King Henry reigns over all the rest

THE man with the most number of football All Star awards is, unsurprisingly, a Kerry man and the top man in hurling is, of course, a top cat – king Henry Shefflin who towers over all others with a quite remarkable eleven

All Star awards.

Indeed, it’s no great surprise that the top five most successful hurlers in the All Star awards are all from the Marble county. DJ Carey and Tommy Walsh match Pat Spillane’s football total of nine, while JJ Delaney and Noel Skehan are the holders of seven each, putting them alongside Jimmy Barry Murphy, albeit that the Cork man won two of his All Star awards on the football field.

Others to win All Stars in both football and hurling include JBM’s Cork colleagues Ray Cummins and Brian Murphy. Cummins holds the distinction of being the only man to win All Stars in both codes in the same year.

Offaly’s Liam Currams is the fourth man on that very exclusive list of players to win awards in both codes. It’s a list that’s likely to stay fairly exclusive in the men’s game.

Four sets of fathers and sons have claimed All Star awards – Fan and Philly Larkin, Richie Power Jnr and Snr, Ken and Brian Hogan and, most recently, Tommy and Nickie Quaid.

There’s little surprise that Kilkenny top the roll of honour for hurling All Stars with 189 to their name. Cork are up next with an impressive 112 awards, followed by Tipperary with 102, Galway with 97. Limerick by dint of their record nine this year have jumped from 55 to 64.

FROM three sets in, there was an air of inevitability about the whole thing. It was Serbian shock and awe, and the Russian just didn’t seem able to cope. Right away Daniil Medvedev was on the back-foot. To stand any chance against Novac Djokovic in Sunday’s Australian Open Final he needed to hit the ground running. Instead he was playing catch up less than twenty minutes into the final. To be fair to the Muscovite he showed a bit of steel to battle back to parity, but it was almost as if in the process of doing so that he burned himself out. Once Djokovic recovered his composure to finish out the set 7-5, it was very hard to see a way back into the match for Medvedev. Not even starting with a break of serve in the second set was enough to rejuvenate his challenge as Djokovic practically cruised to a ninth Australian Open title and an 18th major success in all.

It was damned impressive stuff from the Serbian as he deployed his full skill-set to the task, leaving Medvedev looking increasingly a broken man, muttering to himself angrily after every lost point, smashing his racket with ever more ferocity into the playing surface until finally he buckled it. It was a telling demonstration of a genius at work and its effect upon a mere mortal. The trouble was it all felt a little too easy for the champion. It all felt a little too familiar for everyone watching at home.

The big three’s stranglehold over the men’s game is almost absolute at this stage. Between them they’ve claimed a remarkable 58 of the last 70 Grand Slam titles – 20 each for Nadal and Federer and 18 for Djokovic. You could look at that one of two ways. First as a remarkable era for the game with three of the best ever to play the game going head-to-head year in, year out, driving each other to greater heights. There’s a lot of truth in that certainly. When the big three clash in a slam final it’s always, always worth watching.

Still it’s hard to see the struggles of the next generation to break through as anything other than disappointing. Only one player born in the 1990s has managed to win a major title and, then, Dominic Thiem had the benefit of Djokovic managing to get himself disqualified in a fit of pique at the US Open last year. Medvedev was supposed to go closer than most to Djokovic, but instead his challenge crumbled practically as soon as it began. Contrast the men’s game at the moment with the vibrancy of the women’s. Serena Williams has been toppled. Naomi Osaka looks set to become the dominant figure in the game. A new story, a new set of characters, while in the men’s game it’s more of the same.