GAELIC GAMES: TOM HUMPHRIESon the countless hours of practice and the routine application of his genius that have made Henry Shefflin the icon among icons in black and amber

THE MAN. The king. The Lazarus. The miracle of wounded knee has brought Henry Shefflin’s status within the greatest game into sharp focus. If Kilkenny are to win tomorrow or if they lose, their fate with be ineluctably bound up with that of Shefflin.

Only the most blinkered of Premier partisans would have taken any pleasure from his absence tomorrow. Beating a Kilkenny side which lacked Henry Shefflin would be a qualified pleasure. Tomorrow’s final without Shefflin on the field would be a shrunken occasion.

In this season, when hurlers’ heads have been hidden away behind the Mycro burqas the insurance ayatollahs insist upon, it is notable the narrative of this All-Ireland final should be so much about the game’s most recognisable figure. Not that Shefflin will be comfortable with the attention or the adulation, but the game needs its icons and he is preeminent in that role.

By now, he should be cruising, instead he is pivotal and as relevant as ever in any assessment of Kilkenny. He has seen Charlie Carter banished and DJ Carey and Peter Barry and John Power and Andy Comerford and any number of strong characters and great hurlers peak and then vanish from the Kilkenny dressingroom and he knows the wonder of the stripes is that everybody, virtually everybody, is replaceable.

Even this weekend on the greatest team ever seen, the side with the best forged collective work ethic of any we have loved or admired, there is nobody but Shefflin whose absence on its own would alter the bookmakers’ odds.

He is a testimony to the joy of being able to just keep on keeping on.

An eighth All-Ireland senior medal tomorrow would leapfrog him to a seat at the head of the top table, alongside Ring and Doyle.

His name is freighted with the same awe but the affection in which he is held is different. Shefflin had no Setanta-into-Cúchulainn moments as an apprentice. No wondrous gaisce. His greatness is founded on more familiar qualities.

It is a Saturday afternoon. Shefflin has returned to St Kieran’s where he developed, as he puts it himself, from a “fella with a big oul arse to throw in at full forward” to something approaching the player he has become. He is speaking to a group of young players from Dublin and pointing to a small rectangle of wall just beside the main pitch at the back of the college.

The youngsters want to hear how magic tricks are done. Henry wants to talk about the wall, about the eternity of hours he spent beating a ball against that little bit of concrete and brick, about the games he would play with others which involved nothing more than beating a ball against the same abutment.

“Hours,” he says, “hours every day”. And you see enlightenment dropping slow. There are no magic tricks. Just those hours submitted out of love and passion and humility. Nobody is born mastering hurling. Shefflin explains that he works the same way today.

Always a stick and sliotars in the boot of the car. He doesn’t carry a wand and he doesn’t walk on the waves. He is a hewer of wood and a drawer of water.

He grew up, of course, under the eyes of great men. The Fennellys were childhood idols and he took the same path, learning his early use of the ash wand from Joe Dunphy in primary school in Ballyhale. One of his earliest memories of hurling is being a six or seven -year-old begging to be allowed to play with the 12-year-olds.

Hours. He tells of the old squash court they had out the back of the family bar in Ballyhale. Not much squash got played there, but Henry and his brother Paul put down the hours driving a sliotar in there.

It’s a game of hours. Not inches.

Hours. In the house John was maybe the best natural hurler. Tommy next. Henry carried some weight and was slow. Paul was a late starter. Tommy won a minor All-Ireland and an under-21 title with Kilkenny, but hurling with Pat O’Neill, Charlie Carter and DJ Carey reduced everybody else to the status of extras and bit players.

John was luckier. A minor All-Ireland in 1990, the year Tommy won his under-21 medal. He was man of the match in the replayed final against Cork, scoring three points. Shamrocks were a very settled club though and the seniors were impenetrable. John’s development slowed.

And Henry. He talks often of being a big, tall 14-year-old standing on the line as the under-16 team in Ballyhale played. He was the only sub and, he recalls, too fond of spuds. Every eligible kid in the parish had been rounded up. He just went away and offered up more hours.

The nine All Star awards, the seven All-Ireland medals, the club baubles, the sets of Hurler of the Year statuettes, an RTÉ Sports Personality of the Year trophy and so on. None of it grants licence to be different and nor does he seek it.

Watch Shefflin on any day and he works as hard as he did when he got called up from the Kilkenny intermediate side as a young fella getting a game for the seniors during a biblical plague of injuries.

St Kieran’s again. These walls and the stories they could tell. He struggled to be part of the narrative. Last named on the under-16 panel. In the All-Ireland year he broke a bone in his foot first game out and had pins inserted. The longer he was out the more Kieran’s thought they missed him. He got the pins out before the final and resumed where he had left off, “a big lad with a big arse in around full forward”.

No explosion of talent, no striding on to the scene. No DJ, no Canning. He made the Kilkenny minors at 17 – as a sub goalie. On and on. The theme of work runs through his life like a great river through a parched nation.

Persistence. He had played Fitzgibbon for WIT at 19, but couldn’t get a trial for the Kilkenny under-21s. He made the Kilkenny intermediates. Same old same old. Sixteen turned up for a game and Shefflin was the one on the sideline. They were going to break it to him afterwards that he was dropped. Sacked, jacked and fired. But he came on and did well and the under-21s noticed.

He wound up that year scoring 3-4 out of Kilkenny’s 3-7 in the All- Ireland semi-final defeat to Galway, two of the goals coming from play and the other from a penalty he won. Brian Cody noticed as did most of Kilkenny, but when Cody got the county job Cody’s view was all that mattered.

He made his championship debut in the summer of 1999, taking a tidy 1-6 from Offaly, but, more than his scoring records in championship hurling, his importance has lain in being the physical embodiment of Cody’s philosophy of hurling.

As such there is a bond between the two which is central to Kilkenny’s wellbeing as a side. The story is told of the team trip to South Africa in 2002 when Kilkenny ended up staying in the same plush Cape Town hotel as the footballers from Dublin and Kerry.

One night the managers of the three sides were invited into a backroom by the manager of the hotel and informed a valuable artefact had been broken, a member of staff had seen a red-headed player break the artefact and the hotel would need recompense.

Faced with the prospect of a long and fruitless investigation, one of the men in the room instantly came up with an idea of genius and devilment. He turned to Cody and said he was very sorry to have to announce this but it was Henry Shefflin. He went on to say that because everybody had such immense respect for Shefflin it was imperative the matter be dealt with instantly and discreetly. And that was how it was dealt with.

Except, of course, neither Shefflin or any other Kilkenny man had been to blame. They had found Cody’s Achilles! Little wonder.

Shefflin is Cody’s thoughts and wishes made flesh and put out on to the field. Two different men with the same philosophy, same ability to take in the big picture.

Not just the work-rate, but the mistrust of flash, the subservience to the team ethic.

Eddie Brennan’s goal against Cork this year was a fine example.

Shefflin, moving shark-like through the centre of the defence, had the option of scoring and settling himself into another good day. He made the pass inside to Brennan, though, and Cork were ready to be nailed into their box.

And when the knife needs to be turned he turns it ruthlessly. For all the talk in Tipp of how many steps Richie Power did or did not take in last year’s final, the blade had gone in before that, when Benny Dunne got sent off and Shefflin coldly pointed a free from almost 100 yards out.

And when it comes to talk he is genial but mistrustful.

He has spoken revealingly about Kilkenny’s attitude to team meetings, those rare occasions when the stripeymen gather in a room and look at each other.

“Usually, nobody has anything really to say so we get up and do our talking out on the field.”

That is how Cody likes it too.

Shefflin would be a little more gregarious than his manager, but there is a similarity in their personalities which comes across to those who have interviewed both. In the course of an hour or two’s conversation, they each have the ability to leave nothing particularly revealing about themselves in inverted commas.

Defeat has been a rare intruder in his hurling life, but he speaks of those days with an abhorrence which explains much about him.

The forensics of defeat linger with him longer than the blur of victory. Galway 2001. Greg Kennedy distracting him.

Henry allowing himself be distracted. Wexford 2004. Failing to make a run when he assumed Jimmy Coogan would just go through and score. The Kilkenny county final of 2005 when he went scoreless for the hour. His only sending off as a young fella in a minor semi-final.

The days when: “Coming back into that dressingroom and nobody joking or laughing. When I finish up hurling that’s what I’ll take out of it – the friendships I made, the craic and the laughs, the bit of banter. I hate that losing dressingroom.”

That refusal to make accommodation with failure has been the essence of an astonishing career. Those hours and hours on the wall in Kieran’s and the squash court in Ballyhale equipped him with a sense of touch that seems never to vanish or diminish.

He is a fierce and honest competitor when it comes to looking for ball and that touch has bought him so much time in units of a second or less over the years it is impossible to measure its worth.

This week he has been central to every discussion about the All- Ireland final. Will he play? How can he play? The mechanics of the cruciate ligament have become a matter of common knowledge.

Sometime tomorrow some Tipp player is going to have to put in a big, bone-shaking tackle on Henry Shefflin, just to see if the knee is as strong as advertised. If the king buckles the culprit will be instantly launched by The Sunday Game into the realms of infamy. The Lee Harvey Oswald of hurling.

On the other hand, if Henry sustains the hit the morale boost will be measurable by the guttural thunder rising from the stands.

His legend will expand yet again and he’ll work just that little bit harder to justify it.