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.”