Enda McEvoy: For Brian Cody, good character always came before good hurling

Cody's greatest strength was his ceaseless capacity to send out a team to do a job on a given day. Any given day. Every given day

STEPPING DOWN: Former Kilkenny manager Brian Cody. Pic: INPHO/Laszlo Geczo

If he couldn’t depart in triumph, and in the circumstances a triumph last Sunday would have been the greatest of his career, then at least he departs trailing a strange kind of glory. A cracking All Ireland final, brilliant champions and splendid runners-up. If one has to fail at the last fence, here was the way to do it.

Kilkenny gained more kudos in defeat than they have in many an All Ireland victory. Somebody has to lose, especially against this Limerick team, which in turn means that the manner in which one loses matters. Job done in that regard.

In view of Brian Cody’s longevity, the announcement of his retirement, whenever it arrived, was going to come as a shock rather than a surprise. The rumours, dropping so quickly after Croke Park’s fabulous hurly-burly, were both a shock (itals) and (close itals) a surprise.

If leaving the county in a better position than it was prior to taking the job represents the normal good-manager metric, he smithereened it. He created the GAA’s first modern hyperpower (the Dublin footballers of the past decade were the second). 

Eleven All Irelands and ten National League titles - the latter more than doubling Kilkenny’s haul in the competition pre-Cody – speak for themselves. Sustained success is a manager’s ultimate virtue.

But Cody possessed a raft of secondary virtues, without which there would have been no sustained success, chief among them his ceaseless capacity to send out a team to do a job on a given day. Any given day. Every given day.

That a manager despatches his troops to perform to the best of their ability sounds the simplest thing in the world. It is nothing of the sort.

Only twice in the 116 championship outings of his tenure did Kilkenny fail to get boots on the ground, the 2001 All Ireland semi-final against Galway, and the 2016 All Ireland final against Tipperary. On every one of the other 114 occasions the spirit was willing. If they ended up defeated it was because they weren’t good enough, not because the focus wasn’t right.

Just imagine the thought, the preparation, the planning that went into all of that, time after time. One can barely begin to.

Ensuring that eaten silverware was soon forgotten and convincing his players that they were only as good as their next – not their last – game was another of his skills. 

Ditto his eye for young talent, not least for chaps who hadn’t been feted at underage level but who could be moulded into something bigger. Smart and ambitious lads who had white-collar jobs off the field and blue-collar jobs on it, the kind of rocks on which serial conquerors are built.

Derek Lyng, Brian Hogan, Jackie Tyrrell, Peter Barry. The list is endless. Cody saw something in them that most people, the players themselves included, didn’t. For him, good character always came before good hurling.

The question has frequently been asked, and will continue to be, as to whether others would not have won as many All Irelands given the players he had at his disposal. After all, in Tommy Walsh, JJ Delaney and Henry Shefflin he was blessed with three men who’d make any All-Time Greatest Hurling XV.

Look: yourself and meself would have won a couple of All Irelands with Cody’s four in a row team. But we wouldn’t have won all four and we definitely wouldn’t have come back to make it six in seven or eight in ten.

Nor was it that every member of his praetorian guard arrived fully formed either. Eddie Brennan was transformed from a headless speedster into a netbusting force of nature. TJ Reid was a supporting actor who became a multi Oscar winner.

That the James Stephens man was neither a visionary nor an ideologue, and not much of a tactician either, was a substantial advantage. He wasn’t trying to justify long cherished theories or demonstrate how clever he was. And he was ever, as intercounty managers are, at the mercy of the depth of the local talent pool.

The purchase of Robin Van Persie helped Alex Ferguson win his last Premier League title; Cody couldn’t buy anyone to fill the gaps that appeared in his panels from 2012 onwards. It is not overdoing it to hold that had the domestic conveyor belt churned out young talent in the 2010s at the same rate it did in the 2000s he’d be continuing as manager ad infinitum and Kilkenny would not be MacCarthy Cup-less since 2015.

Part of Ger Loughnane’s motivation in stepping down two decades ago in Clare was that he didn’t want to be remembered “as a Winston Churchill figure – someone who won the war but wasn’t the right person for what came afterwards”. There is no echo of that here.

Yet Cody’s departure now suits everyone. The time has arrived – actually it arrived a few years ago - for a new journey in a new direction. Kilkenny need to rethink the game.

Here’s an obvious question, one that has been invoked over and over again in recent days. Could anyone but Cody have brought the county’s brave but patently limited 2022 iteration so far? Here’s another one. Could anyone but Cody have got them to punch above their weight so manfully, and punch well above it too, when they arrived there?

These are not necessarily rhetorical questions. The first one might in perfect truth be answered thus: “Yes, anyone committed to constructive, heads-up hurling of the kind Kilkenny showed against Galway and Clare.” 

There was less to their performance against Limerick than met the eye. They were praised, and rightly so, for their resilience and mental toughness and the like. But nobody hymned their tactical sophistication or suggested they’d hit Limerick with an unanticipated curveball, and the gameplan in the second half – "Let's put the sliotar down on top of Walter and TJ and see what happens next..." – was as lumpen as might have been anticipated.

It was as though the good habits shown against Galway and Clare had been a mirage. Sometimes spirit isn’t enough.

All of this should worry Kilkenny and none of it will be cured without a new skipper at the helm. Whoever he is he cannot be Cody the Second. He must be himself and he must have his own philosophy, in this case a vision that extends beyond “win your own ball”.

While there is no guarantee the stripey men will be better next year under a manager not called Cody, still less a guarantee they’ll be better in three years’ time under a manager not called Cody, the end of the road was always going to arrive. Now that it has there is something vaguely surreal about it.

He won’t be standing there, being Cody, any more, ever again. The Kilkenny sideline will look denuded. Then again, Lory Meagher retired and Jim Langton retired and Eddie Keher retired and Henry Shefflin retired and life went on. It will do so again.

The timing is handy, however, and in any case the All Ireland u20 success spares the county board a potentially tortuous succession process. The job is Derek Lyng’s to refuse. He won’t.

“This is the proudest I’ve ever been of a Kilkenny team in Croke Park,” Cody declared at Monday’s homecoming. It is not quite the note on which this Mount Rushmore figure would have wished to depart. But it is no bad farewell song either.