Back in 1999, Brian Cody’s first season in charge of Kilkenny, there was also a new manager in charge of Tipperary.
On Sunday in Nowlan Park, the counties meet for the first time since Cody’s retirement and once more there will be two managers in their debut season on the sideline.
In the meantime, Tipperary have had 10 different managements and nine managers – Liam Sheedy doubling up in 2008 and 2019.
During that period, the county’s record against Kilkenny was 10 wins out of 36 matches, including three championship victories – every one in an All-Ireland final – in 11 meetings.
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Neither of the new managers is inexperienced. Liam Cahill has won All-Irelands at under-20 and taken Waterford to a senior final whereas Derek Lyng, who takes up the Kilkenny baton in succession to the man who has won 11 Liam MacCarthys in 24 years, also has an under-20 title from last season.
It was March 1999 when Tipperary went to Nowlan Park, hurled well in the first half and led by 10. After the break, the home side took over with the wind behind them and ended up winning 3-14 to 1-13.
Back on that ground zero, the first Tipp-Kilkenny match of the new era, could anyone have imagined what was to come? Both newly appointed managers, Cody and Nicky English, would go on to win All-Irelands in the following years but the former would add a further 10 before calling it a day last July.
If there was little hint of what was to come in terms of the Cody era, one detail still has a resonance. When the Kilkenny manager talked about his half-time instructions after the match, the words were characteristic of the quarter-century to come in their clear-headedness and lack of panic.
He told reporters that he had said to the dressingroom: “Don’t go mad, fellas, looking for goals. Take the points and the goals will come.”
In later years, maybe greater urgency was accorded to goals but teams in the future would come to feel as insecure as English having built hefty leads against Kilkenny.
The postscript to the campaign was nonetheless positive for Tipperary. They wouldn’t lose again and won the league.
One of the better Tipp players on the day was Tommy Dunne, who would captain the county to an All-Ireland in 2001. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t have vivid memories of the match or a sense that the new Kilkenny manager would dominate hurling.
“No. My memories of ‘99 were very much around Nicky, his presence and influence on us at the very early stages of his tenure. I felt there was a real upping of the ante in terms of mindset and how we went about our training and our games. That’s very clear still. Tipp won the league that year and that was very important to us. We didn’t lose another match in that league.
“You ask me was I aware of Cody at that stage and the answer is no because I was too focused on Tipperary and our own new management. That was my thinking at the time, as we were going through a fairly brutal training regime. On the pitch there was a huge emphasis on work-rate, running, covering ground and being athletic.
“The memories of Nowlan Park are built around that.”
As time went by, Tipperary went through managers at a rate of regular consumption. English departed after defeat by Kilkenny in the All-Ireland semi-final of 2002 despite hopes that he would remain in charge.
Last year he reflected on the fact that it took another 20 years for his rival manager to follow suit.
Cody’s management can be viewed in two parts. The first seven years returned three All-Irelands, which is a fair haul but what followed, a further eight in 10 years, took the whole enterprise to the stratosphere.
In those years of consecutively, four in a row and four in five years, Kilkenny had an aura of invincibility.
“Was it intimidating to play them?” asks Dunne, who spent the best part of a decade playing in Kilkenny’s world and after retirement, coaching at intercounty level.
“It was proper intimidating! I remember one of the matches in 2011 or ‘12. For the first 10 minutes of the game Cody and Mick Dempsey [selector and trainer] were at the linesman – maybe not completely overstepping it but the linesman would have known that they were around. He never said anything or made any move to calm them down or call in the referee.
“I was on the field tending to one of our players and I said to the linesman, ‘Are you going to listen to the two of them chawing you for the whole match?’ I wasn’t roaring or shouting but the two boys heard it and turned on me, yelling, ‘get off the pitch and shut your f***ing mouth’.
“The linesman also turns on me and says, ‘Tommy, if you don’t get off the f***ing pitch, you’ll find yourself up in the stand.’ He was trying to placate the boys by having a go at me!”
He believes the dramatic contrast between the counties’ managerial turnovers proved unhelpful for Tipperary but probably unavoidable given that managers with Cody’s longevity are outliers.
“If you ask me in broad terms would Tipp be better off with fewer changes in management I’d say we would have. But I can’t see it as being possible for some one individual to stay managing Tipperary for the length of time Cody was over Kilkenny. It wouldn’t be a good fit.
“It helps to have been at the summit or very close to it given the crop of players they had every year. Maybe that was part of it as well but I am in awe of coaches who can stay that long with the same team and still inspire the players to play at the best of their ability.
“It was the 2009 final when I had the sense that they were now probably the greatest team ever – certainly the best team I’d ever seen. That’s why the victory in 2010 was so special for Tipp. In the years that followed they were no longer that team but still won four All-Irelands out of the next five.”
He believes that the surprising departure of the 2010 management so soon after their success left its mark on the county.
“When Liam Sheedy, Eamon [O’Shea] and Mick [Ryan] stepped down in 2010, that was one departure that jolted.
“They had won an incredible All-Ireland against the greatest team of all time with a Tipp team, more or less in their prime. When that management stepped away, it hurt and was definitely a negative and I say that as part of the management which came in and so, I saw the effect on the players.”
This weekend in Nowlan Park, after another management change, it will be strange for Tipperary to take on Kilkenny in the absence of the man who defined an era. Everything is reset at zero.
