Kilkenny GAA Thread
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wednesday february 16 2022
GAA | DENIS WALSH
Kilkenny have fallen off the pace in recent years, and their road back is long
Denis Walsh
Sunday February 13 2022, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
O
nce the 2015 All-Ireland final was over Croke Park flushed itself quickly, and soon it was a private party. After their lap of honour the Kilkenny players lingered in front of the Hogan Stand, some of them sitting in a loose line on the grass, among the yellow streamers that had trickled back to earth. Richie Power, on his last day in the jersey, pucked a ball with his son, a special guest in his father’s playground.
Just a couple of hundred Kilkenny supporters waited near the mouth of the players’ tunnel, and half an hour after the final whistle the champions left the stage. For Kilkenny, it was their 11th All-Ireland title since the turn of the century, all of them under the baton of Brian Cody. By then, euphoria was a trained response.
Even though it was clear that, in the punctuation of their life together, that group of Kilkenny players was close to a full stop, it was always safer to use a comma instead. A year later, they reached the All-Ireland final again with a reduced team, fattened on core values, and flattened by Tipperary.
Since then, their decline has been met with ongoing, guerilla resistance. Hardly a year has passed without one performance that carried echoes of their glory days, in tone at least. They reached another All-Ireland final in 2019, and pinched a couple of Leinster titles after that, but without the sense that anything was being restored.
Now? They’re stuck: dealing with deficits, scrambling for solutions. After they beat Antrim by two points last weekend Cody described their performance as “very, very average”, which sounded like a pass mark on an ordinary level paper.
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Where can they turn? It is 14 years since Kilkenny last won an U-21 All-Ireland — or U-20 as it is now — their longest fallow run in that competition. Five years ago, they lost a final in that grade to a crack Limerick team, and of the 20 players Kilkenny used that day in Thurles, 13 of them have since appeared in the senior championship, an extraordinary through-put that smells of desperation.
Eddie Brennan, winner of eight All-Ireland medals, was manager of that team and has watched the comings and goings from a distance. “Some of them were brought in for a little while,” he says, “they weren’t good enough, they were let go, and then brought back in. That’s the reality. It’s not finger-pointing at anybody, it’s just saying, ‘This is what we have lads. We have to train them and do the best we possibly can with them.’”
Ballyhale has generously resourced the Kilkenny forward line in recent years, and those players will be available to Cody again after the club championship ended yesterday; but in what state? TJ Reid has been bothered by a persistent groin injury, which restricted him to just one field session in the five weeks between the Leinster club final and the All-Ireland semi-final. None of the magic has left his hands, but the explosiveness in his legs has simply been eroded by time. Reid turned 34 in November, facing into his 15th season with Kilkenny. How much more can he give?
Cody described Kilkenny’s win over Antrim last weekend as ‘very average’
INPHO/BEN BRADY
Eoin Cody, Young Hurler of the Year for the last two seasons, continues to develop into a player of enormous substance, but Adrian Mullen, his predecessor as Young Hurler of the Year, has stalled.
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Richie Hogan, one of the most gifted forwards of the past 20 years, is still on the panel, but to what end? Haunted by bulging discs for years, it is 2017 since Hogan last started in every League and championship match in a season; last year he managed just ten competitive minutes, in the second half of extra-time against Cork.
Hogan turned the 2020 Leinster final with a dazzling cameo off the bench, including an everlasting goal that was a blend of Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi. Maybe Cody is hoping for one more glorious intervention. But Hogan is 33, fighting a mutinous body.
The broader picture is that the production line of high class talent has stopped. The 2014 minor title is the only under-age All-Ireland that Kilkenny have won in the past 14 years. “We stopped producing the Richie Hogans, the TJ Reids, the Richie Powers,” says Brennan. “We always had stand-out players coming through off minor teams — that had under age pedigree and that had under age success — so, that pathway was there. The view in Kilkenny, and it is no secret, would be that we have fallen behind, and perhaps we took our eye off the ball.”
So, they’re chasing the curve. In the county secretary’s report to annual convention this issue was addressed in diplomatic terms. Credit was given to all the talent development work being done, “however, there is also a realisation,” wrote Conor Denieffe, “that other counties continue to raise the bar — originally set by Kilkenny in this area — and that we need to continue to improve our standards accordingly.”
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With that in mind an initiative called the Kilkenny Coaching Project was established last year, under the leadership of Michael Dempsey. He had been Cody’s first lieutenant for 15 years, but he had also headed a major talent development committee in Croke Park, and this is his area of expertise.
One of the criticisms of Kilkenny’s talent development in recent years was that not enough players from the glory years had been re-engaged as coaches. That is being addressed too, and it is understood that Brian Hogan, Paul Murphy and Aidan Fogarty are part of Dempsey’s team.
“The bedrock of the plan is coaching,” wrote Denieffe. “We need to raise the standard of coaching and the standard of coaching sessions. We need to recruit top new coaches where required and continuously educate and improve all coaches.”
Having fallen off the pace, catching up can be a slow and tortuous business, as Cork discovered. For this year, for the senior team, there are no easy answers. Cody held five trial matches in the off-season, a really unusual approach for an inter county manager these days. But he was just double-checking, and triple-checking, in case they had missed somebody. The time of plenty is gone. Every penny is precious now.
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