CODY’S WARHORSE WELCOMES THIS NEW ERA FOR OLD RIVALS
KILKENNY defender Paul Murphy has experienced plenty of high-stakes battles against Tipperary and he believes that the two counties always seem to bring the best out of each other. ‘I have been part of this Kilkenny team since 2011 and I have yet to play or be part of a bad match against Tipperary,’ Murphy reckoned. ‘If it’s a League match down in Thurles of a rainy Sunday in March or if it’s an All-Ireland final, for some reason both teams just get up for it and get a huge reaction. And a brilliant match is produced. Whatever the ingredient is, the rivalry always produces. Maybe, it’s the fact that neither side can stand to lose ground to the other because they know it will have repercussions down the line. It is the rivalry that other sports in some way wish they have but we are lucky enough to have it in the GAA.’ While it may be hurling’s defining rivalry, it has been lopsided in Kilkenny’s favour over this decade. Murphy has only lost once to Tipp in Championship hurling, the 2016 All-Ireland final, in six encounters. But a lot of the players that defined these wars in the early part of the decade — Lar Corbett, Jackie Tyrrell and Tommy Walsh — have all moved on and there are new players who will now define the rivalry. ‘Maybe, we are entering a new era of the rivalry. The fact that we haven’t had matches over the last two years, whereas year on year up to 2016, we had a game every year. And then the retirements as well. I don’t know what it is that says this is a new generation or new teams but we have had a lot of retirements,’ the 30year-old said. ‘But even with the retirements, there are still many faces that are the same from 2010 and so on. There is still a core group that has experienced Kilkenny-Tipperary before along with the new faces that are experiencing this for the first time. ‘But there is a new generation coming through that haven’t the names of Lar Corbett or Henry Shefflin who have been associated with the battles down the years. But that is just part of the evolution of the game.’