Cats ready for a true capital test

DIFFERENT day, different grade even, but Kilkenny’s mission this evening will be much the same as it was in Croke Park two weekends ago – add another Leinster title to the stockpile and, at the same time, frustrate Dublin’s growing ambitions.

Richie Hogan will be the only member of Brian Cody’s panel involved tonight at Parnell Park but the youngster’s time spent at the underage grades illustrates perfectly the new realities in the province.

Since his first year as a minor in 2004, Hogan has been testing himself against Dublin teams on an annual basis and, if they have come out the right side of the result more often than not, there has rarely been much in it.

No doubt about it, the Dubs are now the Frazier to Kilkenny’s Ali. “In most of the games there was no more than the puck of a ball between us,” said Hogan.

“It was a little bit of extra experience that got us over the line a couple of years back, but now there is just as much experience, even more, in their group so that is not going to help us anymore.”

Dublin manager Ciarán Barr has opted for the same starting side that demolished Wexford in the semi-final. Kilkenny will start without inured trio Andy Kearns, James Dowling and Kieran Mooney although they will still start favourites.

The number of returnees from last year’s U21 panel is in the high teens, half a dozen of whom were starters in the side that captured provincial and All-Ireland honours.

Hogan won’t pay that much heed. This time last year, the sides met in the Leinster semi-final with all eyes on a Dublin side boasting a dozen of the team that had reached the previous year’s All-Ireland final.

Hogan’s Kilkenny had only scraped past Laois before being shown the exit door by Offaly in 2007, but their response in ‘08 was an emphatic nine-point defeat of Dublin and a canter past Offaly in the final.

“We had a new management set-up and an awful lot of new players as well last year,” said Hogan. “That kind of helped us. It was a totally new team with something to prove. Plus, that team had lost to Dublin at minor level as well. We wanted to overturn that result.”

Both sides have featured twice already in the championship. Kilkenny eased past Laois in the quarter-final before struggling to put Offaly away in the last four. In the end, they had just a goal to spare.

Dublin got their stutters out of the way earlier with an unconvincing seven-point defeat of Kildare but they were in a different league to a poor Wexford team who ended up 19 points adrift.

As is the case with every underage game, tonight will be about more than the result itself. A standout performance by any individual will do no-one any harm in terms of their career at senior level. One would imagine Hogan being particularly keen to make an impression on Cody given the fact that he has yet to copper-fasten his place in the senior side despite his stellar underage reputation.

Hogan played a good wedge of the NHL and ended that campaign with 1-10 in the final against Tipperary. But he was used as a substitute against Galway and a subsequent hamstring injury has left him stuck in neutral since.

“It’s totally different. The Kilkenny senior team is picked on training. You get into the panel itself by the way you play with your club at senior level. The boys who play well (tonight) will have a chance to be seen for the senior panel but the team is picked on training.

“You have to see how you are going against the likes of lads like Jackie Tyrrell and Noel Hickey in training. That’s the only way to pick it as far as we are concerned because you are being tested by the best around in training. That’s the best benchmark we can go by.”

Much has been written about Cody’s near-mythical training sessions but they will need to live up their reputation again this summer as the All-Ireland champions contend with a five-week break to their semi-final.

The county championship has been placed on ice as of last weekend as well so much will depend on Mick Dempsey and Noel Richardson’s training regimens, even if Hogan is a bit perplexed by the level of interest in their sessions.

“It should be the same… I presume it’s the same in other counties. There is no point going to training if you are not doing that. The idea of training is to prepare yourself for a match.

“If you drop it by 5-10% you are going to come up short in the championship. Thank God we have had the lads committed enough to do that over the last few years and hopefully it will continue.”