All-Ireland SHC Semi-final Interview with Brian Cody: Tom Humphries finds the Kilkenny manager entirely at home with the peculiar pressures and multiple demands of his role

"What's pressure?" he says laughing, but expecting an answer nonetheless. "Where is it supposed to be? How am I supposed to feel it?" He talks about pressure as if it were a disease. You talk about it as if it were filling the air he breathes. His red-cheeked appearance suggests pressure. His environment suggests it.

How is he supposed to feel it? Just inhale.

Managing the hurling team in the most expectant hurling county on earth. Charlie Carter. Brian McEvoy. Denis Byrne. Conor Phelan. Kilkenny playing Tipp in Croke Park in the defining game of the summer. Seventy thousand people. Do these things not add themselves to each other and create the condition which we know as pressure? Brian Cody is kind of interested, in an abstracted, academic way. He leans forward. Hmmm. You could be talking about weightlessness. Or humidity in the rain forest.

He considers this pressure thing. "Well, I don't feel it in the job I'm doing. People talk about it alright. I'd say you feel pressure if you are doing exams and you haven't done the work. That's pressure. Hurling? It's about putting a lot in and preparing well. As a person I don't feel pressure."

Strange. Tomorrow Kilkenny and Tipperary go jousting. All or nothing. One manager will fall off the horse and land on the seat of his pants before tea-time. Michael Doyle, as a first-year manager, has some leeway and has made few mistakes since the landmark pasting against Clare on May 18th.

Brian Cody and his team are judged differently. One-in-a-row teams in Kilkenny are seldom photographed for the Hall of Fame. Should this side bow out in another semi-final as All-Ireland champions there will be inquests. People will wonder were the side suffering from a Charlie deficiency.

The game, all the fuss, the possibility of an ugly aftermath. Do those things keep Brian Cody awake at night?

"Ah no," he says, laughing again as if he has just understood the concept. "It doesn't keep me awake. Absolutely not. No way."

Another man would have cracked by now. Nicky Brennan walked away. Brian Cody's cousin Kevin Fennelly did the same after just a year. Then Cody walked into the Kilkenny job for reasons he's still not precisely sure of and it seems to fit him like an old jacket.

Perhaps he was born for this. Perhaps he was bred to this level of serene implacability. His life as he describes it is surprisingly lacking in turbulence. He was reared just outside Kilkenny under the oxter of the James Stephens club and he has watched as Kilkenny has grown to digest James Stephens or The Village and turn them into a city club.

There were nine Cody children: four boys and five girls. Brian was the fourth in line. Childhood was as you'd picture it.

"I was just always pucking around. No funny stories. Nothing extraordinary, I just always hurled. Everyone pucked around, but none of them were as crazy as me."

His late father was from Thomastown but moved to Kilkenny to become a stalwart administrator for James Stephens. William Cody was a fierce hurling man and, as his son states, his biggest influence as regards hurling from the time he was knee high.

The club was a constant in Cody family life and William was chairman for 19 years, a period which corresponded with a golden age. They won club championships in 1969 for the first time in 34 years and went all the way to a couple of All-Irelands. That was it. Always The Village. Always James Stephens. Always hurling.

Not just the hurling but some of the steadfastness and some of the quiet manner got passed down the line. William Cody must have enjoyed his son's early successes.

"He wouldn't have been falling over me and showering praise upon me. He would have enjoyed it but things went ahead and that was it. You had a job to do, he'd say. You did it. "

In adulthood Brian lives, by his own guess, about 60 yards from where he spent his childhood. You ask him can he imagine a different life, one without the familiar addiction of hurling and the cool reassurance of permanence.

"Like a real person?" he asks, grinning.

"You know what I mean."

"If you're wondering have I been a bit cossetted, maybe. Yeah, maybe I have, but if I had to do it all again now, if I was 20 now I'd go the same way. Playing hurling right now, well it's never been better. The training, that great level of fitness, playing to the maximum of your ability. In a county which has sustained a level of success, in a county where there is no them and us, where everyone wants the same thing. Playing in Croke Park? In that stadium? Playing with your club, the guys you grew up with. They have good profiles, opportunities, chances to make the best of what they have. If I was in my 20s, I'd do the same thing again."

That's the life and the addiction and the force behind it. You could puck around forever or you could sample the electric buzz which comes with big-time hurling. Try it once and you'll never go back. A man can have as much adventure and passion in his life without moving 60 yards from the homestead as a fellow who pirates the seven seas.

Brian Cody can't remember a time without hurling but in hurling he can remember nothing but good times. Defenders are seldom prodigies but Cody came close. Schooled, inevitably, in St Kieran's, he played in schools All-Irelands in 1971 and 1972, winning the first and losing the second. He played in minor All-Irelands for Kilkenny the same years, reversing the pattern by winning only the second.

In the winter of 1972 he was called into the Kilkenny senior team for a league match against Limerick (only, he says, because Bennetsbridge were playing Fenians the same day). He played on Richie Bennis and did "okay, not bad". He went on to sweep the boards. Under-21 All-Irelands, senior medals and All-Ireland club. The full set.

He experienced plenty of good times and a smidgin of bad. In an incident he plays down furiously, he was barracked by a section of the crowd when Kilkenny had come home after losing the 1978 All-Ireland having played Cody as a makeshift full forward. He has said again and again the incident meant nothing to him but you wonder if his impermeability to public opinion has its source right there. Cody isn't one to take opinion polls. What is right is right as far as he is concerned. Yet, he says, he listens to and filters everything.

"The reality is that everybody has something to contribute. I picked many, many Kilkenny teams before I was in this job. They weren't always the same 15 as the fella who had the job of picking it. That's how it is. People don't approach me.

"Everyone knows everyone in Kilkenny and fellas would know me and the kind of fella I am. They talk or they don't talk. That's how it is. I'm doing the job at the moment.

"I said at the time I took the job that the Kilkenny supporters are entitled to expect that their team will be on the field bursting their guts every time. If they don't do that, people are entitled to criticise. If we lose to Tipp, some people will go bananas. Everyone won't be rational. Most people are fair-minded though."

His bottom-line formulation on the matter is that he has "very good players, talented players, and the job is just making sure they play to the best of their ability."

He talks about Tipp, because like most managers he is more comfortable talking into a microphone about other teams and says he has no idea Kilkenny will beat Tipp but knows Kilkenny will be hard to beat.

He sits back and then suddenly clenches his fist: "We'll give ourselves every chance and life will go ahead but god, it'll be a killer if we don't win."

He pauses again and grins. "Mind you, pressure won't be part of that if we lose."

Maybe it won't be part of it but it'll be part of the wash. Paint a picture. A worst-case scenario. Eddie Brennan plays poorly. Denis Byrne comes on for Tipp. Brennan snatches at a late chancefor a win. The ball is cleared. Denis Byrne taps over at the other end and Kilkenny are gone. Work down through several versions of that picture using other likenesses but always finishing with Kilkenny losing. Fairly or unfairly, questions will still be asked. That's Kilkenny.

Losing players, he says, is a hard part of the job but part of it anyway.

With Charlie Carter he never considered himself to be on a collision course, he says. Things just went that way.

"No I didn't think it would be different again. I didn't ever treat it in those terms. You know we have a panel of players. Fifteen play. Fifteen don't. That one case got huge publicity and that's understandable. I have not said one iota of a word to anyone and won't. There's no point, with all due respect. I wasn't essentially involved in the whole thing and I won't get involved now or in the future. We have an All-Ireland semi-final. We have 34 players in training. Three or four won't be on the 30 in Croke Park. They are the only players I can be involved with."

Any regrets about the players who have been lost - Carter, Byrne, McEvoy, etc?

"Since I came into the job there has been a fair turnover of players. You threw a few names out there. All I can say is that the toughest part of the job is telling a player that he is no longer on the panel. If you start, you start, if not you're part of the panel.

"I can never say I feel that sorry for somebody not starting. I don't. Everyone is as important as the next. A fella doesn't make the panel then I'm sorry. But if you are on the panel I consider you as good as the next fella. I'm not going around to a fella who isn't starting and whispering in his ear that he isn't making the first 15 but that I'm fierce sorry for that, because he knows that at any stage he may be needed.

"That's the nutshell version. There are many personalities in a hurling dressing-room and it's easy enough if a few of them don't appeal to you just to minimise your exposure to them and still extract the best from them. Despite all the rumours and the stories invested with the weight of gospel, there was no plan to get rid of anyone. People just had different views about what guarantees they wanted in return for their effort."

Being Kilkenny of course the whole business inflated and every kind of rumour did the rounds. You tell Cody you've heard from several sources that at one stage in the madness John Hoyne had his hands around Cody's neck, trying to choke him. Cody almost asphyxiates himself laughing.

"Why do I never hear these things. John Hoyne!" "Yeah." "Oh boy. If he was here now he'd enjoy hearing that. Phew! Boy!" "Not true then?" "Sorry. You'll have to rule out that one. I don't tend to hear these things. I hear the odd thing but that one is so good I should have heard it somewhere. No, John Hoyne did not do that to me."

Far from feeling pressure, you can tell he is looking forward to Sunday the way a child anticipates Christmas. The hurling is ever a treat. You have an image of him pegged in your brain since this time last year. Kilkenny have just beaten Tipp in a semi-final that suggests a new and keen rivalry has been born. Cody is leaning against a wall in a room below Croke Park, smiling and still tasting it, describing the sense of helplessness on the line while the ball swept up and down the field as the game assumed majestic elegance. It took his breath away.

You sense he is glad of Tipp's emergence. As a player he could have been forgiven for thinking all opposing teams wore red. He played Cork. Almost always Cork: two Colleges finals, two minor All-Irelands, the senior All-Irelands of 1978, 1982 and 1983, the under-21 All-Ireland of 1975.

Growing up he'd admired and feared Tipp in equal measure. He was brought to Croke Park for the first time for the All-Ireland final of 1963 to see Kilkenny beat Waterford. In his innocence he thought that was what Croke Park was for, to see Kilkenny beat teams in big games.

Then Tipperary emerged and filled his imagination. He had a soft spot especially for Jimmy Doyle. He watched through the 60s as Tipp pillaged the silverware but by the time he himself came to play, Tipperary had disappeared.

"Tipp came along in the 60s with that team and they scared me. They still do. After that we used to travel in hope to Croke Park. Not confidence. Maybe we still do!"

The league games this year have whetted his appetite. There's an edge on it now.

"They were better than us in Nowlan Park. They didn't win by too much. The League final they were definitely better for 45 or 50 minutes. They outhurled us. It was a crazy game. We came back and stole it on them in a way. I mean you don't steal it, the game is for 70 minutes, but they were better for longer. I don't have regrets, but I'd regret losing to Tipp this time."

Of course he does have regrets. The semi-final of 2001 when Galway ambushed them would be one. If there has been a rubicon Brian Cody has crossed as a manager that was probably it. He is torn between playing it down and analysing it.

"First, there wasn't a mad witch-hunt after Galway. The Kilkenny public were fair-minded and it was a bad enough beating, so there was nothing unfair in the reaction.

"It was a learning thing, a terrific education for the reality of intercounty hurling. It's a serious business. We got an education for ourselves. We weren't essentially competitive enough. I don't know if it took me completely by surprise. It's a possibility for any team on any day."

He looks back. There was hubris in the air that summer. Kilkenny never said all those things about their full-forward line in 2001 but the thought that they were one of the greatest lines ever got talked up. Did it get in on the team?

"Anything is possible. A constant barrage of flattery like that? It's hard to get it out of your head. It's part of the build-up. You have to separate that from reality. There's teams out there queuing up to do away with you."

He took defeat hard, But quietly.

"I couldn't look at a video till Christmas. I just didn't want to see it. I thought about the game a lot but I couldn't bear to look at it. I watched it at Christmas and looked at it a few times since. We changed things afterwards but we still picked the best hurlers. We didn't go for bruisers. I didn't become some sort of crazy man overnight.

"People say I became a different person. Not true. Players realised that all of us weren't ready. Players lost All-Irelands in 1998 and again in 1999. They won in 2000 and that was a huge relief. Everyone said you can't stay going. We had to keep going. We got there after three years of tough going. In 2001 we weren't up to it. We came back and pushed it on."

If they lose tomorrow he'll go back to the arms of the summer and reflect that semi-finals are the dark alleys down which champions get done over. He'll cut the grass, tip around the garden. Blow the dust off his old set of golf clubs. Go to a few club matches. He's not a reader and he won't go to the cinema. And he won't watch the video till after Christmas.

"That's it," he says. "There's not much to me really."