Henry Shefflin the Great, hurling’s complete package
He would not be ornamenting his last (probably) Croke Park appearance with a last-minute goal.
Did it matter? Of course not. Did the incident say something about the great man nevertheless? It did. The chance came about because, though Ballyhale Shamrocks were 12 points up and well home and hosed, Shefflin hadn’t clocked off. Still chasing, still harrying and now hunting down a loose pass in the Kilmallock defence to force the turnover and set up a move he was an inch or two away from rounding off. In everything but the touch on the trigger it was purest Shefflin. The king who doubled as a manual labourer. Pulling switches, digging ditches. Working on the railway.
Even up to the last 48 hours yesterday’s announcement appeared no given. He had a full winter’s training behind him and was fitter than he’d been for years. Why not, a substantial school of thought argued, give it one last shot? In the finish common sense prevailed.
All political careers may end in failure; all hurling careers do not. It is given to very few players to decide when to leave the stage. How apt that the most successful hurler of them all devolved to himself the right to choose his own moment of departure.
As always, a sublime decision maker.
Never say never, obviously, but ten All-Ireland senior medals, all on the field of play, is a haul that will surely endure. No less importantly to the man, he is the possessor of three All-Ireland club medals, proof that he and his generation in Ballyhale gloriously upheld the honour and heritage of the club by replicating the feats of the previous cohort. After Croke Park nine days ago there were no more worlds left for him to conquer.
He was the alpha male, the supreme hunter gatherer, perhaps the last of the warrior kings. Had he known his hurling when he came to make The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson couldn’t possibly have chosen anyone else to portray Aragorn.
Shefflin was simultaneously the battalion commander, invariably first over the top and into battle, and the field marshal. The older he got the more he seemed to exist in an extra dimension inaccessible to lesser mortals. It was as though he was both in the trenches and at the same time viewing the action from somewhere among the clouds above. What was a field to others was a chessboard to him.
The 2001 All-Ireland semi-final against Galway was the first time a championship match bypassed him. It was also the last time. When Kilkenny were beaten thereafter it may have been on days when Shefflin was indifferent but it was never on days when he was irrelevant. Through force of will and determination – it was nothing to do with skill or even size – he made himself the axis on which the team spun.
Occasionally he even made himself relevant by making himself irrelevant. A lesser or more insecure player might have taken Waterford’s disarray in the 2008 All-Ireland final as a pretext to go to town on them but Shefflin, never one to obtain his kicks from the prospect of a turkey shoot, was content to do no more than his bit when no more than his bit was all that was called for.
What’s even more impressive about his scoring stats as a consequence is that they weren’t artificially supplemented by riddling holes in corpses. As for the bad days, there were afternoons when Shefflin’s powers didn’t suffice. Naturally. Inevitably. This was rarely due to a failure on his part to bring them to bear, however. In the second half of the 2004 All-Ireland final it was the Ballyhale man who forced Dónal Óg Cusack into the save that, if it didn’t turn the match — Kilkenny’s boat was irreparably holed already – then categorically killed it as a going concern. If nothing else he’d got into the right place to force Cusack to react. Shefflin. Not someone else.
It may seem odd, even obtuse, that the finest Kilkenny score of the age did not involve a single touch from the finest Kilkenny player of the age. Still, there was good reason for that. Richie Hogan’s goal against Tipperary in the 2011 All-Ireland final came about partly because Shefflin was keeping Pádraic Maher company miles away under the Hogan Stand. That was echt Henry, a man not mastered by the compulsion or the misplaced ego to insist on doing everything by himself, grandmastering matters from wherever he chose to take up station. A 15-man game and he didn’t forget it. Only by a quirk of spelling was there an i in Shefflin.
Or take the 2007 All Ireland club final against Loughrea. He attempted a point early on and missed. That was it from him in a shooting sense that day, not because his head had dropped – Shefflin’s head never dropped – but because he’d worked out that the Ballyhale cause was best served on this occasion by him spending the afternoon navvying. So he ran and harried and hooked and blocked and tackled and took the frees and didn’t assay another shot from play at goal, and it was Michael Fennelly who ended up with the man of the match award. Loughrea had a guy called Johnny Maher playing centre-forward the same afternoon. Ballyhale had Johnny Marr.
The cameo against Kilmallock was no bolt from the blue. More than one Waterford player has with admiring chagrin testified to Shefflin’s relentlessness in the closing stages of the 2008 All-Ireland final, contesting – and arguing over – every ball long after the match had been transformed into a rout. Again, it wasn’t because Shefflin wanted more scores for himself; it was simply an illustration of his supreme competitiveness. The next ball was the only ball that mattered, regardless of what the scoreboard said.
No modern player was blessed with a more sophisticated conception of space. Dangerous as he was with the sliotar in his hand, he was frequently even more dangerous without the sliotar in his hand. “His strength, his pace, his movement,” someone who knew him well declared recently.
“The whole package. One minute you’re beside him and the next minute he’s 30 yards behind you waving his hand for the pass. The pinnacle.”
The speaker? Oh, merely JJ Delaney.
Brilliance is not a synonym for greatness. There have been wristier hurlers. There have been faster hurlers. There have been more skilful hurlers. There have been hurlers who struck the sliotar more sweetly. Of the men he played with, at least three — Cha Fitzpatrick, Richie Power and DJ Carey — had more in the way of liquid stickwork.
DJ was by some distance a more electrifying player while Eddie Brennan was faster than Shefflin and had a harder belt on a ball. Elsewhere of his contemporaries Eoin Kelly was as dead-eyed a freetaker if not more so and Joe Canning more of a power hitter.
But Shefflin aggregated all these virtues into the one person. If he wasn’t a ten in any box bar the ones marked competitiveness and freetaking he was a nine in every other box. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghoster into Areas Unseen by His Marker. And if his personal showreel is rather less exciting than Carey’s and contains nothing like the same number of “whoa, dude” moments, what of it? It’s a three-hour movie all the same.
His scoring statistics tell some of the Shefflin story but only some. The 11 All Stars, eight of them in succession, add footnotes. He was that consistently good for that long; there were no fluctuations in form and, bar 2005, no bad years. Yet no one stat reveals more about the man than the 62 consecutive championship appearances in the space of 14 seasons. Never injured, never dropped, never anything other than Henry Shefflin. Christy Ring was around the place for 22 championship seasons; this was a pretty fair approximation in modern, non-dog years.
Did we see any of it coming? One of the few people entitled to claim he did is Joe Dunphy, who was among the random punters and admirers upstairs in the Set in Langton’s yesterday for the press conference. In a previous life Dunphy was for many years the principal of Ballyhale National School, and driving home to Thomastown every evening between Easter and the summer holidays the same tableau caught his eye as he passed the Shamrocks GAA grounds.
Henry and Paul Shefflin had run home, jettisoned their schoolbags and were now hurling away between a pair of junior goalposts. Defending one minute, attacking the next minute, keeping goal the minute after that. Dunphy had already taught two All-Ireland-winning captains in Liam and Ger Fennelly. Did he cherish the hope that here, in chrysalis and far from a gorgeous butterfly, might be a third?
Around the same time John Shefflin, one of the elder siblings, was on the Kilkenny minor team. One of the selectors made it a habit to pay the occasional visit to Shefflins’ to see how he was doing. He’d find John out in the field pucking around with Paul. Down the far end of the field, practising his frees from both sides, was Henry. Aged 11.
His first appearance at Croke Park ended in All-Ireland glory in the 1996 colleges final. He lined out at top of the right and scored a point from play. While his was a decent performance in view of the fact that he’d been an injury doubt, if he hadn’t passed a fitness test St Kieran’s would have found someone else.
He was big, yes, which is always handy at that level, but he wasn’t a fulcrum and he wasn’t required to be. The following year at the same venue he had a bad day for Kilkenny in the Leinster final, a game that has become noteworthy only in retrospect. In the there and then Shefflin hadn’t been expected to win it on his own because he was no superstar and very few people suspected he might be.
Maybe that was the nub of it. Not only was he not too good too young, he had the sense to realise it and the desire and determination to improve. The only way Shefflin proved he was better than the rest was by showing it time and time again. He didn’t live off his back catalogue. He kept producing the hits.
All at once he both had an ego – he knew perfectly well who he was and off the field had an unmistakable aura about him – and was entirely egoless. With the media he was engaging, amusing and able to speak fluently without ever revealing anything of substance. When he suffered a frightening eye injury in the 2004 championship from a blow he was far from happy about he had the nous to say a few polite meaningless words, park the issue and move on.
It is striking, by the by, the frequency with which the word “gentleman” has featured in the tributes paid to him. Does it really need saying that that matters too, and as much as — if not more than — the medals? Mai and Henry Senior raised a son to be proud of in many, many ways.
Waterford IT educated him, honed him, tautened him and transformed him from a lump of a young lad into something resembling an athlete. The summer of 1999, his debut championship with Kilkenny, was when it all changed. Give me a choice between DJ Carey and Shefflin, Ger Loughnane announced midway through the season, and “I’d take Shefflin — he’ll score a lot of goals before he’s finished.”
Around the same time the late Tom Williams, Nicky Rackard’s biographer, began to keep a file on Shefflin’s scoring. “If he was a bit faster he’d be the new Mick Mackey,” Williams declared with commendable percipience – commendable because at the time Shefflin was regarded as a fine strapping lad who was good on frees and had given the Kilkenny forward line some much needed help. But the new Mackey? Seriously? “I’ve just a big lanky stride,” Shefflin said. “I spend half my time trying to put my backside in the way.”
It’s interesting to ponder a quote from DJ Carey at Christmas 2000, shortly after Shefflin had won his first All-Ireland senior medal. “Henry’s pure hurling ability is something that not enough people comment on. His size is a great asset, for the team as well as himself. But the skill is the first thing.”
Carey zeroed in on a score of his own in the final against Offaly, created shortly before half-time by a silken Shefflin touch with upraised hurley to stun a delivery from Canice Brennan and deposit the sliotar into the Gowran man’s waiting paw for a collector’s item of a point. “His role in that point took something that again you wouldn’t comment on with Henry. Vision. He had to keep his eye on the ball but he also knew where I was.”
Whatever about Mackey, what about Ring? Far from deeming comparisons with the legends from the mists to be odious – they are certainly and necessarily imprecise – we ought to be happy that a modern player prompts such talk. Legends should not be forgotten; neither should they be employed as a stick with which to beat the men of today.
From everything we know of Ring we can fairly posit that Shefflin was not his equal in terms of pure skill: then again, very few were. If Ring was forked lightning Shefflin was sustained rumbling thunder, and no less ferociously focused or committed either. Comparing the pair actually exalts both of them.
To finish with, two other members of the communion of saints. Think of DJ Carey. The freeze frame is one of him in full quickstepping flight, bearing down on goal with only one thing in mind. Think, older folk, of Eddie Keher – arguably the most fitting touchstone where Shefflin is concerned — and the image is one of him swivelling his hips and putting the ball over the bar from 50 yards, icily and without strain.
Now picture Shefflin. Point after point, yes, and from play as well as frees, but eternally in the centre of the frame, hand aloft, signalling for the pass. Always looking. Always moving. Always wanting. Always Henry.
Aragorn. Sir Lancelot. El Cid. The King.
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