HISTORY. LEGEND. Pantheons. Those things aren’t for the meek. Then again black and amber stripes aren’t for the meek either.
With seven minutes of this wonderfully and robust All-Ireland final left Henry Shefflin stood over a penalty at the Hill 16 end and stared at the Tipperary goal.
A moment of calm in a day of thunder. Tipp men standing big on the line. One small goal behind them. Pressure in its purest form.
By Henry’s standards he had played a good game if not a great game but now history hinged on his nerve. Kilkenny were two points down with the momentum of the game seeping away from them. The sheer weight of his county’s desperate hunger for four in a row must have been pressing him into the Croke Park turf.
On days when great athletes bottle things the simple mechanics of the game escape the memory that lives in the muscles.
There are a million tiny variables in the act of lifting a sliotar, raising it to a spot a few yards in front of you and stepping into to meet it with perfect violence.
Or maybe there aren’t.
Henry bent. He lifted and drove the ball to the Tipperary net with such fury and precision those on the line barely had time to flinch.
Perfection. It wasn’t the most beautiful moment in a game spangled by wonder and genius but it was the ultimate match of man and moment.
The penalty (regardless of its disputed validity), in its timing and its execution, summed up Kilkenny’s day. It described, too, the personality of this team which has claimed a lease on hurling history. It was a moment which advertised the very character of greatness.
So, four in a row. Seven All-Irelands this decade for Brian Cody and his lieutenants Henry Shefflin and Michael Kavanagh. There can be no quibbles. No asterisks in the record books. No complaints. Kilkenny have moved the game on to a new level. While other humans are still struggling to find ways to cope with life at that altitude Kilkenny are comfortable at the peak.
They have absorbed the best of what everybody has thrown at them these past four years. They have been rattled but more often they have hummed. When the chips are down, when the backs are to the wall, when the going gets tough, whatever, they refuse to flinch.
They have redefined hurling. After the 90s, a decade of uprising and novelty in the beautiful game, Kilkenny have reclaimed hurling and made it their own.
Yesterday in front of 82,106 white-knuckled customers they faced down an extraordinary challenge from Liam Sheedy’s young Tipperary team and won in the end pulling away, stretching the margin to five points, the greatest it had been all day.
“The scoreboard only matters once in a game” said Brian Cody afterwards, “at the end.”
It’s a long time since Kilkenny saw a scoreboard freighted with the sort of regret which Tipperary felt after 72 minutes or so of hurling yesterday.
“I’m hurting. Proud but hurting.” said Sheedy afterwards, his words surely reflecting the mood of an entire county.
“The lads have given it everything today and just come up short. We were facing the best team, possibly, in the history of the game. We just needed a goal at some stage to push on.”
Goals. All year we noted how Kilkenny had been leaking them and we wondered coming to Croke Park to what extend Tipperary’s spry full-forward line could exploit that small fissure in Kilkenny’s excellence.
It was Tipp’s misfortune to find PJ Ryan suddenly armed with the powers of a comic strip superhero yesterday. Ryan made five extraordinary saves, making himself the game’s single most influential figure. His prominence was adequate testimony to the heroic quality of Tipperary’s challenge.
He spoke afterwards with extraordinary modesty of his contribution. One save from Eoin Kelly carried the sort of brilliance which often goes unappreciated. Kelly wound up from close range to drive the ball into oblivion and beyond. Ryan braced himself as best he could. At the last second Kelly slipped and his shot was relatively tame but Ryan had to readjust himself in a split second and get his hurley down low to his left to turn the ball around the post. An extraordinary reflex.
“You get a bit of luck, really.” was all he would say of the moment “That second one Eoin Kelly slipped. If his feet hadn’t gone from under him he would have busted the net out . You get a bit of luck on the day.”
Kilkenny have had bits of luck along the way to this epic achievement but mainly they have been of their own making. The penalty which Shefflin converted may have been a soft award in the context of such a bruising math as yesterday’s but its conversion was an act of almost routine excellence as were Ryan’s saves and Martin Comerford’s cool finish for Kilkenny’s second goal.
The final whistle offered Kilkenny a release which the GAA’s plans for a staid presentation were never going to contain. Cody crossed the border onto the field briefly dancing a manic jig. For a minute or two we watched the giants at rest embracing and celebrating. Then the dam burst and a stripy sea flooded the Croke Park turf.
“Plan B”, said the tannoy, “Plan B”.
Kilkenny who had just consummated the only plan they were ever interested in carried on regardless. Plan A was unrelenting excellence and achievement. They had no Plan B. Such contingencies are for ordinary mortals.
All Ireland SHC Final
Seán Moran: "Tipp led by two points, a pretty endangered margin when Henry Shefflin is striding through the smoke to try the shot"
Keith Duggan: "Kilkenny had the audacity, the poise, the sheer bloody neck, if you like, to pierce a gallant Tipperary defence."
Nicky English: "This was a great match, a fantastic All-Ireland final and, to be honest, it was what hurling needed."