He is entering his 14th year in charge, and yet the Kilkenny manager may be only halfway there, writes KEITH DUGGAN
I KNEW when he was appointed that it spelled trouble for everyone else,” Ger Loughnane said, ever the seer. That was in August, 1999 and Kilkenny had just beaten Clare to qualify for the All-Ireland hurling final. It would be Brian Cody’s first September as Kilkenny manager. That was a long time ago.
In 1999, the euro was a newly minted currency and Bill Clinton was probably the most powerful man in the world. Hurling in the late 1990s was still coming down off the narcotic energy that Clare had introduced and people probably thought Loughnane was just being nice about his college pal.
There was little to suggest then that Cody and the Kilkenny hurlers would eventually fill the sky through the surreal decade of Irish life which was to follow. There was little to suggest then that young men would enter their mellow middle years watching Cody hold that unquenchable flame of his to Kilkenny.
As Brian Cody sets out on his 14th year, the man in the peaked hat and the hurlers in striped shirts are becoming inseparable. Like Alex Ferguson and Manchester United, it is becoming hard to remember when one was without the other. When historians look at Ireland’s decade of delusion and daftness, they might well identify the Kilkenny hurling team as the most substantial and trustworthy presence in Irish life during that time. We all lost the run of ourselves? Cody didn’t. Kilkenny didn’t.
Whose brainwave was it to go for him? Why, during that autumn of 1998 when the Cats were stuck for a manager and had no All-Ireland since 1993, did they go for the stoic ex-full back, the St Patrick’s school teacher with the mild disposition and, it turned out, the granite disposition?
“There was a committee chaired by John Healy,” says Paul Kinsella, the Kilkenny chairman who, as principal, shared the staffroom with Cody for 30 years. In fact, he was calling in to see his old friend – and current principal – the day he took this phone call.
“They got it right,” he chuckles. “Ah, when you look for a manager, only one or two fit the bill. He had lost a county final against Young Irelands but he had been doing well enough with James Stephens.”
But still, the CV was hardly glittering and it is hard to imagine that Cody tried to bowl them over with big promises during the interview.
Somebody saw
something. Fourteen years on and Cody is a household name, looming large in the pantheon of great GAA managers while politely and steadfastly declining to become an Irish “personality”, in the Montrose sense of the word. He has largely kept his distance and left people to fill the gaps as they will. “Ruthless” is the adjective most commonly applied.
The tag amuses and mystifies him. The man teaches children for a living. He doesn’t get it and can’t understand where it comes from. And you only have to watch the interview he did with Gay Byrne for The Meaning of Life series – probably the most open and unguarded as Cody has ever been in public – to get a measure of his empathy. But then: “When I reflected on the 1999 final I felt that we weren’t ruthless or savage enough. Obviously, I use those words in a mental rather than physical context.” (Cody: The Autobiography p45).
The more transparent and plain that he claims Kilkenny’s success, the more mysterious it seems. He lays his philosophy out for all to see in his book, talking about respect and spirit and honesty and he makes it seem as if the Kilkenny dressing room is perhaps the only place in the world where collectivism has succeeded, with the importance of the group always, always coming before the ego of the individual.
A few moments jump out in that book. One is when he recalls sitting down in 1998 to write a letter to James McGarry, then the shadow goalkeeper for Joe Dermody. Cody wrote to McGarry to explain that he was releasing him from the panel and going with Martin Carey instead. (McGarry would return to establish himself as one of the best goalkeepers of the era and the failure of the All-Star hurling committee to acknowledge that in their team selections is one of the recurring bugbears for Cody in the book).
If you took a poll of all living sub-goalkeepers in hurling and football, you wouldn’t find too many with letters from their manager explaining why they weren’t being kept on. But then, when Charlie Carter walked off the panel in 2003, unhappy at being omitted from the starting team for that year’s championship, Cody didn’t blink. He just let one of the biggest Kilkenny stars of the era walk.
“Brian McEvoy also left the panel shortly afterwards, presumably because he thought he should have been starting too. I made no attempt to contact either of them.” (Cody, p95).
The 2001 All-Ireland semi-final against Galway is a match he has referenced many times. Losses that Kilkenny have suffered under Cody are magnified by their rarity. He blamed himself that day. Noel Lane, the Galway manager, was in his first season. But Lane had been a minor and under-21 boss too and he recalls noticing Cody at minor games in Leinster and Munster during those years.
“This was before he was involved with Kilkenny. He’d have stood out because of his physical stature,” Lane says. Not lying down was key to the Galway mindset that day and for once, the maroon men were hot-wired to respond perfectly to the demands of the day. Cody watched on, appalled as his team lost out in the very areas he identified as core requirements: hunger and honesty of application.
Lane remembers the Kilkenny man coming into the Galway dressing room after the 2-15 to 1-13 defeat.
“We were overjoyed, I suppose, It was a huge performance and a huge scalp for us. I do recall that Brian came into our dressing room. I had never really heard him before – or since – speak publicly. But he spoke for about seven or eight minutes, which is a long time for a defeated manager. He spoke with tremendous dignity and passion and I often regret I didn’t have it taped or that. Because everything he said was of the highest order and he kind of forewarned us and he wished us well. Everything that makes the man – the dignity and eloquence – came to fruition and it was there in that speech. It was remarkable.”
But Cody might have gone that year. A more anxious county board would have sought to replace him. The story goes that some of the players were seeing out the season in Lawlor’s pub the day after that defeat and that somebody said to them that Cody would “have to go”. And that the most famous of them said that no, he hoped to be hurling under Cody for a long, long time. When Cody returned, it was with vows to let no softness to ever seep into the Kilkenny approach. “The cosy atmosphere had no place in the rebuild.” (Cody, p90).
All-Ireland titles were duly collected in 2002 and 2003 and it was then that Kilkenny’s potential for greatness fully revealed itself. The mind turns to a league game in February of 2003, one of those monochrome Irish Sundays in Waterford, everything damp and everyone in anoraks. The day would become auspicious because it marked the debut of Tommy Walsh.
It wasn’t Walsh who provided the Technicolor that day, however. One of the forwards, Diarmuid Mackey of Mooncoin, was the toast of the visiting crowd. He hit 1-2 from play and the goal was a humdinger. Praises were sung on television that night and newspapers compared him to Charlie Carter.
The following Sunday, Mackey was taken off after 47 minutes against Galway. He scored 0-1 against Laois before Eddie Brennan replaced him and then did not appear against Dublin in a forward unit consisting of DJ Carey, Henry Shefflin, Willie O’Dwyer, Charlie Carter, Martin Comerford and Brennan. He sat out against Tipperary and Cork too and scored a point off the bench against Wexford. And that was it.
The point is not that Mackey was one that got away but that he was emblematic of just how difficult it was to stake a claim on a striped shirt in those years. Opportunity opened and closed like a camera shutter. Plenty of fine hurlers have made league appearances for Kilkenny down the years only to not quite make the grade, maybe because of loss of form at a crucial time or an inopportune injury, or simply because the competition for the spot for which they auditioned was just too good. You could make a ghost team of them.
In one of the lighter moments of his autobiography, Cody reveals how his selector, Martin Fogarty, started making fun of him when he happened upon Cody sweeping the dressing room after training in St Kieran’s College one night.
“You and your little broom,” Fogarty ventured, “sweeping away.” And Cody laughed but then went on to make the point to the reader: why wouldn’t he sweep the room? The idea of leaving it for somebody else went against everything they stood for. And it was bad manners.
The anecdote is used to burst the perception of Cody as a kind of godlike figure presiding over these wrathful training games in Nowlan Park. He insists he is a facilitator: the man who will happily lay out the cones and pick them up afterwards. He says he is not one for Gettysburg-style addresses before matches either. Early on, he established that the central tenet of his management style was that it wasn’t so much what he said that was important: it was what the players did.
The biggest problem that the county board has with Cody concerns expenses: he never claims any. They have to twist his arm.
“That is not anecdotal. It is fact,” Paul Kinsella acknowledges. “We would try and ensure that he wouldn’t be out of pocket. But if we were to wait for Brian Cody to submit a bill, we would be a long time waiting. And he would still continue working.”
After every season, Cody takes time to think about whether he wants to carry on for another season. He informs the county board at the same time each year. “You won’t ever get an answer until the first week of November, even if you are working alongside him, as I was,” says Kinsella.
There must have been years when Cody knew fine well he was staying on. But the deliberation and the adherence to ritual, to doing things properly, has always been an important part of the Kilkenny story under Cody.
After matches, he has answered the same questions hundreds of times. It would be unfair to call him disdainful of the media, for he has always made himself available after games and is generally engaging in his replies. But he sometimes can’t conceal his impatience.
In fairness, he has had to put up with some peaches down the years. The group of pressmen standing in the dressing room in Nowlan Park won’t quickly forget the seconds after it was put to Cody that the second best hurling team in Ireland was the Kilkenny B team. The famous PG Wodehouse line caught the moment: “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes.”
He kept his calm and declined to answer it. But the talk – of Kilkenny as unbeatable, of B teams – wouldn’t go away. It was dangerous and it bothered him and he did his best to defuse it, and, most of all, he guarded his dressing room against it, but Cork won in 2004 and 2005 anyway and then Cody and Kilkenny went on that epochal unbeaten run that fell just one match short of five perfect summers.
Looking back from a distance, Noel Lane has a vivid recollection of reading a column Loughnane wrote in the Star just after Cody was appointed. “God help us all,” Loughnane warned.
Lane doesn’t remember much about being on the sideline that day against Cody. After all, Cody was, relatively speaking, a novice himself then. But these days, Lane finds himself drawn to the big man in the peaked cap at matches.
“His standing now is much greater. I think it must be much more daunting for other managers if the manager is Brian Cody down the sideline than it was for me that day. That is a factor now. He had yet to carve out the portfolio the day we played them, and I would think that he would have handled that game differently now.
“Kilkenny had an extra man that he would probably use more wisely now, and there is no way they would allow themselves to be bullied now like they were that day. I love watching him on the line now, because you see the body language. I have seen how teams can play to the tune of the body language of the manager. That works both ways too.
“He obviously loves hurling, from under-eight national schools to inter-county level – he is infatuated with it. And in Kilkenny the talent is there, but the way he has harnessed it and kept the hunger and dignity is phenomenal.”
When Paul Kinsella is talking about hurling, he sometimes makes the point that the most important legacy from this splendid era for Kilkenny hurling lies not simply in the medals won or the September bonfires – it is about this attitude that has been instilled, the example set by the Kilkenny squad as an entity.
“In terms of how they carry themselves and how obliging they are in the demands placed on them and how agreeable they are with the official end of things. We realise that players who have won as much as they have could . . . be filled with their own importance. And at presentations I regularly say that when all the winning is over, the biggest legacy will be that every youngster in Kilkenny will know what standards are needed if you want to be part of the set-up. That will last longer than the actual victories.”
That goes back to the thing that Cody bangs home in his book: the common goal, the common good, the squad as everything, the perpetuation of an idea. Sometimes we lament that the most iridescent names in Kilkenny hurling are not always easily recognisable as faces. The realisation is beginning to sink in that there is a reason for that.
Last September, when Cody was answering questions about Kilkenny’s latest All-Ireland, Eddie Brennan was sent in to join him. “Come in Eddie, I’d pick you again,” Cody laughed. But he never did, because Brennan retired with eight All-Irelands and free from any vanity that Kilkenny would not keep rolling without him. He had seen enough great ones walk away to know differently.
The autumn when Cody decides that he won’t return will come as a monumental surprise. But when will that be? Cody is only 57 and looks as healthy as an ox. Alex Ferguson is 70.
For all anyone knows, the Cody era is only at the halfway point. It is not inconceivable that he will still be there long after Henry Shefflin, the talisman of the Cody era, has called time on himself. Why not?
For other managers, that must be a forbidding thought. On that August afternoon years ago, it was put to Brian Cody that things were going fairly well: he had made it to the All-Ireland final in his first year.
“Yeah, I think I’ll retire,” said the man from The Village with a modest laugh.
“Immediately!”
But he didn’t.
Five to remember critical matches for Cody's Kilkenny
2001 ALL-IRELAND SEMI-FINAL
Galway 2-15 Kilkenny 1-13
The men from the west torn into the All-Ireland champions with abandon and Kilkenny never quite recovered, despite having numerical advantage in the second half. Brian Cody took stock and returned determined that his team would never again take to a field lacking hunger.
2006 ALL-IRELAND FINAL
Kilkenny 1-16 Cork 1-13
A year after falling victim to another Galway coup, Kilkenny defied predictions that they were in transition by marching to the All-Ireland final and stopping Cork's bid for three in a row. It would mark the first of five remarkable seasons.
2008 ALL-IRELAND FINAL
Kilkenny 3-30 Waterford 1-15
The perfect performance as Kilkenny land three in a row at the expense of their neighbours Waterford. The match was over as a contest early on but the devastating skill and efficiency of the champions made it a final to remember.
2010 ALL-IRELAND FINAL
Kilkenny 1-18 Tipperary 4-17
Kilkenny ran out of gas in the last hour of what would have been five perfect summers. The portents had been bad coming into the match, with Henry Shefflin's knee injury a distraction. Three goals for Lar Corbett swung the momentum Tipp's way and the Premier men set up to dominate.
2011 ALL-IRELAND FINAL
Kilkenny 2-17 Tipperary 1-16 Perhaps the sweetest of all days for Kilkenny people, as Tipp's momentum was smashed and Kilkenny's remarkable hold on Tipperary under Cody renewed. The season ended with Tipperary, who had been Kilkenny's closest challengers for three seasons, with questions to ask themselves.
