Hickey: Offaly a test for the best

HISTORY tells us that underdogs rarely get the better of things when it comes to replays but Kilkenny’s Noel Hickey isn’t drawing up his Leinster final battle plans with Galway in mind just yet.

Offaly surprised everyone by recovering from a poor start to hit John McIntyre’s side for three goals and take a seven-point lead last weekend and they showed that same spirit in reeling in arrears twice more whilst down to 14 men.

“It’s hard to call,” said the Kilkenny full-back who was speaking at the launch of the Guinness Hurling ‘A County Will Rise’ campaign in the brewery’s James’ Street headquarters yesterday.

“A lot of people would have been expecting Galway, but the way Offaly hurled the last day they would be a match for anyone. They really tore into Galway and it is 50/50 next Saturday.”

Hickey and the rest of his Kilkenny colleagues dispatched a disappointing Dublin with 19 points to spare before taking their seats to in the Hogan Stand to watch the majority of that Offaly-Galway game last Sunday.

“I thought it was great game of hurling. If there are more games like that in the championship it will be a great championship.

“When Offaly got the man sent off you would have thought Galway would have picked it up from that but, fair play to Offaly, they stuck in there and it was a great performance out of them.

It was a welcome change of script for the 25,000 or so spectators who had just watched Kilkenny make so little of Dublin’s challenge and Hickey accepted that it was a relatively straightforward opening defence of their title.

Ger Loughnane was critical of Anthony Daly’s use of the seventh defender that night – a tactic he has used against Kilkenny in the past with both Clare and Dublin – and Hickey shares his doubts about such a system.

“We didn’t know whether they were going to try it or not again on Sunday or whether they would try something different. I don’t know, I suppose it kind of blocks off space maybe a bit on our forwards. Everyone has to go in to win a game. Kilkenny approach a game man for man and take on your man.

“Maybe they just have to go and line out 15 for 15 and just go out and try to win the game. Anthony usually does it when we play him actually. They probably thought it worked well enough for them in the Leinster final last year, but you know, I think at some stage you just have to go for it, 15 against 15.”

A three-time All Star, Hickey missed the entire 2009 season with a groin injury and his return this year has only increased the scale of the task facing every other county this summer.

“Last year was a bit of a disaster with one thing after another with injuries just dragging on all year. I didn’t get a really good clean run of it. It was grand this year. I’ve been able to train all the time after the holidays and trained all spring and it is great to get back in the team and get going again in Croke Park.”

In actual fact, it will be a stop-start summer for Hickey and Kilkenny if they manage to navigate the shortest route through to September. Such a scenario would necessitate, on average, a game a month or so.

Whoever, comes through this weekend’s replay in Portlaoise will be playing their third tie in three weeks come the final on July 4 – Kilkenny will be facing their second game since April.

“Whoever comes out of next Saturday will have the tough games and you can’t beat tough games. We’d be happy enough to have the one game and we’d be back training hard. We can kind of gauge ourselves what our form is like in training and how things are going. It doesn’t really concern us too much really.”