THE PREMIER CHALLENGE
Although Brian Cody has kept his thoughts on Tipp to himself over the years, they have been the side most equipped to test and drive Kilkenny’s ambition
TO get to the truth behind hurling’s greatest modern rivalry, you have to look beyond the one constant to find it. One of Brian Cody’s many skills is his inscrutability, the weather-beaten, reddened face might offer some window into his emotions in game-time but when pressed for his thoughts, either pre- or post-match, every word is filtered through a brain that doesn’t hold prisoners to fortune.
Unless, of course, there is something he wants to get off his chest, as in the manner he rounded on RTÉ’s Marty Morrissey after the latter quizzed him on the dubious nature of the decisive penalty that swung the 2009 All-Ireland final Kilkenny’s way, or his critical analysis of Barry Kelly for his performance in officiating the drawn 2014 decider.
But, in the main, Cody is not in the habit of venting his emotions to facilitate headline writers.
It is a pity, because his view on what he really thinks of Tipperary – other than the obligatory praise that they are a ‘savage’ team – would surely illuminate and educate.
Whatever he thinks of them, there is little to wonder about what they think of him.
He is the thorn in their side and while they may have got some relief of late – it is now six years and counting since Kilkenny last beat their Tipperary neighbours in the Championship ball – it will always feel too little, too late.
In Cody’s 22 years in charge, he has played against them 11 times, effectively every other year, winning seven, drawing one and losing three.
Except that is not how it was early on, with only ancient history and geographical intimacy lighting any fires when Cody dismissed Tipperary with consummate ease in backto-back All-Ireland semi-finals in 2002 and ’03.
The rivalry only became deep and personal when Liam Sheedy took on the Premier County in 2008.
The spark between the teams ignited the following year. Kilkenny’s five-goal trimming of Sheedy’s team in a National League fourth round encounter made a mockery of claims that Tipperary were a coming team after winning the competition in Sheedy’s first season.
But while Tipp relinquished that League title to the Cats after extra-time when the sides met again in that year’s thrilling one-score final (226 to 4-17) in Thurles, they revealed they had the stomach to go with their swagger.
It set the tone. They would meet for the next six summers in a row and, with the exception of 2013 when they faced off in the qualifiers, reduced the championship to an absorbing, intense dance-off between the game’s two best teams.
But when the fire raged at its fiercest, it was Tipperary who continued to get torched with the exception of the 2010 All-Ireland final.
It could be argued that was the most important one for Tipp to win. It denied Kilkenny in their drive-for-five as Lar Corbett went to town, registering a hat-trick on his way to becoming hurler of the year.
But if that was the deepest cut they managed to inflict on Cody, for it.
And if Cody kept his thoughts on Tipperary to himself, others didn’t – most notably Jackie Tyrrell.
If the late penalty awarded for a foul on Richie Power was decisive in the 2009 final, it was the setting of the physical bar by Tyrrell that reminded Tipp that Kilkenny were not for moving, when he ‘cleaned’ Seamus Callanan with a bone shuddering frontal hit in the opening minutes.
Tyrrell was contrite when reminded of it last year.
‘I hit Séamus Callanan a dirty dig, a lot of people remember it. I definitely regret that. I shouldn’t have done it,’ he recalled.
‘If the referee picked up on it, he possibly could have given me a red card back then. If you did it now, you’d definitely get a red card.
‘It was something that I shouldn’t have done, it was instinctive.
‘I remember Séamie had kind of given Brian Hogan a bit of a dirty dig in a League final in Thurles earlier that year and he dislocated
Hogey’s shoulder and I always remembered it.’
And that is the thing about Cody or Kilkenny, they never forget.
Whether that is a refereeing performance, like Kelly’s, which they perceive to have been tinged with injustice or the sight of someone dancing on their graves, they aren’t prepared to let it pass.
While we don’t know what Cody truly thinks of Tipperary, his James Stephen’s club colleague Tyrrell had no such scruples about being open and transparent in his 2017 autobiography, The
Warrior’s Code.
As he watched the Premier celebrate on the steps of the Hogan
Stand in 2010, Tyrrell was convinced thatt squad member Pat Kerwick’s rendition of Tipp anthem The Galtee Mountain
Boy, was directed for Kilkenny ears as much as their own.
‘It was just typical Tipperary,’ recalled the former defender.
‘They win one All-Ireland and they think they have it made. You almost felt that they couldn’t help themselves, that they were teeing themselves up to allow us to eat them alive. And we routinely did.
‘We could beat them 10 times in a row but we felt it still never instilled any humility in the hearts and minds of Tipperary people.
‘If they beat us once, they’d act as if they had been thrashing us for a decade. Tipperary just have this unbelievable ability to gall the hell out of us…
‘No matter what they did, no matter how much talent they had, we always felt we had more men.
‘We just felt that if a Kilkenny player and a Tipperary player went into a room to sort out their differences, the Kilkenny fella would always walk out after having put the Tipp fella on the floor.’
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
One tribe’s song of joy can turn into a poisonous taunt when the listener is already hell bent on gaining revenge.
Tyrrell’s view of Tipp would be a shared one, even if he was rooted in the fundamental side of the Kilkenny religion. He liked to reference his uncle-in-law, John ‘Spud’ Murphy, whose intolerance of all things Tipperary went beyond the hurling field.
He claimed that Murphy, a mechanic, would refuse to work on a machine with a Tipp registration and while that was most likely a gross exaggeration, his uncle’s response to Tyrrell drinking Tipperary Spring Water in his company was less so.
‘Johnny went nuts when we handed the bottles to him. “What did ye bring that sh*** here for? Pour it down the drain,’ joked Tyrrell in his autobiography.
“With Kilkenny
and Cody, they never forget”
“Cody wanted
the game to be kept simple”
Laughs aside, Tyrrell’s disdain for the Premier’s new found status of champions ran deep and when Kilkenny were told to comply with sporting practice and from a guard of honour to applaud Tipp onto the field at the start of the 2011 League, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
They would set the record straight at the end of that year, when they beat Tipperary by four points in the final, but in losing in a competitive final, Tipperary still could peddle the line they were Kilkenny’s equals.
Twelve months later, though, that argument was made redundant.
The beauty, and this undoubtedly added to Kilkenny’s satisfaction, was that it was not a result of anything they did, but simply as a result of getting inside Tipperary heads.
Sheedy’s departure in the aftermath of the 2010 final victory left Declan Ryan and Thomas Dunne to pick up the baton and despite losing the 2011 final, it looked as if would be business as usual.
But as the hype cranked up in the build-up to the 2012 semifinal, their minds became so muddled that they came up with the craziest match-up in GAA history.
Two years after Corbett had riddled Kilkenny for three goals, he was instructed to go out and mark Kilkenny’s talismanic wing-back Tommy Walsh.
‘Once we got a run on Tipp, we mowed them down. It was the same old Tipp again – shaping and hiding behind their bu ****** . They hadn’t the balls to come out and take us on man for man,’ recalled Tyrrell.
Few in Tipperary would argue differently as the sight of their best forward running around the pitch trying to get away from Tyrrell, so he could mark Walsh.
Tyrrell, whose obsession with Corbett extended to having his photograph as his screen-saver so that every time his phone rang the Tipperary star would be staring back at him, simply could not make sense of it.
‘It was crazy, a forward wanting to mark a back. It was like we were on a different planet, playing a different game.
‘Poor oul Pa Bourke didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do either. The two of us were kind of looking at each other. It was very hard to concentrate. Do I look where the ball or where my man is? It was just a total meltdown and the four of us didn’t know what to do. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes. Here’s Lar Corbett, former hurler of the year, he could beat us nearly on his own if he got a few balls and he’s more interested in tucking in to Tommy and distracting him. ‘Pa wanted to mark me. I wanted to mark Lar. Tommy wanted to mark Pa. I still don’t know what sense it made. ‘I remember at one stage, a ball was coming up our right wing, Pádraic Maher had it, and Lar wasn’t even looking where the ball was coming, he was looking where Tommy was,’ recalled Tyrell. Walsh concurred when recalling the bizarre match-up that saw two Tipperary forwards – Bourke the other – literally turn their backs on the ball to pick up Tyrrell and Walsh.
‘I was marking Pa Bourke and I was obviously following him and Lar was following myself trying to stop me hurling and it was just a massive mistake, I felt, for Tipperary.
‘He couldn’t get on the ball with the tactics that Tipperary was employing so it was frustrating but there were no real verbals.
‘The only verbals that were going on were between me and Jackie. He just kept telling me to look at the scoreboard and forget about it.
‘They should have backed Lar Corbett, whether it was Jackie Tyrrell marking, whether it was JJ (Delaney), whether it was Paul Murphy, he would bring them into the edge of the square, man-onman, and took him on because Lar could destroy you in a second.’
But instead Tipperary got destroyed – they lost by 18 points with Ryan and Dunne paying for it with their positions.
Corbett paid as well, going from hero to zero with fans, even though he was merely staying true to the instructions of his management team.
There was a strange kind of logic at play, explained Corbett in his autobiography.
‘We decided as a group that if they were going to focus on stopping me from hurling, we would fight fire with fire.
‘Our plan was simple enough. Jackie would go looking for me as usual and Tommy Walsh would look to mark Pa.
‘But I would roam across the field to Tommy’s wing. It would mean the four of us were going to be bunched together – and Pa would be given the job of dictating where we ran to – but it could free up space for our other forwards,’ explained Corbett.
Perhaps one of the reasons it did not work – in one final surreal twist to the tale – is that the top secret plan was shared with only a few of the Tipperary players, which only added to the ridicule that awaited.
‘I wanted off that field as soon as I could,’ recalled Corbett.
‘I headed to the dressing-room with the intention of staying there as long as possible in the hope everyone else would have left the stadium before me. I was never as low.’
And that is what happens when you try to complicate a game which Cody has always argued is best viewed – and played – when it’s kept simple.
It is not hard to imagine, as he watched the chaos that unfolded that afternoon, Cody was dancing his own jig inside.
Some days don’t need words and this was one of them.