This feels like the start of something really big
Serial-winner Shefflin may be heir apparent when Cody decides to call time with the Cats
This feels like the start of something big. Just six months ago Henry Shefflin had his first competitive game as a senior manager. Ballyhale Shamrocks won that match and yesterday won another, the Kilkenny senior hurling final. Henry’s got a winning habit.
Great players don’t necessarily become great managers. The Mayo misadventures of Jack O’Shea, the greatest footballer of all, are proof of that. But Shefflin seems a good bet to transfer high achievement from one sphere to another.
His intelligent and incisive TV performances already suggested he may be as good at thinking about the game as playing it. An air of implacable authority surrounds Henry Shefflin. He is that most precious of commodities, a man who knows what he’s at. You’d always want him in your corner.
At Nowlan Park his home club reaped the rewards of putting him in theirs when they won their seventh title in the last thirteen years. At first glance Ballyhale doesn’t seem the most difficult assignment for a neophyte manager. There’s a certain comfort in being able to put TJ Reid, Michael Fennelly, Colin Fennelly and Joey Holden on a club team sheet.
Yet it was four years since Shamrocks had captured the Kilkenny crown and Shefflin looked to be inheriting a team in transition. Only seven of the starting fifteen from 2014 began yesterday’s game, a remarkable turnover for a village club.
It hasn’t been all plain sailing for the new boss. In the semi-final outsiders Erins Own led Ballyhale by two points in injury-time before a goal from Evan Shefflin, the manager’s nephew, rescued Shamrocks. It was a cruel blow for Erins Own, who’ve never won a senior title. In their absence once mighty Bennettsbridge, languishing at junior level just four years ago and making a first senior final appearance since 1974, assumed the role of sentimental favourites.
But Kilkenny is the least sentimental of counties and Ballyhale were ruthless in a first half which ended with them leading by ten points and neutrals wondering how Bennettsbridge had got this far. We found out in the second half as two terrific goals in eight minutes by Brian Lannon, a piledriver followed by a perfect overhead connection, cut the deficit to three entering the final quarter.
A fairytale finish seemed possible yet there was a typical calmness about the way Ballyhale re-established control in the final ten minutes. The three-point margin flattered the losers.
No-one played a greater part in Ballyhale’s victory than the man filling the team leader’s role once inhabited by Shefflin. In the fourth minute, as though sensing the newcomers’ nervousness, TJ Reid went for the jugular, cutting through the middle of the defence and firing a fierce shot past Enda Cleere.
It was Reid’s most spectacular intervention but his most memorable was a point he added in the first half. Confronted by a couple of defenders, the number 11 shaped to shoot, then wheeled in the opposite direction to leave them helpless before slotting over the bar. He finished with 1-10, a total halfway between the 0-11 he hit for Kilkenny in the Leinster Championship against Wexford and the 0-15
he scored in the National League final.
Few players have put in a 2018 like TJ Reid. His Kilkenny performances were the perfect illustration of what a seasoned player owes to younger comrades. Yesterday he shouldered the burden of an inter-county star on a club team with equal grace. Ballyhale’s final score, a long free which Reid converted after earning it with a soaring catch in a crowd of players, had the emphatic quality of a full stop placed at the end of a great work by a writer of genius.
Yet club titles also depend a great deal on players unfamiliar to the national audience. One moment midway through the second half summed this up perfectly. Bennettsbridge had got to within three when a dangerous high ball was lofted towards the Ballyhale square. Liam Blanchfield, big, strong and excellent in the air, arrived in hot pursuit but keeper Dean Mason advanced, kept his eye on the ball and fielded perfectly just ahead of the Kilkenny forward.
Mason’s clearance then led to the Ronan Corcoran point which stemmed the Bennetsbridge tide and may have been the game’s most crucial score. The keeper is only in his first year out of minor ranks. Moments like this, when boys become men, are what keep clubs like Ballyhale rolling along.
This particular victory had a personal resonance for the Ballyhale players. In April 24-year-old team member Eoin Doyle died after a motorbike accident. When captain Michael Fennelly spoke in his victory speech about how the team had brought an extra jersey with them to every game and dedicated the final to Doyle’s memory, the emotion was all the more powerful for the understated way in which it was expressed.
July 11, 1999 is a significant date in hurling history. That day a 20-yearold Henry Shefflin scored 1-6 in Kilkenny’s Leinster final win over Offaly to emerge on to the senior county scene. August 28, 2018 might end up seeming pretty important too.
Brian Cody, who towers over managers as Shefflin did over players, will one day leave the Kilkenny job. There must be worry beside the Nore that Cody’s retirement might lead to the kind of decline which followed Alex Ferguson’s departure from Manchester United or Mick O’Dwyer’s from Kerry. Such men do not come along very often.
Yesterday we may have witnessed the early steps of Cody’s heir apparent, a new Cat king in hurling’s circle of life. Maybe last time Henry Shefflin met Liam McCarthy he didn’t say goodbye. Maybe he said see you later.