REACTION FROM THE KILKENNY CAMP:"SURE IT beats losing," says Brian Cody, as good a phrase as any to start.
Everything must go – and now, after 12 All-Ireland hurling finals, that’s eight wins, three losses, and, almost inevitably, the first draw: Cody sits back to ponder this thought, all his brain seems to be telling him is that even if a draw beats losing, it will never beat winning.
“And that was the plan, to win, definitely,” he says. “You couldn’t be satisfied with not winning. But certainly we’d be very, very dissatisfied with losing.
“It just means we start all over again. It doesn’t really matter right now, dissatisfied or not. That’s the way it panned out. Now we start planning ahead. It’s only three weeks. It will arrive.
“I’ve won some, lost some, but never drawn one. But any time you’re told you’re in an All-Ireland final in three weeks’ time you’d be excited. If it was six months away you’d still be excited. It will change the scenario for club fixtures, and that’s serious. But it’s so seldom you get a draw in the All-Ireland final, and it is a strange feeling, for both teams, I’m sure. Very unusual.”
Cody is then landed with the serious questions – such as why Henry Shefflin opted to send the late penalty high above the bar, instead of trying to get it under, what he thought of the late free awarded to Galway, after Davy Glennon was apparently fouled by Jackie Tyrrell at the death – and Joe Canning breathed life back into Galway.
“Well I saw it, in a split second,” Cody confesses, of the equalising free, “but I’m not going to even remotely explain it. They scored a point, to get the draw, so from that point of view it was very important, if that’s what you’re talking about.
“But it’ll be blown up a bit, I’m sure, as it happened to be the last free. But there were other incidents in the game that I might disagree with, or Anthony Cunningham might disagree with. That’s the nature of the game.”
Cody definitely wasn’t about to blame match referee Barry Kelly, perhaps knowing the man in the middle had let the game flow as freely as anyone could.
“Look, I don’t referee the game. I don’t even have a good reputation to referee, it seems. And he doesn’t make the changes for us, either.
“He has a tough job to do. We have a tough job to do. I’m sure I made several mistakes out there, and all this year, in hurling. He’d be some man if he didn’t make mistakes.
“I’m sure a Kilkenny person thought it wasn’t a free, and a Galway person thought it was a free. All that mattered is that Barry Kelly thought it was a free. In this game, there are no excuses. We weren’t robbed in this game. Not by a long shot.
“Galway scored the same amount as us. We scored the same amount as Galway. I don’t have any problem, at all, with the referee.”
What Cody said to Shefflin when Kilkenny were awarded a potentially match-winning penalty on 67 minutes wasn’t so much words, as a shrug of the shoulder, translating as “decide whatever you want to do yourself . . .”
Whether that’s exactly what Cody would have liked Shefflin to have done is unclear: “Because you can’t inspire Henry Shefflin what to do with a penalty, or whatever else. He decides that himself. If he’d scored it he’d have been a genius. If they saved it he would have been a lunatic. He gave us a score, a vital score, a score that really mattered. And he’d a huge game, won hard ball, took on a leadership role, again.”
What exactly Cody said to Galway manager Anthony Cunningham at the final whistle might never be clear.
“Look,” says Cody, “there were 80,000 people excited at that stage of the game, roaring, and fierce passionate. Surely to God the two managers are entitled to be excited as well, and maybe not totally agree with everything?
“It was a bit of excitement, that’s all. We shook hands. Well done, Anthony. Best of luck. See you in three weeks’ time.”
That they will – and when Cody sits down to ponder the areas for improvement he won’t be worrying about work-rate.
“You wouldn’t be getting too much kudos for working hard, in an All-Ireland final. It was a decent second-half performance by us, after a first half in which Galway were definitely the better team.
“At least we put ourselves in a position where we were competitive in the second half. And I think the players performed at a very decent level, their intent, and you couldn’t ask more that than. I’m sure everybody got great value for money out there, and will look forward to the replay.”
That we all will.
