Kirby happy he answered the call

All-Ireland SHC final countdown: His involvement might look obvious but Gary Kirby didn't see it that way. A top performer on the team of the 1990s as a strong, free-scoring centre forward, he decided at the end of his club career to step away from hurling for five years.

Little more than halfway through this abstinence he gets the call from his uncle and clubmate Richie Bennis, who has decided to take the fire buckets down to the disaster site that was the Limerick team after the 17-point trimming in Ennis and the resignation of Joe McKenna.

"When Richie asked me the week after the Clare match would I get involved," says Kirby, "I actually said 'no'. I had promised my wife Carmel at home that I would take a break of five years. I was three years into it and intended to stick with it. At that stage my working life had changed and I had become a house husband, minding our three young kids at home. The wife actually said to me that it mightn't be a bad idea if I got involved because it would give me a break. The minute she said it to me I was delighted and rang Richie back.

"She has a very responsible job (Limerick County Council chief fire officer) and to be fair I couldn't have done this without her help."

The situation which greeted the new management is well known: what had looked like the most spectacularly squandered underage promise exacerbated by a series of administrative crises and seven management changes in five years, each successive one brought down by further woe.

"No," says Kirby. "It's not a healthy thing. Let's be straight about it. There's been too many managers in the last few years. One of the unlucky ones I felt was Dave Keane, who won three under-21 titles and only got one year at senior. Okay he made mistakes but we all make mistakes and to get rid of him after one year I felt was harsh. You can't just chop and change managers and get success.

"Go back to 1997 and until this year we'd only won two championship matches, both in 2001, and for a hurling county that's just not good enough."

In theory that's fine but after all the panel had been through in terms of off-field fiascos and on-field disaster what did the new management prioritise to achieve the startling turnaround of the past few months? Kirby says that they worked on the players' self-belief, trying to draw out the sort of conviction that had marked many of the under-21 triumphs when matches had been won in the last 10 minutes. The three-match epic with Tipperary in June proved the point.

"First of all when we joined last year we were amazed at some of the things they were asked to do. Some of them were told not to have shots at goal because they can't score.

"Straight away they had no confidence in themselves so the first thing we did was try and get confidence into the players to express themselves the way they express themselves for their clubs. The reason they were picked for the county was the form with their clubs.

"We then had to blend what they had into a team. The biggest challenge was getting the confidence into them. A lot of them, especially the forwards and midfield were at a low ebb. Our biggest problem was getting that self-belief into them."

Kirby is familiar with the problems of translating underage success on to the senior stage. His career included minor and under-21 All-Irelands (1984 and '87) but his generation's senior quest proved heartbreakingly unfulfilled.

Offaly's four-minute fireball in 1994 and Wexford's high-wire act two years later left Limerick tantalisingly short of the MacCarthy Cup. Lessons, he says, that can be applied.

"We were in finals in '94 and '96 and you might think you'd be in more finals so the best thing to draw from it for these lads is that finals don't come around to Limerick too often so when they come around they should go for it."

And they will.