There are games when only sorcery will do. Sometimes the margins are too tight and the teams are too matched, meaning every punch has a counterpunch and nothing mortal can make a difference. On those days, you have to be able to access something beyond, something inexplicable.
Clare people will spend decades trying to convey what it was like to have Tony Kelly hurling for them. Most of all, they will try to get across what it was like to have him in the 2024 All-Ireland final. A reduced version of himself, but in no way a lesser one.
He finished the game with 1-4 against his name, the afternoon’s leading scorer from play. But using numbers to tell the story is far too cold a metric here. Instead, we’ll let Shane O’Donnell ease us into it.
“It’s just a matter of trying to feed him with as much ball as possible and sometimes just getting out of his way,” said O’Donnell afterwards, sitting beside Kelly at the press conference. “He does things that you don’t think are possible. You just stand back and be in awe.
“Especially the last 10 or 15 minutes, myself and [Conor] Cleary were sitting beside each other on the sideline and we were willing everyone to get the ball to Tony. And it’s not the first time we’ve been in that scenario. He’s just an exceptional player and it’s a privilege to play with him.”
Kelly scored five times in the game. On each occasion, Clare were either level or a point behind when he got the ball. On each occasion, the tension in Croke Park was unbearable and the path to the steps of the Hogan Stand was unclear. They needed him to fashion something out of nothing and they needed him to do it now.
For the first 50 minutes, Kelly didn’t score at all. But then, David Fitzgerald caught a high one and cut inside, dishing off to Kelly in here-do-something desperation just as he got bottled up on the edge of the D. Kelly set off, skittering this way and that, taking three touches to alley-oop the ball over Seán O’Donoghue and tip-tap it past Patrick Collins.
“I saw a couple of red bodies in front of me and I just had to kind of avoid them,” Kelly said afterwards. “I was going to take my point. Often goals are made by the defender rather than yourself. You don’t take the ball thinking, ‘I’m going to score a goal here’. You take what’s in front of you really.
“So when the defender came, I didn’t want to get blocked down so I had to sidestep him. And then another defender came and I had to sidestep again. And once you’re through, you have to have a rattle off the goal. I was fortunate enough that it hit the back of the net. I wasn’t so fortunate in extra-time when Collins made a great save.”
The goal put Clare three clear but Cork never went away. The sides were level in the fourth minute of five in stoppage time at the end of normal time. Patrick Horgan had just equalised with a free when Kelly latched on to a loose ball on the Cork 45. He got pushed away from goal and still threw the ball up, facing the Hill and falling over, twisting himself into an ampersand to whip the go-ahead point.
It was his first point of the day. His second came in extra-time, speared through the posts with whitewash on his boots out under the shadow of the Cusack Stand. His third was four minutes later, knifed from midfield after he intercepted a Mark Coleman sideline cut. But the killshot was yet to come.
There were 88 of the 90 minutes on the clock and everyone was running in sludge by now. It looked for all the world like the two sides had fought each other to a standstill. In those circumstances, it’s usually a mistake that decides matters but Kelly had better angels in mind.
Ethan Twomey was coming out with the ball before Kelly whipped it off his stick. Coleman gathered and dished off a handpass, only for Kelly to butt in again and knock it clear of Ger Mellerick. He was on to it in a eyeblink, lobbing it over Luke Meade and gathering the other side before dispatching it for the score the put Clare into their last lead of the day. Nobody else could have scored it. Nobody else would have tried it.
We asked him afterwards what it meant to lift Liam MacCarthy.
“From a selfish point of view, I suppose it’s the best thing I’ll ever do in hurling. There’s obviously a bit of luck involved, to be asked to captain the team first of all and to have a team good enough and a panel good enough to win an All-Ireland. From a personal point of view, it’s the greatest thing I’ll ever do in the GAA.”
Good for him – and of course the honour must feel immense. But the rest of us can respectfully disagree. This probably wasn’t his greatest display in a Clare jersey and probably (to these eyes anyway) John Conlon was a more deserving man of the match.
But on a day when nothing short of it would suffice, Kelly conjured up the magic required to get Clare over the line. “When Tony gets going, there’s nobody like him,” said Shane O’Donnell.
Amen to that.
