Needle and the damage done: How Kilkenny’s inner fire was stoked by spite and slights

When a 10-month-old gripe about Ballygunner’s victory speech made a pop-up appearance in Colin Fennelly’s post-match interview after the Leinster final, two stories from another Waterford-Kilkenny entanglement came to mind. After they won the 2007 League final, the high-jinks and general giddiness of the Waterford players got on Kilkenny’s wick.

“I remember seeing John Mullane up on the podium without his jersey,” wrote Jackie Tyrrell in his autobiography, The Warrior’s Code. “That was just classic Mullane. When I saw him bare-chested in 2007 I stored that image in my head for another day. ‘The next time I run into Mullane he’ll have his jersey off alright,’ I said to myself. ‘Because by the time we’re finished with Waterford Mullane will be too embarrassed to be wearing that jersey.’”

Henry Shefflin, on the other hand, was needled by bits and pieces of triumphalism on the Waterford team bus. “They had the cup on board, and it might have been our imaginations running wild, but they seemed unnaturally keen to draw our attention to the fact,” wrote Shefflin in his autobiography. “A couple of their players kept shaking it in our direction. We sat watching them [on the Kilkenny bus] and, to a man, began to boil.”

“I can’t remember who was sitting beside me, but I do remember turning to him and saying, ‘Look at the f**kers, the way they’re rubbing our noses in it!”

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Looking for grievances can’t be your main motivation, but you can use it like sauce on the side

According to Shefflin, the 2007 League final was “talked of” in the build-up to the All-Ireland final against Waterford, 16 months later. “If you perceive, rightly or wrongly, that somebody has disrespected you, the best thing to do is store that hurt for another day,” he wrote.

Can you put feelings like that in the freezer, and re-heat them on demand? Maybe. Tyrrell writes that before the 2008 All-Ireland final they still had a “beef” with Waterford over the League final. “They didn’t boisterously ram it down our throats, but that’s the way we contrived it,” wrote Tyrrell.

The last line is telling. What they felt about Waterford’s antics was visceral and not open to interrogation; how those antics would have seemed to neutral observers was immaterial. The fire was always hungry for logs. Kilkenny beat Waterford by 23 points in the 2008 All-Ireland final, producing the most complete and spectacular performance of the Brian Cody era. How much of their energy that day had its source in Thurles 16 months earlier? Surely it was negligible.

You wonder if that approach has any traction now. The preparation of all elite GAA teams has been increasingly chaperoned by sports science since the turn the century. That oversight has been sought out and embraced. Hurleys are no longer broken on dressing-room tables, in D’Unbelievables fashion. Roaring and shouting, in general, has been discredited as a performance enhancer; still applied, but sparingly. And yet: the desire to compete and win is such a primal impulse that it burns fossil fuels too.

“Looking for grievances can’t be your main motivation,” says one leading performance coach, “but you can use it like sauce on the side. You’ll struggle to find a sports psychologist to say that on the record, but you would use a bit of it.”

In that context, Kilkenny are an interesting test case. Their status as the greatest hurling team of all time may yet be threatened by Limerick, but it was painstakingly established over the guts of a decade, and accepted long before their time was up. Their Nowlan Park training sessions were the most productive adrenalin gland in the history of hurling.

And yet, they never discounted external stimuli. In his book, Brian Cody referenced what he regarded as dismissive commentary after Kilkenny lost the 2005 All-Ireland semi-final to Galway, quoting Enda McEvoy, a locally based and hugely respected hurling writer, and Donal O’Grady, the former Cork coach. “If I had any doubts about continuing [as manager],” he wrote, “suggestions that we were beaten dockets helped me make up my mind.”

Shefflin referenced that too. “He [Cody] seethed at the depiction of us as some sort of pre-historic force,” wrote Shefflin. “Maybe desperate people file all this stuff away, hoping you can pack it tight like gunpowder. Well, we were desperate people [in 2006].”

Over the years other stuff materialised as low-hanging fruit. After they lost the 2011 League final to Dublin one newspaper used the risible headline “Croker Chokers”. “Cody went absolutely ape over it,” wrote Eoin Larkin in his autobiography Camouflage, and it was raised more than once during the summer.

When they reached the All-Ireland final against Tipperary that year, word reached Nowlan Park that a Tipp player had been running his mouth in Copper Face Jacks after Tipp’s semi-final win. “Before long, the whole squad had word of it,” wrote Christy O’Connor in The Sunday Times. “Kilkenny already had a beef with Tipp, but that anecdote added fuel to the flames.”

For a few years, Kilkenny’s relationship with Cork was inflamed by all kinds of differences, most of which originated off the field. “We were never hung up on trying to find an edge in motivation on the opposition,” wrote Tyrrell, “but we never had any trouble sourcing that fuel before we met Cork.”

Kilkenny resented the image of best-in-class professionalism that Cork projected, they took offence at being characterised as “Stepford Wives” in Donal Og Cusack’s autobiography, and they had no truck with the Cork players’ strikes – just to tip the iceberg.

“By the time Cork rolled into Nowlan Park in March 2009, they had just emerged from their third player’s strike,” wrote Tyrrell. “[In our camp] there was genuine disdain by then for Cork and what those players stood for. We didn’t just want to beat Cork that day – we wanted to trample them into the ground like dirt.”

All of this is as old as the game itself. When Ger Loughnane was in charge of Clare, he was always looking for a “cause”. Did Kilkenny need it? Would they have been the same without it? In their pomp, they traded not just on brilliance and endless ambition, but on edginess and ruthlessness too. Having a jaundiced view of the other crowd might have lubricated the process of winning at times; or maybe they believed it did.

“In sport, you’re always looking for that extra edge,” wrote Shefflin, “and the instinct is to make use of whatever is to hand.”

Sport is full of grievances, and there is no register of all the grievances that failed to make a difference in the end. For Fennelly to make that intervention when he did, though, in advance of the match, was unusual and surely unwise. If that stuff comes out, it is usually in the winners’ dressing-room.

Listening to Barry Coughlan’s victory speech again it is hard to identify where the “disrespect” could have occurred, but offence is always in the eyes and ears of the beholder, and, in sport, nobody is ever asked to justify those feelings.

An All-Ireland semi-final between Ballygunner and Ballyhale didn’t need sauce on the side. Anyway, there it is. No extra charge.