Triumphant Brian Cody pays tribute to vanquished Waterford

Down in the tunnel, bodies are spent. People are spent. Derek McGrath can barely get his thoughts in train. This has emptied him, drained his well of chutzpah until the bucket hit the bottom. Usually after matches, he is analytical and open with his thoughts, often motoring off on tangents to better explain himself. Tonight, his back to a wall near the Waterford dressing room, the game has siphoned his spirit away.

"I don't even think the aftermath I could put my finger on anything. I think that six-minute period before half-time, when Kilkenny scored three points… I think in normal time, it was level and Kilkenny nipped three points like that. I thought that might be a factor later on. But I wasn't imparting that to the lads. I thought that might be a crucial period. I just felt we had them if we could twist the knife.

“But what do you say to guys who give it everything they have? Who empty themselves? Mistakes are going to be made. Mistakes are going to be wrong. I think it was just a case of two teams going at it with everything on the line and unfortunately, we came out the wrong side of it.”

This wasn’t there for Waterford in the way the previous Sunday had been there. But it was a chance all the same. Not many teams hold Kilkenny scoreless between the 53rd and 70th minute without winning. McGrath saw his team hike to within touching distance of the mountaintop twice in six days. If they hadn’t seen such riches they could live with being poor.

“We’re not short of much I think. We’re not short of resolve and determination and we’re not short of representing who we know we’re representing, Waterford people all over the world. I’m not sure. I’m not willing to say we’re short of anything…

“It’s about every one working as one, wherever there are numbers. We’ve never professed anything else. The overriding emotion is one of absolute pride but devastation because these chances don’t come along too often. I hate to be as grim but that’s my honest opinion.”

When we get Brian Cody, he has just left the Waterford dressing room. In 18 seasons, that's 15 losing dressing rooms he's been to after All-Ireland semi-finals, passing consolation onto broken young men with thousand-yard stares. We don't say it often enough – we'll never see his equal.

Tight game

The crux of this night came at the end, Pauric Mahony's free twickering through the black sky down towards the town end. It looked for all the world that he'd pushed us into extra-time. It was from 70 metres on and angle and it arrowed right over the black spot. If he hit it in training, it would have landed on top of the net. But Eoin Murphy got a paw up over the bar and clawed it down. Kilkenny were out the gap.

“It looked serious,” Cody says. “It was a fantastic catch there’s no doubt about it. Obviously you can reach a ball with a hurley but to get up and take it in his hand and make it so safe, if it had gone wrong obviously there would have been consequences, it was just a great bit of skill, a great bit of taking of responsibility which is what he does.

“He [Mahony] can score from there, he can score from just about anywhere in fairness to the chap. He has given an exhibition of scoring over two days with frees and that. I presumed he’d score it when he was hitting the free, I turned to the lads and said, ‘Lads there’s going to be extra-time.’ But it didn’t turn out like that, thank God.”

“I’d say there was calmness right throughout the field, we did use it better. We had to get the ball to use it and we did better than we did last week. We had to be obviously because even being better than last week, Waterford are an outstanding team.

“I have just come from the Waterford dressing room and there is devastation there. Like I said before the semi-final, when I look at Waterford I don’t see systems I see brilliant hurlers. Absolutely brilliant hurlers and they proved it again here. It is absolutely tough on them and we are very, very happy obviously.”

Nobody who watched him, James McGarry and Ned Quinn course the referee and his officials down the tunnel at half-time could have mistaken them for very happy people. As usual, Cody doesn’t bite when we ask him about it. The free-count in the first half was 7-2 in Waterford’s favour, as if that’s any excuse.

“It is a big count. Seven-two is a fair divide there. Look it, we won the game, I was animated at different times, so was Derek, so were the lads in the stand. But any person who was alive out there, if they weren’t animated they need to be checked up.”