JUDGMENT DAY. The bookies, the pundits and the know-it-alls were in agreement beforehand: Tipperary were younger, leaner and hungrier than Kilkenny. The axis on which the hurling world had spun for so long had changed irrevocably.
And in many ways, it felt like a day of reckoning. The sky was dark with rain as the game got under way. The glare of floodlights gave it an eerie, almost apocalyptic feel.
But it was Kilkenny, not Tipperary, who exploded into life. They bombarded the Tipp defence with laser-guided missiles, rammed them with bone-rattling shoulder charges and seemed to cut through their defensive wall at will. Within 15 minutes, they had clocked up five unanswered points.
The world was spinning, all right, but not in the way Tipperary had expected. For all that dominance, Tipperary hung on and clawed their way back to within three points. In a remarkably free-flowing game, the collisions were furious and blood flowed: even the referee Brian Gavin sported a white bandage on his nose after getting struck by a stray stick.
Like ravenous underdogs, Kilkenny hounded the Tipp forwards and tore into them in attack. In the end, they outplayed and outfought them to win by 2:17 to 1:16, though the winning margin could have been twice that.
Most of the Tipperary stars fluffed their lines on the big stage. Even Lar Corbett – the three-goal hero from last year – managed just a single point.
As the final whistle sounded, Kilkenny manager Brian Cody – normally reserved and statuesque – leapt repeatedly into the air and waved manically at the crowd.
It was his eighth All-Ireland, though it looked like it could have been his first. “This was massively sweet,” he said later.
As Kilkenny fans left the ground, with sun on their faces, they inhaled the familiar fumes of victory.
“I’m still breathless,” panted Jim Walsh (70), a retired teacher from Slieverue in south Kilkenny, one of the 81,124 spectators. “They told us this Kilkenny team was too old, that this was their swan song. Well, by God, if it was, it was some bloody swan song.”
