Kilkenny return with a vengeance

ALL-IRELAND SENIOR HURLING FINAL:ANOTHER SEPTEMBER and the scenes in Croke Park are at once familiar and electrifyingly new. How many ways can a team find to express its greatness and collective spirit? With this Kilkenny bunch, the capacity for reinvention seems endless and the desire to win deathless.

Through one game of hurling, Kilkenny seemed to have dodged Time herself. Twelve months after Tipperary broke free with a deluge of goals, the genie is back in its bottle and corked. The scores dried up for Tipp’s vaunted forward line and they did well to keep it at its end total of 2-17 to 1-16.

This was vintage Kilkenny, with scores embroidered with fabulous stick work underlining a performance of controlled and demonic hard work. Yesterday’s win marked Kilkenny’s 33rd All-Ireland victory. It brought an eighth All-Ireland medal for Henry Shefflin, completing a triumphant return after last year’s departure from an All-Ireland loss and a winter spent in lonely rehabilitation from a cruciate injury. Noel Hickey, Eddie Brennan and Michael Kavanagh also claimed their eighth medals.

But as well as the records and honours the day brought a return to what this Kilkenny team has always sought: that feeling that comes with this particular Sunday.

The Rose of Mooncoinhas sounded through dressingroom doors in the vaults of Croke Park on many other Septembers but seldom with the same depth of passion. For most of the last decade, Kilkenny had set the standard.

Yesterday, they came to Croke Park as outsiders: as the team with something to prove. As ever, they did so. You could see it in Brian Cody afterwards, in the incandescent joy with which he watched Brian Hogan lift the Liam MacCarthy Cup. You saw the big man in the black peaked cap raise his arms aloft and you realised that as well as being the most successful coach in hurling history, there will always be something of the boyhood fan about Cody when it comes to Kilkenny hurling.

With every All-Ireland success, Cody has always insisted that it was impossible to categorise those wins and he began to say the same about this latest success before checking himself and admitting to himself as much as to the world just what this comeback meant.

“But if I am being honest . . . this is by far our best achievement, without a shadow of a doubt.”

That is quite an acknowledgement given the decade of magic and steel with which Kilkenny have dominated hurling. Perhaps it was because for all of the secretive sessions down in Nowlan Park and for all of the willingness of the players to leave every ounce there, they couldn’t be sure. After relinquishing the title and the confidence to Tipperary, they couldn’t quite be sure of where they stood. Not the Kilkenny players and not the public.

The mood fell somewhere between guesswork and optimism as to whether the dreamtime might have drifted into the past.

“I wouldn’t be silly or childish enough to say that I knew we were definitely going to win the game,” Cody said. “But I was absolutely certain they were going to perform. You could see it. You could smell it almost . . . It was right. The resolve and attitude and determination and the closing down and hunting and packs. But we hurled with our heads too. We fought like hell to win the ball but when we did we used it very well.”

Transferring that nitroglycerin energy from Nowlan Park training sessions to Croke Park has never been difficult for Kilkenny. The signs were clear from the first 15 minutes as the Noresiders dictated the terms of the match.

Lar Corbett, whose wonderful season ended with a scoreless final, turned in the third minute to find JJ Delaney coming at him with a perfectly timed shoulder which knocked him off stride. Fourteen minutes in and Michael Fennelly thundered into Shane McGrath who coughed up a ball which Richie Power pointed.

Two minutes after that, Tommy Walsh soared for one of those marvellous catches and whipped a ball forward which Shefflin pointed. By then, the champions were trailing by 0-5 to 0-0 and were beginning to understand that a year later, everything had changed.

In Kilkenny’s brightest years, the timing of their goals always seemed designed to drive the dagger that extra inch and so it was here: a swift combination between Shefflin and Eoin Larkin sent Michael Fennelly bursting through to hit the first goal in the 35th minute.

And then in the second half, with Tipperary toiling hard just to stay in touch, they concocted a goal of beauty, with Larkin supplying Eddie Brennan. The supreme poacher of so many of these amber afternoons made a perfect run before flicking a pass to Richie Hogan whose finish – one touch of the hurl and a ball placed with speed and precision perfectly beyond the attentions of Brendan Cummins – was staggering. It was 2-12 to 0-10 and the Cats were everywhere.

“Disappointing day. Absolutely,” said Declan Ryan in grim resignation. “When you prepare as well as these guys have done and don’t bring your A game, it is very disappointing. Hats off to Kilkenny. They were a hungrier team on the day. That is how it looked on the sideline.

“We were lucky to be just five points down at half-time. We re-jigged it a small bit and I think guys did themselves justice in the second half.”

Tipp fought on. Patrick ‘Bonner’ Maher showed ferocious resolve and the rearguard put out several fires. Paul Curran saved Larkin’s 13th minute flick off the line and Michael Cahill made a wonderful block on the same player as he was about to pull the trigger. Pádraic Maher cut out at least three dead clever and lethal Kilkenny passes. But the champions were bailing water.

They tried to reassure themselves that if they kept calm and chipping at the lead that the Kilkenny men would tire and that those goals – so easy all summer – would come. But Kilkenny had different ideas. That frightening honesty was back in abundance and it was intimidating just to watch.

Not long before half-time Colin Fennelly came at a Lar Corbett shot in a black and amber blur. Lar’s hurl broke and Fennelly left to get stitches. Cody stood just on the sideline, metres away and in the afterglow he would remember that exchange.

“Colin Fennelly sprinted and without thinking of life or limb threw himself at it and ended up with a few stitches in his ear. But that sort of attitude: that ball can’t be cleared permeated through the whole team.”

So Fennelly has his first All-Ireland. Shefflin, his Ballyhale team-mate, has his eighth. So it goes with Kilkenny. Those who expected them to fade and spend these autumns reminiscing on the great years have had their answer.

Nothing is ending.