YEARS OF THE CATS
Across all levels of the game, Kilkenny have dominated a golden age for hurling
EVEN at the lower level they exhibit their power. The day after Brian Cody’s understrength seniors put manners on Cork, Bennettsbridge became the sixth club from Kilkenny to win the All-Ireland junior hurling club championship.
A week earlier Ballyhale Shamrocks booked their place in a seventh senior club final with their ageless talisman Henry Shefflin seemingly turning back the clock on a career that has coincided with the greatest period of dominance that hurling has ever known.
One of the great gripes about the GAA’s competition structures is that they are built to capture excitement rather than measure consistency.
It is an old argument that the Championship’s sudden death nature seeks to imitate the thrills and spills of the FA Cup across the water, rather than tease out the substantive issue as to who is actually the best team in the land, like the Premier League does.
Perhaps, but one of the great gifts that great teams bring is that they provide absolute certainty, transcending formats and structures, removing any shred of doubt.
So it is with Kilkenny, who hardly needed an exercise in accounting to confirm what the rest of the hurling world has long known: since the turn of the century they have inhabited a different world to the rest.
Last weekend, they defied the haemorrhaging of a busload of hall of fame players to get off to a winning start down in Cork in an Allianz League campaign which over five rounds doubles as a sprint.
It might have been just another two points but it was a powerful reminder of their capacity to keep on keeping on, no matter what is thrown in their way.
It is why Kilkenny have be c o me the county that has utterly changed the game’s landscape this millennium.
True, counties have always had golden periods – Cork in the 1940s and ’70s, Tipperary in the 1950s and ’60s – but hurling has never known anything quite like this.
Kilkenny’s dominance since the start of the new century is all embracing, and while Brian Cody’s stewardship has been central , it goes far beyond that with the county outperforming their traditional rivals across all grades.
The composite League table published on the opposite page and the number posted by Kilkenny is a reminder of the chasm that separates them from the pack.
Drawn from results in all grades since 2000, it measures more than just silverware but also consistency at all levels over the period.
It provides the neat symmetry that Kilkenny’s main rivals over the past six years, Tipperary, come in with exactly half their points tally at senior level.
More worrying though, for the Premier men, is that the gap widens as you trawl down through the grades. Kilkenny dramatically outperform Tipp at under-21, minor and club level − a trend that continued last year with their All-Ireland minor victory and may well be enhanced next month when Ballyhale seek to add another club title − which suggests that there is unlikely to be any dramatic power-shift when Cody eventually calls it a day.
And if you just wanted to get plain vulgar about it and do a stock-check on their silver haul since 2000, Kilkenny have annexed 30 national titles between the All-Ireland senior, under-21, minor and club championships, an average of more than two a year. No one else comes near them, with the exception of Galway, who lean heavily on their prominence at club and underage for the 18 titles they have taken in that time. The Tribesmen’s three League titles are their only national success at senior level. For Kilkenny’s traditional rivals, it has been a discomforting start to the new millennium.
Tipperary have managed eight titles, but the giddy sense of optimism they were gifted back in 2010, when they won All-Ireland finals at senior and under21 inside a week and were hailed as an emerging dominant force, has long passed. Kilkenny do that to you.
Meanwhile, it has been nothing short of disastrous for Cork who have managed just three titles since the dawn of the new millennium – and not a single one at any level has been garnered since they won backto-back Liam McCarthys in 2005-06.
In what is seen as the crucial under21 developmental grade, Cork are currently charting ninth, hopelessly off the pace and adrift of the game’s elite counties.
Adding substance to Donal Óg Cusack’s claim that the GAA’s biggest county is paying the price for a lack of planning and investment, our table confirms that Cork is a county punching pathetically below its weight.
WHILE Galway emerge from this exercise far better than their performance levels at senior level might suggest, it also provides reaffirmation of old failings. Their prominence at underage and club level is undoubtedly a large part down to a competition structure which guarantees their presence by right at the business end of the Championship. The points awarded here have been shaved in their case to take that into account.
It backs up the perception that while they are prolific at underage level and are blessed with a strong club culture, they cannot deliver on the promise of either.
In the past, the latter has been used as a theory on their failure to cut it at the very highest level – it is now 27 years and rising since their last Liam McCarthy success – but as ever, Kilkenny are proof that you can have your cake and eat it. They are second to Galway in terms of club success and it has hardly proved to be a hindrance to them.
But then they continue to rewrite all the rules. In the early Noughties, the lack of competition in Leinster was served up as an argument that their dominance was in part facilitated by the impoverished nature of the company that they were keeping, but since then the province has borne witness to the emergence of Dublin and the importation of Galway and still nothing has changed.
They remain absolutely relentless, a county in a league all of its own.