Malachy Clerkin: Richie Hogan was a golden hurler who made the rest of us feel joy and wonder

Maybe the best way to measure the career Richie Hogan has just called time on is to count up the down years. He joined the Kilkenny panel for the All-Ireland final in 2007 but between injury and competition, it was 2011 before he established himself in the team. From 2017 to 2023, his back troubles meant he played just one full championship match in the last seven seasons of his career.

So you’re essentially talking about 2011 to 2016 as the period when he was fit and able to be Richie Hogan. The game got six good seasons out of him and he left a mark that nobody who was there for them will forget in a hurry. He won his four All Stars in that period. He won his Hurler of the Year gong in 2014. He was, for a time, the best player in the game.

Usually when a sportsperson has to retire because their body just won’t do it anymore, the temptation is to wonder how good they could have been. But we don’t need to do that with Richie Hogan. We know it in our bones. Whereas someone like TJ Reid will be remembered for his numbers and his leadership and the complete package of it all, Hogan will stick in the mind because of the way his hurling made you feel.

People admire greatness. But they love genius. For Hogan, that genius was his boxer’s punch, the last thing to go. On so many occasions over the past seven seasons, the most he could offer Kilkenny was a 10-minute cameo off the bench. In Brian Cody’s dressing room – and in Derek Lyng’s this year – 10 minutes of effort here and there isn’t much to be bringing. For 10 minutes of genius though, they could always find room.

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It was like that from the start. Hogan was one of those names that bubble up every couple of years on the juvenile scene in Kilkenny. He was the youngest boy in his year in St Kieran’s and yet he was the only kid in the school to play on the juvenile, junior and senior teams in the same year. He was a Kilkenny minor for three years. His ascent to the senior set-up was inevitable from a long way out.

Except that when Cody came looking for him, he had to make an effort to get him. Hogan was still only 18 and, as 18-year-olds can do, he had lost his phone on a night out in Dublin. When his mother finally managed to get word to him, he had to ring Cody’s house and introduce himself. “It’s easier to get in contact with the Pope than to get hold of Richie Hogan,” was Cody’s opening gambit.

Yet it always seemed like Cody reserved one of his (famously few) soft spots for Hogan. He’d come on at the end of a league game somewhere and snipe a couple of points and we’d say, “Great to see Richie out there, Brian…” And Cody would sigh and break into a half-smile and talk glowingly of the savage amount of work Hogan was putting in just to get out onto the field.

“He’s a player who doesn’t hold back,” Cody told us after the Covid Leinster final in 2020, the night Hogan came off the bench to score the goal of the year against Galway. “When he’s injured, he won’t just lie down, even if it’s a serious enough injury. He’ll keep going. He’s a fighter. So I mean he hasn’t minded the body from the point of view of sitting back and going, ‘I’m injured, I can’t play.’ He’s not like that. He always wants to play.

“You talk about real experience, that’s a player who has given great service over the years for certain. It’s terrific, Richie has had an uninterrupted year from injury. He’s one of the players in the country who has benefitted from a lack of competitive games over the year. The body got a break. I firmly believe – and I said it to him as well – that it has done him the world of good.”

[ Seven-time All-Ireland winner Richie Hogan retires from intercounty hurling with Kilkenny ]

It was never enough though. Hogan puts at least some of the blame for his back trouble down to the amount of handball he played as a kid. He has 15 All-Ireland handball medals and one world championship to his name but the price he paid for them down the road was steep. He had to take injections to play, even when he was in his pomp. He was never right in the latter half of his career.

And yet, he was a golden hurler. In his first iteration, he was a bustling inside forward, accurate and ruthless, well fit to mix it physically for a lad his size. At half-time in a league game against Tipp in 2014, Cody read out some changes and told him he was going out to midfield, launching the best season of his career.

“What I found,” he said in an Irish Times interview in 2015, “was that no matter how poorly we were playing, I was in the middle of it. I was in control of whatever I wanted to do on the pitch. I was completely non-dependent on anybody.

“If I wanted the ball, I could go and get it. If I wanted a score, I could go up and get a score. If I wanted to defend and hang back, I could do that. I was completely in control and that was the main difference – I was basically dictating the sort of game I was going to have. As time went on, I found that so much easier to play. Before matches, I wouldn’t be bothered in the slightest about what we had to do.”

Imagine having that for yourself. Imagine being that person, able to steer your life to your pleasing at the flick of a wrist. Able, too, to stop others in their tracks, to make them point and stare and feel alive.

Time is so fleeting – we did that interview in May 2015, less than three months before he was unable to walk the Friday before an All-Ireland semi-final because of a prolapsed disc. He took injections to be able to suit up against Waterford the next day – and to score five points from play – but that freedom was never his again to play with.

Still, you hope he knows. He said once that the day he retires will be the saddest day of his life. And maybe it feels that way this weekend. But when he was able, he made the rest of us feel only joy and wonder, in a way very few sportspeople get to do.

When the sadness passes, Richie Hogan will always have that.