Making his own giant impressions

When Eoin Kelly was a child - he is 19 now - he would trawl through old video cassettes at home and look for footage of vintage John Leahy. Eoin's father, Jimsy, was not only immersed in the village's conversion from standard football parish to new hurling test-tube; he tried to chronicle the every play of Mullinahone's first scion.

The youngster would drink it all in on the pale Saturday afternoons when the house was restful, studying Leahy's unique blend of delicate balance and fearsome power.

Those light steps that belied the chunky frame and the rough splendour, the charismatic cut of the man. The way the crowd's din would reach crescendo during those Leahy surges or trademark points, when he would sit back into a stroke that was at once clipped and yet a flourish, a rare signature beyond forgery.

Then Eoin Kelly would go out and try do just that. He would become Leahy on those damp hours of the weekend when all kids slip into a parallel world and play-dream until dusk closes in and the call comes for tea.

The difference was, though, that around the home place, everyone felt that Kelly was destined to be the heir to Leahy. Not because of any cosmic prophecy. Jimsy Kelly didn't spend the late 80s going around making Earl Woods-type claims on behalf of his son. There were no apocryphal promises nor moments that today seem tinted with eerie foresight.

People just looked. The youngster had preternatural control of the camβn and the ball was no more than an extension of his own being.

"I'd say he was a five or six-year-old when I first came across him above in the field at Mullinahone. His father was a selector and I remember seeing this little lad always above hurling and he had every skill in the game from that time," says John Leahy now. "He is just a phenomenon, I think, a total natural. I don't think his skill ever improved really from that young age because he had it all then and to see him progress - the man just has this natural scoring ability that I have never before seen in a young chap growing up."

Mullinahone's identification of itself with hurling through the singular brilliance of Leahy is one of the more fabled aspects of contemporary hurling lore. There is a loyalty and respect for Leahy that is infectious and Eoin Kelly was, inevitably, hooked on that general wonder.

"Yes, he was my idol really," he said in a bright utility room in Semple Stadium on Wednesday, training finished and thunder clouds casting a wintry hue.

"He was the first from Mullinahone to play senior with Tipperary and you'd just be following him, really, nobody else. The only concern was how Johnny played. I'd say it was in the late 80s when Tipp started winning that I first became aware of him.

"I was that bit young for his minor days - the 1987 final - although I have dug out those videos so I know what he was like back then."

Back then. Kelly's frames of reference for Tipperary hurling are so fledgling, it is comic. He squints as he recalls the grainy days of September 1991, Tipp's last All-Ireland joy, with the hazy reverence of an old man talking of Ring or Mackey in their pomp.

"I barely remember it - just the feeling after it. I was nine, say. The homecoming - all the people around Thurles and the fires and cheering - that sort of thing. But nothing about the match." Within six years of that celebration, the child in the crowd had distinguished himself as a godly prospect, a gift. At 15, he came on as a substitute in the 1997 Tipperary senior county final against Clonoulty-Rossmore. It was Mullinahone's first final and they lost it, narrowly.

But, by then, Kelly's ascension to mythical terms was taking on a new momentum. When he was a boarder in St Kieran's of Kilkenny, word spread through the Leinster stronghold and that same summer, Kelly was unveiled as a Tipperary minor.

With Tipperary struggling at senior level, his arrival was an issue of impatience for many supporters. The moment fell late in the quarter-final loss against Galway, when he was thrown in at the tail end of the match. Tipperary lost, but Kelly fired an oblique point and his presence there, as Tipperary contemplated defeat, was like a semaphore from Nicky English, a glimpse ahead.

One summer on and Kelly has a Munster senior medal under his belt and is an integral element of Tipperary's attack. His journey has been without blemish or fuss. "I think it shows the mantle of the man," says John Leahy, "that his first year hurling senior with Tipp, he is on the frees. The man just loves the sport and that's what he lives for, is hurling."

Kelly admits as much, agreeing that at this stage in his life he could not imagine a world without hurling. Jimsy was devoted to both himself and his brother Paul, who will line out at midfield for Tipperary on Sunday if he shakes off a hamstring injury in time.

"My parents were definitely the biggest influences in the way we developed. Dad would always bring us to the field and give us advice, tips. The one thing I remember is that he always encouraged us to hit our weak side, even against the wall. There were more windows broken at home through that."

In the decades ahead, those sightings of Kelly as child, studious, playful on the sidelines, learning under the shadow of the great, might well be passed on. He has arrived but is truly only at journey's start. Last year against Galway was just to whet the appetite.

"I really wasn't expecting to go on - I was there as the sub 'keeper. But they found a 16 jersey for me and I remember finding the speed and pace of the thing hard to adapt to. Eugene O'Neill threw me out a handy ball, though, and I got an easy point and that gave me a small bit of confidence." Something struck him, though, on the long drive home, the bus shrouded in heavy, silent loss. He had missed out on Leahy. He shakes his head now.

"I even cracked a joke with Johnny there recently about it. I came on against Galway but by then he had come off injured. And then he came on this year agin' Clare but was off straight away again with the injury. So I was kidding, saying maybe we just weren't meant to play together, something like that."

Then he falls serious and announces: "But if we're all to stop now and people asked me what my biggest disappointment was, it would definitely be that Johnny was injured and I couldn't play with him. Even the small thing of him coming on against Clare rose Tipperary and that small thing helped us win."

Tipperary's great hurling heritage has not been part of Eoin Kelly's life experience. As Nicky English has stressed all week, the county has been at Croke Park for senior championship games only four times since the All-Ireland win in 1991. So Kelly is a bit bemused to hear talk of a handy draw for the Munster side.

"Like, Wexford are the team with the All-Ireland medals," he says. "Not us. So why everyone would make us, as Munster champions, favourites, I don't know. And they are on a high, too, with the under-21 semi-final coming up. The way they fought against Limerick, with their pride on the line, well, it was obvious they are a fine team. It is going to be hard, you know."

The one definite is that Eoin Kelly won't be fazed. Sometimes, Johnny Leahy, at heart a shy individual, watches his young friend stroll through the gazes, the expectation and backslaps and he marvels. Leahy knows the complications; the difficulty of being the one they say can walk on water.

"He is always at the centre of publicity and has never been over-awed," says Johnny. "I don't honestly think I ever saw him hurl poorly for Mullinahone or Tipperary. And that's amazing."

Kelly, fresh-skinned and bouncy, is oblivious to the melodrama he creates. For a nonesuch, he is remarkably ordinary. By day he is a teenage bank clerk planning to go back to college next year. Regular things preoccupy him. He talks like any youngster about the hurling championship.

"And Galway," he is saying. "They have some players. You wouldn't get a better hurler than Cloonan, wouldn't you not? Just so daring, great to watch." Words and opinions shoot from him, warm and unselfconsciously.

Then the young man is moving again, bearing his gift easily, moving through the murky light of Semple Stadium to where the family car waits to bring him home and on to all of his tomorrows.