There’s no danger of Cody losing his relevance
Hurling has never been so competitive but Cats boss remains an inspirational force
REVOLUTION blazed through hurling and Brian Cody had to protect Kilkenny from the flames. Twenty years ago this month, he was in charge of his first competitive game, a two-point National League defeat to Cork in Páirc Uí Rinn.
By February 1999, his county’s wait for an All-Ireland title was in its sixth year.
Cork had been subdued as well, and Tipperary too, by a tumultuous preceding half-decade that saw Clare and Offaly, twice apiece, as well as Wexford, win the Liam MacCarthy Cup.
The game’s three ruling powers were cowed by season after season of underdog ambition let loose on the grand old hurling hierarchy.
When he brings his team to Cusack Park in Ennis today, Cody will be trying for two wins from Kilkenny’s first two League games of this new year.
But the sidelines he stalks in this, his 21st season, are once again roiled by change. The revolution does not feel as pervasive as it did two decades ago, but Limerick’s All-Ireland win last September, as they succeeded Galway as champions, was fresh evidence that the old certainties in hurling are under fierce scrutiny once again.
Through the changes, Cody endures.
His first season ended in defeat to Cork in a September final. Twelve months later, he led Kilkenny to their first All-Ireland Championship under his care.
It would take another six years for his greatest creation, for hurling’s greatest force, to emerge.
The team that won four in a row between 2006 and 2009 is the best the GAA has yet seen. Their final victories in 2007 and 2008 were awesome studies in ruthlessness and boundless desire.
In those matches against Limerick and Waterford, they played like men that would have hurled through the depths of hell to prevail – and they would not have been denied down there.
That was a consequence of a team equipped with some of the best players of any generation, but it was also because of Cody.
He coached and prepared but he also cajoled and inspired and reprimanded. Before throw-in he would spit into his hands and rub them together, ready for work. He could have been taking up the reins of a plough horse or facing into a bank of freshly cut turf.
He would be an active participant in the ensuing 70 minutes. Not for him the detached evenness favoured by some managers on the line.
His job did not end on the training field; he was a vivid part of every second of those Kilkenny finals.
It must have been horrible for the opposition, and it can’t always have been pleasant for his own men when Cody leaned into the squalls of combat with a bellowed instruction or, God forbid, a reprimand.
And those great matches would end, Kilkenny would be triumphant, and Cody would greet victory as if it was the choice of fate; his team had been fortunate on this particular day. Next time it might be someone else.
He insisted on the closeness of the hurling Championship even as Kilkenny reduced it to pulp.
It is highly improbable that he will ever achieve on the scale he did in the 2000s again. The days of a squad fattened by names like Hickey, Delaney, Walsh, Shefflin, Brennan and Larkin are gone.
Those tight Championships that Cody insisted Kilkenny survived a decade ago are now a fact of the hurling world.
Along with Limerick and Galway, Clare have re-emerged and Wexford are relevant thanks to Davy Fitzgerald.
Liam Sheedy, the man who stopped Cody’s five-in-a-row in 2010, is back to provide Tipperary’s talents with focus and gumption.
Leinster is fraught for Kilkenny under the revamped Championship structure, let alone the eventual engagement with the best of Munster in the All-Ireland series.
A manager in his 21st season must consider dangers real and imagined. They must examine their reserves of motivation and coaching intelligence, while knowing there are plenty on the outside doubting their relevance in the modern game.
Cody has never seemed much bothered by what anyone else might think, and he has done enough in these recent volatile seasons to suggest he still knows his way around a field.
Plotting a way to last year’s League title was unexpected, and Galway needed a replay to beat them in the Leinster final.
He has spent recent years squeezing good performances from a group reliant on only a handful of high-calibre players.
Younger talents are now promising to grow into forceful seniors. Kilkenny look like a team summoning old powers.
And 20 years on, Cody remains their inspiration.