The 10 ways Kilkenny are leading the way
Where better to start than with the best? No other team has a player of his ilk nor his character either. Henry Shefflin may make his 70th championship appearance from the bench on Sunday but it’s his resilience in the face of operation after operation in recent years that provides so much example to his younger team-mates. There’s the longevity and then there are the scores — 27 goals and 484 points, 24-136 from play.
Kilkenny were by no means the first to shut up shop but they were the first to make it acceptable. They broke the habit of a lifetime in 2005 but then extended the level of secrecy in 2012. It was initially met with scepticism but then the likes of Kerry, just as famous for their open training sessions, followed. “We were an open book for a long time,” said Mick Dempsey. “People could come and see who was actually playing and what we were actually doing in training. It was done purely in the interests of making sure what we were doing ourselves was confidential and wasn’t all over the place.”
Sunday is the great man’s 74th championship game in charge and the authority he commands has probably never been stronger. His heart operation last year was a health scare but the admiration for him meant few were going to probe him on the matter. Within his own group, he has dealt with Shefflin and Tommy Walsh this year no different to older players like Eddie Brennan and Charlie Carter in the past. Look at how he’s managed others too, such as John Dalton and John Mulhall. A little while back at a press event, a young player was asked an innocuous question about Cody but literally put his hands up and uttered he’d prefer to say nothing. Not because he might regret what he had to say, but he simply felt it wasn’t his position to comment on the manager.
Kilkenny are synonymous with words like catch, pass and shoot but hook, block and tackle are their bread and butter. According to Christy O’Connor, Tipperary bring out the best in them in those departments, their hook-block-tackle number in their last three league games against them for instance averaging around an impressive 26 mark. But in finals, they really up it, hitting the 42 mark in 2006 and 39 against Tipp in 2011. They win games because they work harder.
Privately, it’s a source of bemusement to some officials in Kilkenny that other counties don’t follow their example and concentrate on the one code. The Cats have only been too happy to share their thoughts on underage and competition structures to rivals but perhaps safe in the knowledge that none of them will ever be as far removed from being a dual county as them.
Allow us a little levity. There’s an anecdote, probably been artificially augmented over the years, but it goes that Cody turned away a player from training one night when he noticed he was wearing non-black boots. The truth of the story may be questionable but then when have you ever seen a Kilkenny player not wearing black ones?
It’s a long-standing tradition under Cody at this stage that Kilkenny head away for a couple of days’ training prior to their All-Ireland semi-final when they have won Leinster. For the manager, it’s a means of breaking up the five-week break between the games. They would also have stayed in Carton House the weekend before last to hone preparations for Tipperary.
The likes of Limerick, Waterford and Tipperary, in “Bonner” Maher, have all had army recruits but with a camp in the city Kilkenny has had more than its fair share of officers in their ranks. At the moment, Paul Murphy, Eoin Larkin and Colin Fennelly wear the uniform.
Keeping with the Defence Forces theme, and as a veteran of Kilkenny press nights in Cody’s reign, the only way to describe them is having military precision. That’s little surprise given how many they’ve held since 2000. The same goes for homecoming receptions. It’s long past that Kilkenny cared about releasing such details. Win or lose (but not draw), they’ll be back in Nowlan Park at 6.30pm on Monday.
When sausages were an issue for a Tipperary forward around 2000, nutritionist Noreen Roche was already a couple of years in working with Kilkenny. With the manager, Shefflin and Denis “Rackard” Cody, she has been a part of the group since the outset. Few other camps list their dietician as a backroom member.
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