GAELIC GAMES: KEITH DUGGANtalks to Tipperary's top scorer, Eoin Kelly, who, despite a decade of excellence, has seen All-Ireland glory elude him since 2001

IN THE beginning, when he was winning, he could never have guessed it would come down to a day like this. This summer, Eoin Kelly has been celebrating a decade of enduring excellence in Premier colours – 3-36 has been his scoring contribution to this year’s championship.

If he manages just another six points – and he fired 0-13 against Kilkenny in the corresponding final last year – he will finish as the championship’s top scorer.

That tally enhances a prolific career that has long since shaded the scoreboard contributions of old Tipperary gods like Nicholas English and Jimmy Doyle.

In most respects, the hurling life of the Mullinahone man has been as lavish and spectacular as was predicted when he demonstrating his first flourishes of brilliance with St Kieran’s College and the county minors.

He is 28 years old now and will captain Tipperary in tomorrow’s august All-Ireland final occasion against Kilkenny. None of the participants have stood up and said it yet, but this is a hurling match for the ages, a match

that will result in either the confirmation or abrupt disappearance into the ether of a sporting feat that has become the Holy Grail for the best GAA teams.

Kelly has grown up wearing a Tipperary jersey, from his origins as the irrepressible and preternaturally calm teenager sent in to the fury of a Galway-Tipperary match in August of 2000 to the survivor and leader through a so-so decade for Tipperary hurling.

He has never lost the wide-eyed look of his teenage years and when he thought back to his first All-Ireland win in 2001, he scanned the room of the Horse and Jockey hotel as though hoping that images from that time would materialise from the furniture.

“It’s gas you mention that now. Someone just said to me the other day about looking back to 2001 and what it meant. I can’t really think back to the emotions of that time. Obviously we were delighted but beyond that . . . it seems a long time ago. Myself and Lar (Corbett) were under-21 and we probably did think that every year after that would be happy days.

“We went through that year unbeaten in the league and the championship. But I do think that if we could win this one, then there would be more. It might mean more to win a championship after having understood the hurt of the previous years.”

Back then, there was little for Kelly to understand except the sporting path ahead seemed to be littered with garlands. And it proved to be so except in one respect. He came through when Clare were the litmus test of ambition and manhood; Kilkenny had not won an All-Ireland title for eight years.

In 2000, there was little evidence to suggest the ultimate objective of his senior hurling life – to win All-Ireland medals – would come to be defined by the feats of Kilkenny men. Maybe Kelly saw inklings of the future during his years at St Kieran’s, when he hurled with Brian Hogan and Jackie Tyrrell and Tommy Walsh. Perhaps he sensed the hurling lives of his schoolmates were set for a different trajectory.

But then, they had scarcely finished studying the Catcher in the Rye when Kelly collected his first senior All-Ireland.

In September 2001, his Kilkenny friends were the envious ones. It all fell into place for Tipperary in Nicky English’s third season in charge; they enjoyed the perfect season.

Kelly’s appreciation of Tipperary hurling was, because of his youth, narrow in definition. He held blurry memories of Tipperary’s 1991 All-Ireland final victory. Growing up in the traditionally football-oriented village of Mullinahone, he studied hurling videos his father collected of Tipperary games in the 1980s and 1990s and, like his elders, he kind of fixated on the career of John Leahy, the first man from the club to hurl for the county.

Because Leahy’s game seemed to thread the narrow gap between volatility and genius, the first question was always about how Johnny had got on.

“It was all Johnny, really,” Kelly said in an interview with this newspaper 10 years ago on a dark August night after training in Semple Stadium. Kelly sat us down in a kind of glorified cupboard in the old stadium that night and he was much the same then as he is now – unflappable, low-key, honest and polite. But there was no mistaking where Leahy ranked in his mind.

He brushed off talk of his startling debut when having selected the 18-year-old as a substitute goalkeeper, manager Nicky English introduced him in the closing stages of a tense quarter-final against Galway and immediately watched him whip over a point.

“Eugene O’Neill threw me a handy ball,” he shrugged later. He was more interested in talking about how Leahy had left the field injured just minutes before he made his debut.

“If we were all to stop now and people asked me what my biggest disappointment was, it would definitely be that Johnny was injured and I couldn’t play with him.”

That sentiment was about as handsome a tribute as the youngster could have paid to Leahy and it was also down to the fact that, in hurling, Eoin Kelly had known precious few disappointments. Flash forward a decade and he knows the game has been as good to him as he has been to it. But there has been no return to that fabled place on the first Sunday in September, in those few minutes after an All-Ireland title has been won.

Kelly looks mildly surprised at the suggestion that of all the people in the Tipperary dressingroom in the aftermath of the 2001 final, none looked more relieved or delighted to have won than English, the manager.

“Possibly. That was Nicky’s third year and he had to come in and sort of rebuilt the team. So he could better understand what goes into a defeat and all that.”

Last September gave Kelly and his team-mates a keenly bitter insight into the lessons of a close defeat. They did so much right in that riveting All-Ireland final and came hauntingly close to breaking the Kilkenny stranglehold on the summer competition.

But Kelly shakes his head at the idea that maybe just that small bit of luck was missing – that without Henry Shefflin’s murderous conversion of an iffy penalty, Tipperary might have ended the day as winners.

“No,” he says firmly. “It is too soft an option. I think the goal chances that we had – and I had one of those – to beat Kilkenny and did not take are what cost us that day. You have to convert those chances when they come to you.”

He hesitates when asked if that loss was the worst he has known as a hurler.

“We were gutted. Gutted. It was an All-Ireland final and it was close. But you go back to your club and you get beaten in that and you are gutted again. We went on holidays then and once we got back from those holidays, there was honestly not a mention of 2009 or Kilkenny. Look, it was a heartbreaking thing.

“But any year you lose out in a championship at whatever stage, it is a terrible feeling because the same effort goes into it no matter how far you get.”

Regardless of the result, many people left Croke Park that day believing that they had witnessed a changing of the guard; that the amber light was dimming and Tipperary were resurgent.

That theory has been scrapped. Kilkenny have returned and inflicted their will and skill on the championship more vigorously than ever.

No team has come close to them and Tipperary displayed an uneven bag of tricks this year. Kelly dissects their form without melodrama, dismissing the league as “topsy-turvy” and sighing about their defeat to Cork in the Munster championship.

“No match down in Páirc Uí Chaoimh is simple and they had their homework done on us. If you have three or four players not performing, you are in trouble.

“But we had maybe 13 players who did not play well. If Liam could have made 13 changes, he would have been justified in doing so. And Cork beat us all over the field.”

But they are back at the only place that matters. Tomorrow, Kelly will play in his third senior All-Ireland final. For most of his career, he has maintained a consistency of form that lies somewhere between excellent and dazzling, regardless of how Tipperary’s season turned out.

When he took a month touring Australia with his brother Paul in Christmas of 2005, they joined up with the All Star touring party in Singapore as members of that year’s team.

Kelly was then on the way to becoming only the second ever player (after Pat Hartigan of Limerick) to win five All-Star awards by the age of 24. In the winter sun that January, he anticipated a revived Tipperary effort under the stewardship of Babs Keating and in the following championship he turned in one of his most mesmerising displays, striking 0-14 out of Tipperary’s 0-22 in dispatching Limerick.

But Tipperary fell short that year and the following July,

Kelly, inhibited by injury, was controversially left out of the team as Tipperary fell to Wexford, bringing an end to the second act of Keating’s managerial career with the county.

Through that episode and the various injuries that have hampered him, Kelly has never courted controversy, always looking forward in his public pronouncements. He admits there are times when the demands of the game have gotten to him, but the admission is quickly converted into a more positive response.

“Of course there is. Injury is the number one thing that gets to you and gets you down. And when your team . . . it took us seven or eight years to win two tight games back to back in Croke Park. That happened for us this year. Okay, last year we played Limerick (in the semi-final), but they were not as organised as they would normally be. Croke Park is just the worst place in the world to come out of following a defeat.

“We are learning. Against Galway, in the last few minutes, we were three down. We didn’t panic. And that is where the experience of the previous few years has come to stand to us.

“It is one thing winning games in Thurles or Cork or Pearse Stadium. But Croke Park is a place of its own and you need those experiences to come through there.”

But is the Kilkenny experience not different? Kelly sees no secret in how Kilkenny have become the supreme GAA team of modern times. He lists the fundamentals – Hard work. Practice. Honesty.

His mind turns to the hour after last year’s All-Ireland final. The Tipperary lads flushed and destroyed and reluctantly leaving the dressingroom to face the outside world when it would have been easier just to stay holed up inside until after midnight. They say the world stops when you lose an All-Ireland.

But you still get hungry. Still get thirsty. So they went upstairs to the bar and the victors were there and handshakes were exchanged and then they were talking. Kelly knows these Kilkenny lads from his schooldays and from those All-Star trips.

“One thing I will say about them – they are as humble as if they have never won an All-Ireland. And that is genuine. Any player that says differently I think is wrong.

“Once they get into a dressingroom, though, they are hungry and they work really hard at what they do. That is what you have to do in any sport.”

When Kilkenny are so sporting, so correct and easy in victory, maybe it is difficult to develop that bit of necessary hate required of a team that wants to take something away.

“I think the key is – Cody said it one day there – the defeat against Galway in 2005 when he reckoned that they were bullied that day. They were outmuscled at the start of the game and he was determined that would not happen again.

“And he has brought their intensity right up over the years since then. It has taken several seasons for them to reach it.

“But you have to match that intensity if you want to compete with them. And we did match that in the final last year. But then they place as much emphasis on their wrists and their skill.

“If you have a team that goes out and matches their intensity, fine. But then you have to factor in their touch and control and what they do on the scoreboard.

“Look,” he sighs. “Everyone would love to achieve what they have achieved. I suppose you wouldn’t call that hate, would you? Yeah, it is admiration. But! You would love to have what they have.”

And that has been the big discovery of Eoin Kelly’s hurling life. The honours and wins that came in such a rush during his fledgling years would become more spare and elusive. Kilkenny’s insatiable acquisition of All-Ireland titles, the fact some of their players are chasing down eight and then more medals seems as fabulous to him as it does to us.

Even if Tipperary do win tomorrow, the worth of Eoin Kelly can never be weighed in a neat presentation of Celtic crosses. Instead, Kelly has been about honouring his given brilliance at the sport and staying loyal to a Tipperary cause that has brought him plenty of frustrations.

“The old head, we will call it,” he grins when asked what the main difference is between the young marvel of 2000 and the man who will lead his county around Croke Park tomorrow.

“I imagine my game has changed. I would find that obviously, you are a few years older and not as quick or as sharp as when I was 19 or 20. But it is that thing of looking out for other guys. Back then,” Eoin Kelly smiles at the memory of simpler days, “I was wired into myself.”