It's perhaps the greatest hurling team ever, but most of them would be unrecognisable to the general public. RONAN MCGREEVYlooks at Kilkenny's masked heroes
BY 5PM TOMORROW evening any lingering doubts about this Kilkenny team’s status as the greatest of all time will be ended if they beat Tipperary to win a fourth successive All-Ireland title. The only team to achieve such a feat before was Cork between 1941 and 1944 at a time when the trains were fuelled by turf because there was no coal and glimmer men stalked the country turning out the lights.
There is truly no comparison between a four-in-a-row won during the years of the second World War and the same achievement in the modern era with its professional levels of fitness and preparation and its back-door qualifying system.
Kilkenny have already won five of the last seven All-Irelands. The players ought to be feted as household names from one end of the country to another, their services in demand for the opening of every supermarket, off-licence and chip shop, their faces on billboards and magazine covers. Instead, the public outside Kilkenny and the hurling fraternity would be hard-pressed to recognise any Kilkenny player other than “King” Henry Shefflin.
Who is Jackie Tyrell, for example, or John Tennyson or Aidan Fogarty? At the age of only 27, Kilkenny back JJ Delaney has won five All-Ireland medals and four All-Stars – he’s a hero in his native Johnston, but would he be recognised on Jervis Street? Off the pitch, corner-forward Eddie Brennan is a garda, but how many people could pick him out of a police line-up? That such a marvellous team is so anonymous in an age of saturation media coverage is a shame. Players on the Leinster rugby team’s bench or Irish soccer players playing in England’s lower divisions are probably better known.
THE PROBLEM BEGINSon the pitch. The GAA's decision to make the wearing of helmets compulsory from January 1st will be important for health-and-safety, but it is a marketing disaster at a time when hurling continues to struggle for relevance outside its traditional hinterland. How can you identify with players if you can't identify them? If you can't see the whites of a player's eyes or the agony and the ecstasy etched on his face, how you can form that bond of empathy between the athlete and his audience which makes sport such a compelling spectacle? Kilkenny players even wear their helmets during the pre-match parade.
Only goalkeeper PJ Ryan and corner-back Michael Kavanagh are helmet-less. Kavanagh will appear tomorrow in his 10th – yes, that’s right, 10th – All-Ireland final.
He’s one of the more recognisable Kilkenny hurlers, but he’s no superstar.
This Kilkenny team is a throwback to the days when GAA players were seen and not heard, did their talking on the pitch, appeared in front of a full house in Croke Park on the Sunday and were back cleaning out cowsheds, or whatever else constituted their day job, on the Monday.
The desire for anonymity starts at the top with the team’s gruff manager, Brian Cody. In an unusually revealing interview with Tom Humphries in this newspaper before last year’s All-Ireland final, Cody was questioned about his public image.
“The public perception of me doesn’t matter,” he said. “Does there even have to be a perception? Just because I am doing this job doesn’t make me any different from the fella down the street, so I don’t feel like I need to have a public persona.”
The fella down the street tends not to be one of the most successful managers hurling has ever seen. Nor is he somebody like Shefflin, by common consent one of the all-time greats, and the only Kilkenny player who is a household name. Shefflin was interviewed a couple of weeks ago by Henry McKean, of Newstalk radio, who had composed a rap in his honour. McKean’s idiosyncratic interviewing style often elicits interesting responses from his subjects, but Shefflin played it as a straight as a free in front of the posts. “Being from Kilkenny, you have to have a level head around here, because family and friends will pull you back fairly quickly. We’re trying to keep our feet on the ground,” he said.
Given his prodigious gifts, nobody would begrudge Shefflin cutting loose and behaving like a big-time Charlie once in a while, but that is not the Kilkenny way.
The players constantly stress the collective rather than the individual (just as well, given the competition for places), their desire to take one game at a time, and their determination never to get carried away with their success or to rise above their station. They are mostly from the put-me-down-for-whatever-I-said-last-year school of GAA media repartee.
Kilkenny’s facility for winning is matched only by their ability never to say or do anything off the pitch which might give some succour to their opponents. While they can be exhilarating on the pitch, they can bore for Ireland off it. Not since the then captain, Charlie Carter, walked off the panel in 2003 after being dropped has there been anything approaching a controversy in the Kilkenny camp. It is all so laudable, and yet so predictable. Not for this team the strikes and ructions that have convulsed Cork hurling.
THE 1990S, which was hurling's miracle decade, threw up the charismatic Clare, Wexford and Offaly teams and a gallery of characters who could talk for Ireland as well as win All-Irelands, people such as Ger Loughnane, Liam Griffin, Anthony Daly, Johnny Pilkington and Davy Fitzgerald, among others. Their popularity transcended the game. There may well be mavericks, mad hoors and compelling characters in this Kilkenny team, but they are not apparent to those who have been following them for the last decade.
Former Leeds United manager Howard Wilkinson was fond of saying he’d rather his players have character than be characters. The sporting public, however, like their sporting characters as much as they like their sporting champions. Egos make sport more interesting.
Faced with the choice, this Kilkenny team would rather have a fistful of All-Ireland medals than be box-office. If an indifferent public is the price Kilkenny pay for a fourth successive All-Ireland, its a price they are happy to pay.
MARTIN COMERFORD
Centre forward
Known as “Gorta” because he was skinny as a child. Childhood sporting hero: Diego
Maradona
MICHAEL KAVANAGH
Corner back
Will appear in his 10th All-Ireland on Sunday, and became a father for the first time this week
RICHIE POWER
Forward
Triple All-Ireland winner Richie is the son of Richie senior (two All-Irelands) and older brother of John, who is on Kilkenny’s minor panel for Sunday
TJ REID
Forward
Showing his entrepreneurial streak, this 21-year-old has already set up his own hurley-making business
EOIN LARKIN
Forward
A soldier who served in Kosovo last year but was hardly in the front line: “Ah sure, we had a
great gym out there – nothing else to do"
TOMMY WALSH
Right half back
Brothers Martin and Padraig are on the under-21 team and minor panel respectively, while sister Grace won a minor All-Ireland with the camogie team