NO DRAMA, NO FUSS
Kilkenny legend Tommy Walsh bows out in the manner in which he played the game
MARTIN FOGARTY bumped into a Kilkenny hurler on Thursday evening. There was only one topic of conversation – the announcement that Tommy Walsh had made earlier on local radio. ‘He said to me that if Tommy’s standard had slipped slightly this year,’ recalled Fogarty, Brian Cody’s former assistant, ‘that only brought him back to the rest of us on the panel. If there was a slip, it just made him an ordinary Kilkenny player.’
There was little ordinary about Walsh, though. The appreciation of his flamboyance and his remarkable ability to bend a hurling match to his will from the half-back line have been flying furiously around social media since his retirement, making the way he departed the stage all the more strange.
The long goodbye has become a fashionable farewell among sporting legends but there was none of that. His last performance in a Kilkenny shirt was early in the summer in the Leinster SHC semi-final replay against Galway in Tullamore, a performance glossed with an outstanding point.
Once Kilkenny took up residence in Croke Park this summer, he disappeared from view, adding grist to the rumour mill that he had lost a yard of pace. His last appearance at headquarters, which had been his own personal playground for a decade, was as part of a Super 11s exhibition at half-time during the 2013 All-Ireland final replay – at Fogarty’s behest.
‘That was another measure of Tommy as a person. He took to that game, a mini-game exhibition at half-time, with the enthusiasm you’d expect of someone going into an All-Ireland final. That’s the way he approached every game,’ Fogarty explains.
WALSH ONLY turned 31 during the summer, so he is still a young man but 12 years as Kilkenny’s ultimate warrior had taken its toll. It’s easy to miss one of the most arresting images in ‘A Season of Sundays’, Sportsfile’s excellent photographic annual of the GAA year, as it is tucked into the corner of a page, early in the book. It shows a chastened-looking Tommy Walsh emerging from a dressing-room in Freshford, his eyes trained on an impassive Brian Cody, giving his thoughts on a facile Walsh Cup win over DIT. Given what would transpire over the course of the season, the image symbolised how Walsh was drifting in his manager’s thoughts. The Tullaroan tyro remains one of the most gifted players of his generation but his final season probably turned on a league encounter in Parnell Park last March when he was hooked by Cody after spending the first-half in Danny Sutcliffe’s slipstream. He was substituted three times during the National League, evidence that his considerable powers were on the wane.
By the time the Cats and Limerick conjured up a classic All-Ireland semi-final slugfest in torrential rain, the type of gladiatorial arena where Walsh once thrived, he was watching from the bench.
Former Kilkenny player Lester Ryan (uncle to current captain Lester) was in charge of Leinster hurlers for the Interprovincial series this year and was surprised to see how far Walsh had dropped in the pecking order. ‘We played Ulster in Trim in February and Tommy gave an exhibition. His positional awareness, game-reading ability, all of that were superb in that game, so I was surprised when I heard during the summer that he had slipped back a bit,’ Ryan said.
For more than a decade, Walsh epitomised the bloody-minded defiance of the greatest hurling team of all-time. His nine consecutive All-Stars, in five different positions, an illustration that he deserves to be ranked among the greats.
On his best days, he was like a one-man half-back line and if you simply trained your eye on the player with number 5 on his back and red helmet, you were certain of seeing much of the action.
‘He was like a magnet for the ball,’ Fogarty said. ‘I remember asking once how was he able to catch the ball so well all the time. He just shrugged. It was as natural to him as breathing.’
THE FACT that Walsh played on the edge made him so loved by Kilkenny supporters (and loathed by some rival fans). Before the 2009 All-Ireland final, a season that ended with the Hurler of the Year award, DJ Carey took to the airwaves to defend the perception of him as a player who sometimes overstepped the mark.
Cody himself defended the player on a number of occasions, even writing in his autobiography: ‘Those who have snidely used the phrase “living on the edge” to convey the message that Tommy is a dirty player should be ashamed of themselves, as indeed should others who have jumped on that sinister bandwagon.’
Offaly referee Brian Gavin is the whistler most associated with Walsh, after being hit by his hurl in the 2011 final. He wrote an apology a couple of weeks later, complete with his signed shirt from the first final that Gavin refereed.
‘He played on the edge but, if he had to get a yellow card, he always took it. No complaints,’ Gavin said. ‘And that is what made him a great player.’
Lester Ryan insists that a measure of his greatness was in always making himself available for a call-up to the Leinster side. Former Kilkenny goalkeeper Michael Walsh said he was the most enthusiastic of all players about the hurling/shinty international.
In 2012, the second annual Shinty Test was scheduled for Cusack Park in Ennis the day after the All-Star ceremony. It was the first year that Walsh didn’t receive a gong – ending his remarkable run of consecutive awards. The Ireland team had stayed in Limerick the night before.
‘I remember getting a phone call at eight in the morning and Tommy’s name popping up,’ Michael Walsh recalls. ‘He had been to the All-Star bash the night before, didn’t win one for the first time and he was already in Limerick, raring to go. He had the disappointment of the night before but just wanted to get out.’
Walsh was transformed when he stepped onto a field. And while his standard may have slipped in the past couple of years, there was very little ordinary about him or his hurling career.