickey recovered from laser eye surgery. Henry Shefflin was spared much of the league to recharge his batteries; the fact he and Martin Comerford were injury-free was also good news.
By the time Kilkenny were cruising to the Leinster championship, they were unbeaten in all competitions. Tyrrell, as captain, didn’t worry about complacency.
“We came through it easily enough, but you don’t have to go back that far to 2004 when Wexford beat us. There’s too much preparation at inter-county level to take games for granted.”
The quarter-final draw threw up Galway, the side who’d outgunned the Cats in the 2005 semi-final.
The motivation was fairly obvious. “As soon as we got Galway in the draw everyone was focused,” says Tyrrell. “I’d say the training went up another 20% — everyone was looking forward to taking them on. We were clued in from the word go.”
And it showed: Kilkenny jumped into an early lead, and Cody warmed to the team’s development: “Twelve months previously we weren’t able for Galway. We didn’t lose that game by too much but they were a superior team to us. This year we had the new lads — John (Tennyson) at centre-back, Cha (Fitzpatrick) at midfield — players in vital positions.
“Eddie Brennan came into good form coming up to the quarter-final, the same with James Ryall. Aidan Fogarty had a bad injury after the league final, but when he came back for the Galway game we could see he was getting there. So things were falling into place.”
Galway clawed back goals in the second half, however, and questions were raised. Tyrrell concentrated on the positives.
“People focused on how they came back into it, but it probably did us no harm to go into the semi-final without having had such a big win. People always seem to take a negative out of games, and once we’d won we focused on Clare, the Galway game was gone.”
His manager wasn’t quite done with the Galway game, however. That same week, Waterford boss Justin McCarthy told this writer too many people were looking for the perfect game of hurling. Cody challenged the pundits’ evaluation of the quarter-final.
“The Leinster final wasn’t a great game,” he recalls, “And you could even tell looking at the reporters’ faces afterwards they felt the same. After the Galway game I was fairly upbeat — I felt we were very good for 40-50 minutes, that Galway had been very good for the remainder, and that that was fairly good value for anyone’s money. Yet reporters were saying to me, ‘two brutal games’. I felt there was some brilliant hurling being done, so I was taken aback.
“It’s a contest.
“You’ve to get it right on the day because the losers are gone. I’d agree with what Justin said about the perfect game. There’s so much goes into it now that I don’t know what other people want, but for the contestants it’s the result — to finish the game a point ahead, or whatever it is. Everyone would love to do that beautifully, and sometimes it happens, but it’s rare.”
The semi-final against Clare followed a similar pattern. Kilkenny goaled early through Shefflin, but again, searching questions were asked of the Cats’ defence. They weren’t always answered.
“It wasn’t one of my better days,” says Tyrrell. “We only pulled away in the last few minutes, and going into the final after a shaky-ish enough semi-final, people were maybe writing us off a bit. Going into the final as underdogs was unusual for us, we’d usually be favourites or slight favourites, but that probably suited us, particularly with the pressure on Cork going for three in a row.”
THERE were negatives after the Clare game.
Tennyson had dislocated a shoulder, and the feeling in the dressing-room after the semi-final was that he didn’t have a chance of making the Cork game.
Four days after the Clare game he was out running to stay in shape. Six days after that he was hurling.
“John led the way,” says Cody. “Within ten days he had defied all medical advice and logic to take a full part in training. He was sending out a message that he wasn’t going to be stopped, and that determination ran right through the team. He didn’t mind his shoulder when he came back either, he went right into tackles the same as ever.”
Then came Delaney’s injury. When a hospital scan confirmed a torn cruciate ligament, it added to what should have been a tense All-Ireland final week for Cody. The first-choice full-back was out for the season. His replacement, Noel Hickey, was just back after a heart scare that threatened to end his career. The centre-back, in his debut season, was overcoming a severe shoulder dislocation. To top it all, new star midfielder Cha Fitzpatrick was battling flu.
Fraught? Not a bit of it.
“I was relaxed that week,” Cody says, “I could sense the whole thing coming together, the intent of the players. Training went well and the lads were sharp.
“Noel Hickey’s illness wasn’t an issue — the first day he’d togged out afterwards, that was gone. Cha had the flu but I spoke to him on the Saturday evening and he said ‘I’m fine, I don’t want to hear about it’. John Tennyson was ready.”
Still, Cody accepts that those inclining towards Cork were entitled to feel the loss of Delaney would tip the balance.
“He’s a phenomenal player,” says Cody. “There’s no better defender, and you can put him on any list you like, he’s a huge presence for us.
“But his attitude was ‘someone takes my place and we carry on’. There was no question of feeling sorry for himself and therefore no question of us feeling sorry for him, even though your heart would go out to him, obviously. The only thing we could do for him was to win the game. That drove the whole thing on.”
Tyrrell echoes the manager: “It was a huge blow, JJ’s a great hurler and he’d put in a huge effort all the year, but there was no good saying ‘hard luck’ to him. We wanted to go out and win him an All-Ireland medal.”
It was time to consider Cork.
THE All-Ireland final loss to Cork in 2004 was a motivation for the Cats, and few were more driven to make up for the loss than Noel Hickey. Doctors had advised a break from hurling after the full-back was diagnosed with a heart virus, and when he returned he was more determined than ever.
“Losing out in 2005 was a big shock,” says Hickey. “All of a sudden, the hurling, everything’s taken away. When I came back, I decided I’d give it one hell of a shot, because you never know when it’s going to be taken away from you. Starting off I didn’t know how it was going to go.”
It went well, but Hickey was one of those criticised when Kilkenny’s defence creaked against Galway and Clare. It rankled.
“You’d know talk was going on and it would wound you a little, it wouldn’t be natural otherwise. But that spurred us on.
“I felt coming off the field after the Clare game, though, that we were ready to take Cork on. I felt we’d be hard to beat. The pressure was on Cork. They were favourites. They weren’t talking about the three in a row, but it’s bound to be in the back of your mind.”
For Cody, there was the Cork game plan to consider. Or rather, it was for the Kilkenny players to consider.
“To be honest, the day after the game everyone spoke about the massive plan we had, but it wasn’t like that,” says the manager. “We didn’t speak as much about Cork as the players — they knew the Cork players and the Cork style, and they spoke about the various things they needed to do. There was no big PowerPoint presentation or anything, it was simple, basic stuff.
“Obviously, if the goalkeeper pucks the ball out to a man on the 14-yard line, that player is not going to hit the ball any further than the goalkeeper would anyway, so we let that man take the puck-out himself, if you like. There’s no point in running towards him and letting him tip the ball to someone else. The key to it was a huge work rate from the forward line, and it was clear that they were hungry enough to contest every ball. Hunger can’t be invented, you can’t just grab it.”
In the final, Kilkenny showed plenty of hunger. Hickey points to the three forwards who pressurised Seán Óg Ó hAilpín 25 minutes in and the blockdown by hefflin that yielded a vital free.
But those forwards had the ideal example in their full-back. Two years before, Hickey had been moved off Brian Corcoran as Cork surged home. The Kilkenny man hadn’t forgotten.
“Walking out onto the pitch for this year’s final, I focused on the criticism we’d had all the year, and I’d always remember how it went wrong for me in 2004 — you never remember the good ones, just the bad days. I suppose you could definitely say I was going out to prove a point in the final.”
By the end of the game, Corcoran was operating in the corner. Hickey ruled the square and was steering Kilkenny home.
“Beating Cork was enjoyable,” says Cody. “That’s the tribute to how good they are. It wasn’t about stopping the three in a row. What was great for us was that we picked the All-Ireland final to play our best game. It was a very good game to win playing very well.
“The whole approach of the panel is what I appreciate — the level of commitment.
“That’s what I enjoy. The coming together of a new team, gelling throughout the league for instance, I get a great kick out of that. Seeing Noel Hickey come back and playing out of his skin, the attitude of the panel towards JJ and Donncha when they got injured ... you can have brilliant goals, like Eoin Larkin’s in the league final, but they’re just flashes of brilliance. The constant genuineness of the team — that’s what I enjoy.”
His captain isolates another highlight.
“Maybe the best part was the few moments we had in the dressing-room after the game,” says Tyrrell. “It was all of us there, everyone who’d put the work in, and we had the cup in the middle with us. There was a huge effort put in, and we had the thing we wanted.”
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