Rice: Shefflin good for a starting role
Despite not starting a game since the league final win over Tipperary, Brian Cody recently confirmed the nine-time All-Ireland winner was fit and the option of saving him as a potential impact-sub would not influence his selection policy. Rice, meanwhile, is adamant Shefflin is in peak shape.
“Yeah, easily,” Rice said when asked whether Shefflin could last the entire match. “That’s the type of lad he is, I think he’s fitter than ever from what I’ve seen of him. I don’t think there’s any fears like that about him, he just minds himself incredibly well. I don’t think there could be a professional player that could mind himself more.”
Rice replaced Shefflin in the 2010 All-Ireland final defeat by Tipp after Brian Cody had decided to risk the Ballyhale Shamrocks club man just weeks after he had suffered a cruciate injury. The two-time All Star has had his own rotten luck with injuries in the last three seasons.
In 2012, a controversial challenge from Tipp’s Padraic Maher left him with a broken hand and out of both All-Ireland final tussles with Galway. This year, a cruciate ligament injury came a lot earlier in the season and, he says, the timing this time around has made it easier to accept.
“To miss the final two years ago was probably worse because that was so close. You realise there’s zero hope this time because obviously Henry and Tenno (John Tennyson) tried it before and that didn’t work out. They’ve gone and been the crash-test dummies on that so I knew my year was over. Two years ago I knew I was in bother because I just couldn’t physically do it, it was so close. This year it happened a long way from the big match but as the matches got bigger they’ve been harder to watch.”
The secondary school teacher, speaking at Croke Park last week, also said he is wary about being a negative psychological presence in the camp. “It’s probably healthy for me not to be in there the whole time. It’s nice to get in and have the crack with the lads like you normally would but also not be there moping around.
I don’t want (players thinking), ‘Oh Jesus, here’s Rice again and he’s going to be giving out about his injury, I don’t ever want to be that lad!’ So I don’t talk about it too much.” There has been some speculation that this season could signal the end of a number of stellar careers but Rice believes there is a fundamental motivating factor that still drives the squad.
Asked whether some Kilkenny players stayed on to make up for last year’s quarter-final failure he said: “I couldn’t talk for everyone. I think every individual has his own motivation. I suppose it generally is a belief that you can go on and win an All-Ireland but I don’t think there’s any major one reason that is over-arching for everyone, I think it’s individual to each lad.
“One of the big factors, I think, is that lads just love hurling. I don’t think you can get away from that. ” On whether Kilkenny can win next Sunday, Rice believes the nature of the semi-final contests makes it too difficult to predict.
“It’s pretty much 50/50,” he said.
“We’ll have to improve again. They were very good here (against Cork). We’re going to have to make sure our hurling is up to that level. Our day against Limerick you’d describe it as a dirty day in terms of weather and we really had to grind it out.
“It’s incredibly hard to predict. Going back to the quarter-finals you’d have thought they’d be close matches but it just hasn’t materialised for whatever reason, which makes the final so hard to call.”
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