There is an alternative version of Henry Shefflin’s career that makes no reference to his 10 All-Irelands and 11 All-Stars and his place among the greatest hurlers of all-time.
Like every great sportsman he was shaped by failure and harassed by it and driven by it more than he ever was by winning.
The thing about failure is that it keeps coming back. You find a chemical to spray the weed and it takes root somewhere else. You hear sportspeople say that they have “overcome” failure, but that is never the final outcome. The spraying never stops.
In the first half of his career, especially, Shefflin was challenged to find ways around failure, or back from it. Long forgotten stuff now, buried under the landslide of triumphs. Shefflin spoke once about an All-Ireland minor semi-final in Croke Park when his free-taking cracked under pressure and Kilkenny lost by a couple of points.
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The significance of it at the time was that Shefflin didn’t know if he would ever play in Croke Park again. Whatever people saw in the youngster, it wasn’t greatness.
“When I was a minor,” he said years later, “people would have said I was just another Kilkenny minor. He’ll play club – that’ll be it.”
After he made his breakthrough the failure didn’t stop. He was already an All-Ireland winner and an All-Star when his form bottomed out in 2001: taken off in the Leinster final and held scoreless from play; tormented by Gregory Kennedy in the All-Ireland semi-final and held scoreless from play.
The 2005 season was better than that, but Shefflin still classed it as a failure. Kilkenny lost another All-Ireland semi-final to Galway and Ballyhale Shamrocks lost the county final. On those teams Shefflin was the breadwinner; on both days he scolded himself for his performances.
By his own account of the county final he missed chances that should have been worth 2-4 and ended up contributing just two frees. At that stage in his career he had three All-Irelands, five All-Stars and one Hurler of the Year Award. Failure paid no heed.
“At the start of this year [2006] I was down,” Shefflin said at the time. “This time last year [December 2005] I could have been driving along in the car and I could start thinking about the county final or the Galway match and you’re just devastated. You feel like pulling the car in and stopping. It hurt me so much. At the start of the year you’d be saying, ‘Why do you put yourself through that?’”
For winners the relationship with losing is never resolved. There is no prospect of mediation or compromise. Shefflin played for the most successful manager in the history of the GAA on what is still – for now – the greatest team hurling has ever known. Winning was what they did best.
Shefflin is in a much different position now. He finds himself in charge of a team that seems to contain nothing of him; not his cussedness or his unyielding will. In his third season as Galway manager the team has no identity or momentum.
Galway’s performance in Wexford Park nine days ago was just as dysfunctional as his first Leinster final as manager in 2022 when Galway managed just three points in the last 24 minutes.
In every respect it is different from his first job in management. The Ballyhale Shamrocks team that he led to back-to-back All-Irelands had a forward line that included TJ Reid, Colin Fennelly, Adrian Mullen and Eoin Cody. In the modern game, complication and sophistication are often tangled up but Ballyhale didn’t need to get bogged down in any of that. They were straightforward and smart.
The temptation to underestimate what Shefflin achieved with Ballyhale, though, should be resisted.
Managing your own club, dealing with neighbours and deep-rooted families, is rarely simple. In his first year their performance in the league was so hairy that they needed to win their last game to qualify directly for the championship quarter-finals. For that game, one senior player arrived just 10 minutes before throw-in. They lost again, apparently going nowhere.
Since the current championship system was instituted in Kilkenny in the late 1990s, no team has won the title without starting their campaign in the quarter-finals. Ballyhale, under Shefflin, were the first. He turned it around.
The challenge he faces now, though, is much greater than that. The intercounty game demands a certain level of sophistication and tactical acuity that Galway have lacked. By the end of last summer he was frustrated with Galway’s “inconsistency,” and in that respect nothing has changed yet this season. In Year Three, Shefflin is no longer bedding in. By now the team should have been shaped to his design.
The cheap assumption, across all sports, is that great players have the wherewithal to be successful managers. What is the strike rate? We’re still waiting for the academic paper.
In his playing days, though, Shefflin’s resilience was his greatest strength. In the second half of his career he was terrorised by serious injuries: two cruciate ligaments, a shoulder reconstruction and a broken foot that lingered for seven months. It was a wearing cycle of setback and rehab.
“The successes I had were brilliant,” Shefflin said when he retired. “But the challenges I faced made me what I am.”
At the same press conference to announce the end of his career he said a fascinating thing about how he handled pressure, referencing an unnamed person who became his sounding board.
“There were a lot of pressures, you know, being Henry Shefflin – which I put on myself,” he said. “I was probably concerned about what people thought of me. So it was great to be able to sit down with someone and just talk about things and get much more comfortable in my own skin. You become freer.”
Elements of that pressure he felt as a player – to perform, to lead, to win – must be on his mind now. Great sports people put themselves in these positions. On the field, Shefflin stared down every challenge. Will that make any difference now? This will be a long game. He needs to get better. For 15 years in a Kilkenny jersey, he followed that imperative.
