Kerry gold: A closer look at Kingdom's modest magician Shane Conway
KERRY GOLD: Kingdom talisman Shane Conway from Lixnaw. Portrait by Peadar Drinan
The Zoom call with Shane Kingston is 11 minutes old.
It is the morning of June 9 and after all Covid-related bases have been covered with the Cork hurler, such as stepping off the inter-county hamster wheel during lockdown and return to play protocols, the conversation is energised by talk of Kingston’s UCC teammate, Shane Conway.
The pair were constants in a UCC team that achieved back-to-back Fitzgibbon Cup glory in 2020. Conway, as he nearly always does, top-scored on the February night of their Fitzgibbon final win over IT Carlow, seven frees and two points from play.
This haul brought the Lixnaw man’s tally for the five-game campaign to 0-38 (0-28 frees, 0-1 penalty). But it is not his dead-ball proficiency or the sizable tallies he regularly runs up that has Kingston speaking of Conway with such genuine respect. More the 22-year-old's voracious appetite for the unglamorous - and often unseen - toil.
“Conway is fabulous. I'd have him on my team any day of the week,” Kingston says of the Kerry hurler on whose shoulders so much expectation sits ahead of Sunday’s Joe McDonagh final.
“What epitomises him is that when we were struggling against IT Carlow in the Fitzgibbon final, he moved out the field, picked up a rake of dirty ball and turned the game.”
It is a point picked up and developed by UCC selector Ray Delaney, who keeps his College involvement to the Fitzgibbon Cup. You won’t find the long-serving selector on the line during the Cork county championship. Instead, you’ll spot him in the stand wherever UCC are playing, keeping an eye on the soon-to-be second years who’ll attempt to break into UCC’s Fitzgibbon panel once college resumes in autumn.
For the 2018 Cork SHC semi-final, Delaney was at Páirc Uí Chaoimh to take a look at this young lad from North Kerry who captained the UCC Freshers earlier in the year.
“It was the first time I saw him,” Delaney says. “I had heard all this talk about him and then you see him on the pitch, you see the size of him, and you think, 'Jaysus, he is going to get knocked around here’. But you put a hurley in his hand and he is just a magician.
“He is our free-taker the last two years and I would hazard a guess that 40-50% of the frees Shane stands over are for fouls on himself.”
In the aforementioned Fitzgibbon decider, UCC trailed by four with 14 minutes remaining when Mark Coleman sprayed a pass to Conway who was standing roughly 10 metres inside his own 65-metre line.
The feet were quickly adjusted, shoulders opened up, and there followed a monstrous post splitting effort. No question but it was a vital score in wresting momentum from DJ Carey’s side.
“There were times where you’d nearly be saying, would you stay in close to goal and we’ll get the ball in, but he’s not afraid of hard work.
“I've been involved with UCC since approximately 2012. We have had forwards of the calibre of Seamie Harnedy, Conor Lehane, Dan McCormack, Pauric Mahony, and Shane Bourke. If Shane Conway was available in any of those years, he would have made any of those teams.”
John ‘Tweek’ Griffin was captain on the last occasion Kerry won hurling’s second-tier championship - then the Christy Ring Cup - in 2015.
His relationship with Conway began as that of coach and player. And a successful one it was too, a smattering of minor and U21 county championships collected in the middle of the last decade.
These days, the pair are teammates on the Lixnaw senior hurling team.
“He always stood out. In primary school, he was selected to play in Croke Park as part of the Mini Sevens in 2011. You knew he was going to be good, but we didn't know how good," says Griffin.
“His profile has really rocketed the last few years with UCC in the Fitzgibbon. Exposure to that level of hurling has really developed him, but he was always going to be a serious hurler because he is a good trainer, has a great attitude, and has got all the skills. The latter was no fluke. A hurley never left his hand growing up.”
Griffin often refers to Shane’s dad, Johnny, as Mr Lixnaw.
“Hurling is everything to him,” he says of Johnny, a passion shared by Shane’s mother, Margaret, and indeed the rest of the family.
“Hurling is just a way of life for them. It was never going to be any other way but Shane out the back of the house with a hurley in hand."
The two-time All-Ireland minor and U21B medal winner has hit 2-35 (0-23 frees, 0-1 ‘65) in Kerry’s four-game journey to the Joe McDonagh final.
That’s an average of roughly 0-10 per outing. His Fitzgibbon average from earlier this year was 0-8 per game, while his contribution in this summer’s Cork county championship - which included 0-14 (0-8 frees, 0-1 sideline) during UCC’s semi-final defeat to Blackrock - was 0-9 per game.
But the same as Kingston and Delaney before him, it is not Conway’s scoring ability that Griffin sees as his outstanding asset.
“If you train with him or watch him closely, he is one of the best tacklers you'll see. He's not the biggest of fellas, but he's a very, very strong tackler.
When the 2019 Fitzgibbon Cup winning UCC team landed into Lixnaw two days after their win, Kerry manager Fintan O’Connor said there was no doubt that at least one local boy would take inspiration from seeing a bus load of inter-county hurlers step onto an open truck at the top of the village.
“When that 11 or 12-year-old sees all these inter-county hurlers arriving in Lixnaw for Shane Conway, they might say to themselves, ‘I’d love to be on that team, I’d love to be Shane Conway’,” O’Connor told this newspaper last year.
Kerry goalkeeper Martin Stackpoole once described Shane as “one in a million”. Nobody spoken to for this piece strayed from that sentiment.
“Shane is a poster boy for Kerry hurling because of his attitude as much as his skill,” says Griffin. “He loves hurling, it is all about hurling for him. The top level, were Kerry to hopefully get there, would suit him.
“You see the impact Jack Fagan [a Meath native] has had for Waterford. If you are good enough, if your attitude is right and if you are willing to put in the effort, geography doesn't matter.”
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