VINCENT HOGAN
Can Brian Cody find a full-back to launch another Liam MacCarthy assault?
Ten of Kilkenny’s 11 All-Ireland wins under the great James Stephens man were delivered with either Noel Hickey or JJ Delaney in situ at full-back. Is he close to finally settling on a new full-time resident at number three in the shape of Conor Delaney or Huw Lawlor?
ON SUNDAY, Jackie Tyrrell was of the view that Kilkenny might finally have found a gatekeeper with the cold prudence to satisfy Brian Cody.
Conor Delaney’s two pickpocket steals on Seamus Callanan in Thurles inevitably brought to mind JJ Delaney’s memorable burgling of the same player 18 minutes into the 2014 All-Ireland final replay. On ‘The Sunday Game’, Tyrrell suggested that Kilkenny’s manager would be “delighted” by what he saw of the young Castlecomer man against Tipperary.
Over the years, few acts have given Cody’s teams a bigger energy charge than backmen outsmarting a marquee opponent.
Teeth
Once guardian of the ‘square’ himself, he particularly recognises the place that striped number three jersey has in the hearts and minds of Kilkenny hurling people. Stretching right back to a time when full-backs kept their teeth in a glass at night, that’s a history straddling generations of extraordinary men.
But Kilkenny have not settled on a longterm defensive anchor since JJ’s retirement after that epochal replay against Tipp five years back.
And, at times, last year’s use of Pádraig Walsh in the role felt almost counter-intuitive. Potentially the team’s most energetic player being chained to a precinct demanding concentration, blunt strength and resolution all but had the feel of a bird trapped in a cage.
For Kilkenny’s five competitive games thus far in 2019, Cody has sought an alternative, using Huw Lawlor (three times) and Delaney (twice) at full-back. Both have looked decent. Delaney was the county’s U-21 full-back in 2017 and played wingback for Cody in last year’s National League final as well as the Leinster Championship games against Dublin, Offaly and Galway before slipping off the radar.
Lawlor, an O’Loughlin Gaels man, made his senior debut in the Wild Geese exhibition game against Galway in Sydney last November and played the Walsh Cup semi-final against Wexford and league games against Cork and Clare before being sidelined with injury.
Now, whether or not Cody has seen anything persuasive from either man is, naturally, impossible to know. The historic candour of the position has certainly changed from when full-back play was an exercise, above all, in physical coercion.
One encapsulated in Limerick’s Stephen Lucey’s description of the role to Diarmuid O’Flynn in his book ‘Hurling – The Warrior Game’.
Lucey tells O’Flynn how his old manager, Phil Bennis, would counsel pulling “like a tinker!” at number three.
“The zone of terror, that’s what you want that area to be,” he explains. “‘This is my space – invade and I’ll f***ing kill you.’ That’s the attitude you need in that area. You hear the old stories about the Tipperary full-back line, Hell’s Kitchen. That’s what it’s got to be.”
Yet that profile of full-back is, essentially, obsolete now.
With so many teams deploying just two forwards to their inside line today, the role of full-back has become more nuanced and considered. As often as not, the modern number three finds himself marking space now as distinct from a specific opponent.
Three-time All-Ireland winner John Henderson believes mobility to be the most important facet for manning the position today. His medals were all won as a corner-back, yet Henderson ended his Kilkenny career anchoring the ‘square’ in the 1991 All-Ireland final.
“In my day, a full-back could get away with just spoiling,” explains the Johnstown man. “I mean I was a corner-back all my life, that was my stock in trade. I ended up full-back, as is often the case, by default. Basically, so that the rest of the team could have its balance.
“No-one is really born a full-back, they get there by process. But it’s mostly two on two in the full-back line today, so there’s actually little enough difference between the full-back and a corner-back. The big, tall, stand-out number three isn’t really there today.
Knacky
“I’d actually say that JJ probably ended up the perfect interpretation of the modern full-back with his mobility and all those knacky little flicks.”
If anything, JJ became Cody’s greatest problem-solver too. Perhaps the pre-eminent wing-back of his time, he won AllStars for three different positions. And, no more than Pádraig Walsh today, his pure hurling ability probably made the idea of using him at full-back – initially at least – seem needlessly cautious and prescriptive to many.
Not to Cody.
Because of injuries to Noel Hickey, Delaney manned the Kilkenny ‘square’ for their All-Ireland wins of ’09 and ’12 and, by ’14, was seen as a virtual master of the role. So any assumptions being made about the manager’s plans today should probably be heavily asterisked.
What we do know is that he still likes a thread of obstinacy and self-sufficiency in his back men. While the drawn 2014 final with Tipp was lauded as one of the greatest games ever played, Cody regarded it – broadly – as a carnival of bad defending. Indeed, we can say for certain that Kilkenny’s concession of 29 scores that day offended him to the core.
That number was cut to a much more modest 16 in the replay, after which he said of the first game: “It was spectacular but maybe it was lacking in some of the things that are very, very important to have.”
Cody has always seen a certain art in hooking and blocking, in the compression of space. His teams may never have deployed an obvious sweeper, yet – at their best – they have managed to master the business of getting bodies into dropzones. To that end, he sees defending as the collective responsibility of 15 players, not seven.
After Kilkenny’s full-back line leaked a ruinous 2-17 from play to Tipp’s inside attack in the 2016 All-Ireland final, he bristled at any suggestion that that stat represented any failure specific to Paul Murphy, Joey Holden and Shane Prendergast.
“They won’t be scapegoated by us,” he told journalists. “I would hate to think that would happen. That’s the simplest thing in the world to do. It would be very, very cheap sort of analysis. We win together, we get beaten together, we attack together, we defend together and our full-back line have been heroic and were manful to the very end.”
Still, Prendergast never hurled another championship game and Holden hasn’t been trusted at number three since.
So what precisely is Cody now looking for? Impossible to define. After all, Hickey and JJ were Kilkenny’s full-backs for ten of Cody’s 11 All-Ireland wins as manager, yet polar opposites in how they played the role. Hickey always liked to get in front of his man; JJ was happy to play from behind. What they did have in common was a strain of absolute ruthlessness.
In his autobiography, ‘The Warrior’s Code’, Tyrrell – involved in nine of those victories – opens the blind on how that strain was never exactly discouraged in training.
“Tommy Walsh was no saint,” he recalls.
“He’d be waving the hurley around like a sword. He’d have two or three fellas hit before they even knew what had happened. I wasn’t much better. Neither was JJ. He was desperate for flicking across the wrists.
“JJ didn’t have a name or reputation for the loose strokes or dark arts but he was a master at concealing the practice. He’d have a lad hit four times before the ball would even land near him, but JJ married that edge to his game with pure class because he was the greatest defender I ever played with. He had everything.
“JJ was a joy to play with, a pleasure to soldier alongside because we had such a telepathic understanding.
“The toughest and hardest of all, though, was Noel Hickey. He would be bating lads up and down the field like he was walloping cattle with a stick to herd them into a field. I loved playing beside Noel because if someone got past me, there was no way they’d get past Hickey. He’d cut them in two without a second thought.
“Noel always seemed to have a licence to do anything. He could pull strokes far more vicious than I would and Brian would never say a word to him. As a defender, Noel always had a killer instinct. He exuded a menacing and aggressive body language. You and the opposition just always knew that Hickey was going to do whatever had to be done to get the job done.”
In the same book, Tyrrell suggests that what Cody always sought above all else in hurlers was “men of steel with the instincts and savagery of animals.”
Such language is, categorically, the bluntest ever used by one of Cody’s lieutenants in depicting the everyday terms of engagement behind closed doors in Nowlan Park. And it’s surely a moot point if those terms remain either reasonable or sustainable today.
That said, what we do know about Cody’s management of Kilkenny is that it has always been informed by tactical intelligence too and an understanding of the difference between fad and revolution. He has rebuilt Kilkenny so many times, any instinct to question his ability to move with the times can only be rooted in myopia or ignorance.
Henderson believes that Kilkenny could be just a couple of key solutions away from being right in contention for this year’s big prizes. And full-back, unequivocally, demands one of those solutions.
He says he liked what he saw of Delaney in Thurles last weekend, but is loathe to be beating drums just yet.
“He made two great interceptions on Callanan,” Henderson says of the 23-year-old. “And that’s an instinct. Great defenders do instinctive things at the end. But the day that doesn’t work? If Callanan gets the same two balls in summer, will he put the burners on and get away? If he does, that’s two goals.
“Personally, I’d rather see a full-back winning the ball by attacking it heroically.”
In truth, full-back is a problem position for most counties today as the taste for deployment of ‘sweepers’ communicates. The trick, for most, is in managing to conceal it.