GAELIC GAMES:His excellence and reliability is often taken for granted but the Kilkenny ace stands on the cusp of scoring his 300th championship point from placed balls, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

THE BROTHER was better, of course. Ain’t it always the way? Or if he wasn’t ultimately better, he was the one who caught the eye at the beginning. John Shefflin was man of the match in the 1990 All-Ireland minor final replay, stitching three points against Cork. But for the purposes of this yarn, John is a MacGuffin.

The story goes that a Kilkenny selector dropped by chez Shefflin during that campaign to check in. The chat was easy, the conversation light, interrupted only by the odd stray thud against the back wall. Out there, pucking away off left and off right was 11-year-old Henry. Just him and the ball and his two sides. Nobody yet, just somebody’s little brother.

The sun will set, the sun will rise and at some point tomorrow afternoon John Shefflin’s kid brother will click past another one of those milestones that only his career alone has even seen on the horizon – Shefflin sat out training Wednesday night but is expected to be fit for the game. A Waterford player will lay down too hefty an early marker, Barry Kelly’s whistle will go. Henry Shefflin will stand, look, lift and strike and will become the first hurler to amass 300 championship points from placed balls.

That’s 53 more than the next man, Eddie Keher, and 60 more than the next man still swinging a stick, Eoin Kelly (see table, below). Everyone else is an ocean back. As long as the game has been played nobody has scored more or, crucially, averaged more from frees and 65s.

Yet it’s taken for granted. Talk to anybody about what makes Shefflin great and they’ll get a fair distance down the list before free-taking comes up.

They’ll talk attitude and leadership and decision-making, ability to bring others into play and set up goal chances. But his free-taking is just there, hidden in plain sight. He takes them, he scores them. No biggie.

Keher has been watching him score frees and 65s since he came through at under-21 level. Famously, he wasn’t much of a minor and Keher kept an eye out principally because he and Henry Shefflin Snr were in the same year at St Kieran’s. For close on three decades, nobody came within 100 points of the 16-199 Keher racked up from frees. The sliotar goes farther now and the pitches are better too so he isn’t overly surprised the current generation are catching up. But still only one has passed him. Keher has enjoyed most of Shefflin’s gaiscí in the flesh.

“Henry’s feet are the same distance apart all the time,” he begins by way of describing the technique. “Eoin Kelly has a very wide stance, which I always found difficult to do because you’re depending on the ball coming up okay for you. If it doesn’t, you’re left with very little room for manoeuvre.

“Henry’s stance isn’t as wide as that but he lines himself up with his shoulders pointing to the target. He jab lifts the ball and lifts it high enough to able to come through with a long, follow-through swing.

“But the principal thing with free-taking is that you have to practice, practice, practice and Henry does it all the time. I see him before training, after training and plenty of time away from training. What that does is it means he’s always comfortable going into a match. It’s the number one priority. A free-taker needs to stay sharp. You need to be practising right up to the game. I know Kilkenny’s last training session is on Friday night but I would be amazed to find that Henry wasn’t off with a bag of sliotars somewhere on Saturday practising frees on his own.”

Through the years, Shefflin’s free-taking been a constant. The first time it mattered properly was the All-Ireland Under-21 final against Galway in 1999. Kilkenny hadn’t won an All-Ireland title at any grade for five years and had just lost the senior decider by a point to Cork the previous Sunday. Had Galway beaten them that day, it would have been a sixth All-Ireland final defeat in a row between minor, under-21 and senior. But Shefflin won the free-taking duel with Eugene Cloonan and his eight points was the ballast that kept them afloat in a 1-13 to 0-14 win.

“His frees were vital to us winning that All-Ireland,” says Richie Power Snr, who was over that side. “We wouldn’t have done it without him. He was deadly accurate because of all the practice he was doing. I would honestly think myself that the most important thing for him over the years was practice and plenty of it. To be so successful, he spends a lot of time practising outside of training.”

For Keher, the constant need to practice isn’t anything to do with being able to physically pick a spot and hit it. Shefflin crossed that bridge a lifetime ago. It’s more that he finds himself shuffling from a fresh deck when he steps on the pitch. No clutter, no worries.

“It’s to stop the doubt coming in. The day you stop practising is the day you start doubting yourself. If you have it in your head that you missed a day’s training or you had a spare hour that you could have used but didn’t, it can plant a seed of doubt in you during a game. It becomes like golf, it’s a mind game at that stage. Free-taking is a test of the mind as much as anything else.”

Shefflin’s body has tested his mind to infinity and beyond. From shedding what was a considerable amount of puppy fat to coming out the other side of two cruciate operations, there have been sloughs to rise up out of. Through it all, the tick-tock of scored frees has barely missed a beat.

“He must have found it difficult after coming back from this injury to get his free-taking back to the point where it was before,” says Keher. “The important thing with taking frees and striking in general is having strength in your legs so that you can have solidity beneath you. That must have been a part of his recovery that he’d have been nervous about. But he’s obviously coped terrifically with it.”

That he has. Six frees and two 65s against Wexford, seven frees from a total of 1-9 against Dublin. Relentless, monotonous, routine. Inside their heads the opposition know that to give away a free is to give away a score. Pushing back the boundaries of what 128 years of history have assumed was possible.

If that sounds like over-egging the pudding, consider this. Shefflin is just 18 points away from being the first man to reach 500 overall at the age of 32. Ring played for a decade after 32.

He’s Neil Armstrong. And the rocket’s still rising.