ON GAELIC GAMES:Like Jim McGuinness in Donegal and James Horan in Mayo, Galway's unflappable hurling manager has made a huge impact

JOE CANNING’S unerringly dispatched free on Sunday was a welcome intervention for anyone not from Kilkenny. Brian Cody’s reaction to the decision of referee Barry Kelly to award a less than clear-cut free was understandable but it will make the 2012 All-Ireland title a collector’s item for whoever wins it in the end.

It also gives hurling a much-needed profile boost at a time when it is lagging behind football in the public imagination. The week after next football’s All-Ireland will be going to either a county that hasn’t won it in 20 years or one that’s been waiting over 60.

There have been six counties in the three most recent All-Ireland finals, something that hasn’t happened for 50 years in football and just once in over 60 years of hurling – during the 1990s, one of the game’s more competitive eras.

Galway have been waiting even longer than Donegal’s footballers for an All-Ireland and it was sobering on Sunday to see the great side of the 1980s being honoured as the silver jubilee team. You’d wonder did their minds go back the 24 years to imagine their younger reactions at being told that they’d be standing there in their suits waving at the All-Ireland crowd before the county managed to land another Liam MacCarthy Cup.

There hasn’t been a drawn final since Eamon de Valera’s first All-Ireland as president and, if this was an outcome that on the law of averages couldn’t be kept at bay for ever, it has helped the season to a fitting conclusion.

It hardly seems that long – three months – since it looked as if Kilkenny’s destruction of Cork in the league final had rendered the championship unnecessary, something that was only being played in order to appease the massive greed of the GAA.

Had Kilkenny edged home by a point at the weekend, it would have obscured the extent to which the season has defied the gloomy projections and delivered an unexpectedly compelling narrative – even incorporating the meltdown of a Tipperary team widely assumed to be the champions’ only real rivals for ultimate honours.

The Leinster final redefined expectations but, like a whipped cur suspicious of affection, the hurling world was by and large unwilling to venture very much emotional investment in the prospect of any putative new order being upheld.

Looked at now – and accepting that if Kilkenny hand out a punishment beating in the replay, everyone will wish that Canning had missed his free – there has been a welcome transformation both of the championship and, more importantly, of Galway.

Last week this column questioned how a county that is neck-and-neck with Kilkenny for all the other prizes in hurling over the past 20 years has shot so many blanks in senior championship. The corollary of this is to wonder how the champions have plotted such a sure-footed path through so many championships under Cody.

Winning this All-Ireland would make Cody statistically the most successful manager in GAA history. Nine All-Irelands in 13 seasons would finally outstrip Mick O’Dwyer’s Kerry and their haul of eight football titles in 12 years.

This could be the first year that Kilkenny win a title through the qualifiers but their record in 14 championships is phenomenal: just five sudden-death defeats in all of those 60 matches – years of forced marches through minefields with so few mishaps.

That Anthony Cunningham took on such a formidable challenge twice and escaped unbeaten on both occasions is as telling a comment as any on the extraordinary rookie year he’s had as a senior manager.

His meticulous planning is well attested but that’s more of a prerequisite than a decisive advantage in the ranks of intercounty management. One thing does stand out is his preternatural calm.

I remember the night his Galway Under-21s got tossed on the bonfire of Tipperary’s celebrations in the 2010 All-Ireland final just six days after that year’s senior triumph, Cunningham was reasoned and affable.

It had been a difficult week because Galway had complained about having to play the final in Thurles and feelings had run quite high with the secretary of the county’s hurling board describing the decision as “absolutely disgraceful”.

In the frustration of the moment – and a 25-point defeat – it would have been forgivable had Cunningham banged the same drum or lashed out in some other way but he acknowledged defeat gracefully. A year later when his team had enjoyed a different experience in Thurles, beating Dublin in the final, the tone wasn’t much different. In other words, those two imposters were treated just the same.

The structured equilibrium with which he has been running the show this year is detectable in the lack of excitability, the emphasis on the collegiality of his management team and the deadpan restraint with which he appears to greet more or less everything, including Cody’s attempts to lock antlers on the sideline.

The alchemist’s touch, evident in the presence of 10 starting players from last summer’s embarrassment at the hands of Waterford, is also a feature of the football final, in which Jim McGuinness and James Horan will be aiming to complete the rehabilitation of Donegal and Mayo teams, the bulk of whom were also humiliated in the year before the new managers took charge.

It is appropriate timing in the year that has seen the issue of paying managers being openly debated on foot of GAA director general Páraic Duffy’s discussion document released last January that three of the four All-Ireland finalists – the other has as detailed won eight All-Irelands since 2000 – have so clearly demonstrated the transformative power of the right appointment with all of the positive consequences that has for the GAA in the relevant counties.

The counties have decided to embrace the imposition of Rule 1.10 on amateurism with renewed vigour in answer to the questions posed by Duffy’s document, which when giving an inventory of the demands on a modern manager points out that the GAA has assigned many of its functions to paid operatives because sourcing them in a wholly voluntary context is not possible.

It is doubtful if any professional services retained by counties have quite the same seismic impact as that of a successful county team – depending on the county that can mean as little as a strong league campaign or as much as winning a senior All-Ireland.

The GAA as a whole has reason to be grateful to the managers who have brought about the transformations that have benefited the national standing of the games. smoran@irishtimes.com