Along With Cork's Jack Lynch, Jimmy Phelan is one of the last two surviving players from the starting line-ups of 60 years ago. "I last met Jack Lynch at the Eire Og Skibbereen replay (All-Ireland club football final, 1993) and he said to me `Jimmy, we're the faithful and the few' and I remarked that we were still faithful but getting much fewer," he recalls.

Left corner forward, he scored both Kilkenny's goals in the first half. Originally from Ballyragget, he has been living in Carlow since 1937 when he first took up employment with the sugar company in the town. This change of residence was to influence his inter-county career profoundly after the success of 1939.

Phelan played his last match for Kilkenny in 1941 when he was only 23. The foot and mouth disease outbreak in the early 1940s meant that hurling was all but suspended in the worst-affected counties. After the epidemic had subsided, wartime rationing took its toll.

"I had no way of getting from Carlow to Kilkenny for training," he says. "Private motoring was restricted to essential trips and the county board were no longer able to send taxis to collect me as travel to training was a non-essential journey."

His inter-county profile was reestablished at the start of the 1960s when he trained his adopted Carlow to an All-Ireland junior title in 1960 and the intermediate championship two years later. Now 82, he continues to live in Carlow and take a keen interest in hurling.