Hiding in plain sight: Patrick Horgan and TJ Reid are pushing back the scoring boundaries

They’re out there, hiding in plain sight. Two of the supreme hurlers of the age, chasing each other up their own private mountain. Patrick Horgan is the leading scorer in the history of the hurling championship, sitting on a total of 590 points. TJ Reid is on 580. The closest current player to them is Seamus Callanan, all the way back on 338. The pair of them are off out in deep space, everyone else is earthbound.

Almost nobody knows this is happening. The GAA’s glaring lack of the sort of record-keeping that is the lifeblood of every other sport on the planet means that Horgan and Reid are running a race with virtually no spectators lining the route.

There’s no list on the GAA website, no table or drop-down menu to keep track of this stuff. There’s only the meticulous work of amateur statisticians like Carlow’s Leo McGough and Sligo’s Pádraig Ferguson to keep the rest of us some way informed. It is thanks to McGough in particular that the numbers backboning this article are available at all.

All of which does a grave disservice to what is an incredibly rare moment in hurling history. Since 1955, only six men have held the scoring record. It passed from Nickey Rackard (who finished on 271) to Christy Ring (305) to Eddie Keher (439) to Henry Shefflin (565) to Joe Canning (567) to Horgan (590 and counting). Depending on how the fixtures pan out over the coming months, it’s entirely feasible that Horgan and Reid could pass it back-and-forth between each other, sometimes on the same weekend.

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It could easily have happened last Sunday, in fact. Reid scored 0-9 against Galway in the early afternoon match to bring him within two of Horgan. Only for a missed penalty against Westmeath the previous week, he’d have taken ownership of the record, at least for an hour or two. Indeed that Westmeath game had already seen him skip over both Shefflin and Canning in the space of one afternoon.

As it stands, Horgan’s 0-8 haul in the late Sunday game against Waterford has pushed him on to 22-524 and within 10 points of becoming the first hurler to cross the 600-point threshold. That he will presumably do so at some stage in the 2023 championship carries a pleasing symmetry as July will mark the 70-year anniversary of the first hurler to pass 200.

Kilkenny’s Jim Langton – who had himself taken over the scoring record from Mick Mackey in 1951 – broke through the 200-point barrier in the 1953 Leinster final win over Wexford and finished his career the following year on 16-159 (207). Ring was the first past 300, clearing the bar in the 1961 final loss to Tipperary before finally walking away on 33-206 (305) a year later.

These are the gods of the game we’re talking about. Mackey, Langton, Rackard, Ring and Keher all appeared on the Team of the Century in 1984. It was Keher who sent the scoring record stratospheric through the 1960s and ‘70s.

He was the first hurler to pass 400 points, eventually ending up on 35-334 (439). He was the first to raise more than 300 white flags. He scored 17-201 from frees alone. When he retired in 1977, Keher was 144 points clear at the top of the all-time scoring charts. He was so far ahead of everyone else, the player who would catch him hadn’t even been born yet.

That was Shefflin, who took over the record in 2010 and strapped it to his rocket, lifting it to further heights. According to McGough, Shefflin was the first player in the game’s history to pass 500 points, the first to raise 400 white flags, the first to score more than 300 points from frees.

The game is on fast-forward these days, of course. It took 33 years for anyone to pass Keher. Within a decade, three have already overtaken Shefflin. Canning, Horgan and Reid have all been at the vanguard of an era where there are (a) more games and (b) more scores in those games. Shefflin was the leading scorer in the 2006 championship with a total of 2-47 (53). Reid top scored in 2019 with 5-83 (98).

And yet for all that the general tide has risen, Horgan and Reid are massive outliers. Callanan is 242 points behind Reid going into this weekend and is at least as close to the end of his career as the other two are to theirs. Ditto Neil McManus, who is another 16 further back and is 35 years old.

Maybe Aaron Gillane, on 11-215 (248) and still just 27, could have a shot at catching them. If he plays, say, another seven seasons after this one and racks up an average of, say, 55 points a championship and never gets injured, then it could happen. But it’s unlikely anytime this side of 2030.

And who’s to say where Horgan and Reid will have left it by then? Injury-permitting, they’ll both pass the 600-point mark in the coming weeks. Horgan was the first to pass 500 white flags, something Reid will presumably follow him in doing so this weekend.

The point is, these two are pushing back the boundaries of what the sport has ever imagined possible. Not alone that, they’re doing it at the same time, game by game, week by week.

The least hurling should be doing is making a fuss of them as they do so.

All-time Championship scoring list

590 Patrick Horgan (Cork) 22-524

580 TJ Reid (Kilkenny) 28-496

567 Joe Canning (Galway) 27-486

565 Henry Shefflin (Kilkenny) 27-484

439 Eddie Keher (Kilkenny) 35-334

431 Eoin Kelly (Tipperary) 21-368

415 Damien Casey (Tyrone) 14-373

368 Paul Braniff (Down) 27-287

368 Ruairí Convery (Derry) 19-311

338 Seamus Callanan (Tipperary) 39-221

Still playing: Neil McManus (Antrim) 17-271 (322); Tony Kelly (Clare) 9-283 (310); Aaron Gillane (Limerick) 11-215 (248); Lee Chin (Wexford) 5-198 (213)