Inside the mind of Brian Cody

You are Brian Cody, a man for whom the word manager is no longer just a job description but almost mutually defining — manager, Brian Cody; Brian Cody, manager.

Your team is generally accepted as the greatest hurling team of all time yet here it is, the Leinster final, a championship Kilkenny have owned for over a dozen years, and you’ve witnessed that team getting the mother and father of a beating. What goes through your mind? How do you manage this? A serious rethink of tactics, team selection, training, or perhaps even a combination of all three?

Hardly. “No, certainly there was no sense of a panic. It wasn’t as if there was a fundamental problem of a lack of honesty or anything like that — or at least we hoped there wasn’t. There was a huge, huge lesson for us but I would have a huge trust in the players. You can see it in them, their attitude, their level of disappointment afterwards. I’d have had absolute confidence that they were going to be completely honest in their attempts to rectify what happened on Leinster final day and their attitude was top class. At the end of the day, you go back and work — there’s no magical way of doing it. We wouldn’t have been thinking of any major dramatic change after that, no.”

What happened wasn’t ignored, nor was it written off as a fluke, a once off. Honesty of effort is a hallmark of any Cody team, of any Cody player, but honesty of assessment is also a hallmark of this management team and in this result, Cody noted two things — Galway’s performance, Kilkenny’s failure.

First, Galway. “Galway played a terrific quality of hurling that day, they were excellent but it wasn’t as if we were suddenly discovering that. I’d always have Galway written up there as one of the teams capable of winning the All-Ireland final every year or certainly getting to it. Sometime they’re just going to take off and no-one will handle them and they hit that day in the Leinster final. They were at a different level to us in every aspect of our play so no, it wasn’t a surprise to us. Obviously we didn’t want that to happen and we weren’t expecting it like that, of course not, but you’re dealing with top quality players.”

Then, Kilkenny. “It’s a game that we’d have to look at and say we didn’t perform, we weren’t competitive and were outfought in so many aspects of our game and outhurled.”

Excuses? There is, for instance, the absence of three key players, Michael Fennelly, Michael Rice (came on after the damage was done) and JJ Delaney, the fact that Kilkenny in fact fought back to ‘win’ the second half — all readymade consolation, mitigating circumstances, but all just as readily dismissed. “Obviously those are players you’d like to have, quality players. You always like to have your full panel available but we’ve never gone down the road of excuses over missing players. We have full trust in our panel. Three, four or five players wouldn’t have made a difference on that day, it was a bit of a hiding and the players we had in there were genuine members of our panel so no, there’s no solace to be gained from that.”

And the second-half ‘win’? “We possibly performed a bit better than we did in the first half but you couldn’t count it as good at all, Galway were content to just see out the game, it was already won. Our players were trying to regain a bit of pride so we tried to play to the finish but there were very, very few positives, if any, for us from the Leinster final.”

Without wishing to differ with the man, perhaps just this once, he’s wrong. One positive, a very definite positive, is the reinforcement of trust between management and players. Where others were beginning to question this team, wondering if the end had come, within the walls there was no such doubt. Management continued to trust players, players continued to trust management, not a hint of dissent. Cody: “We shouldn’t be in a position where one defeat is going to suddenly shatter our confidence, I think the team has been together too long for that. People were beginning to wonder around the place, ‘are they finished, is the team coming to an end’ — that’s being speculated on in the press and whatever and that’s fair enough. It hasn’t occurred to me though that that is the case.”

So no, there was no panic, no finger-pointing, no blame. It was simply a case of what’s next? “Obviously we got a serious beating and that focussed the mind. If it had happened in the All-Ireland semi-final, that was our year over but we had an opportunity to do something about it. Another avenue opened up for us, an opportunity we wouldn’t always have had. It wasn’t a case of having to motivate players, they came back focused and determined to salvage the season again and thank God, though it took an extra game we got to the final, where we wanted to be. The challenge now is to go ahead and win it.”