Brian Hogan learned the hard way to take every Championship game seriously

You’d usually be well-advised to bring a packed lunch in your knapsack when setting off in search of a Kilkenny player with an early-summer cautionary tale.

Though they head into this particular one without a Leinster Championship to defend, at least Galway had to wait until the final last year to sack their towers. For their last June defeat, we need to find our way back to 2004 and Wexford’s last-puck win in Croke Park.

If in an idle moment this coming Sunday you are given to wonder what a meeting with Offaly at this time of year could possibly do to raise the Kilkenny pulse, Brian Hogan will happily fill you in.

He made his debut in that Wexford game, a rangy 22-year-old wing-back alongside Peter Barry and Seán Dowling. Mick Jacob's goal was a magician's smoke bomb and by the time we were able to see the stage again, Hogan was nowhere to be found.

For the qualifier against Dublin a fortnight later, JJ Delaney moved out from corner-back to take his jersey and Tommy Walsh scuttled back from wing-forward to facilitate the switch. Whereas both of them ended the season with All Stars, Hogan didn't start another championship game for three years.

A blender
Though Brian Cody constantly whizzed the half-back line through a blender in that time – eight different players got starts over the course of 15 matches – Hogan wasn't one of them. That's a long old spell to be promising yourself you won't sleepwalk into the next time.

“For me personally,” he says, “I lost my first championship match. I came into a team that had been dominating Leinster for the previous couple of years and as a young lad you would have almost assumed that you were going to pick up a Leinster medal. But we were beaten by Wexford and that was it, we were into the back door.

“It was a while before I got back into the team so it stuck with me. I suppose I didn’t think so at the time but it was a great learning curve.

"From my own perspective, that taught me a great lesson very early on. Don't take anything for granted, approach every match properly. Go for it the same way you would in an All -Ireland final. People might think it's only lip service or whatever but it's genuinely the way we go about things."

Is, was, has been and will be. Since taking over the number six shirt from John Tennyson at the start of the 2007 championship, Hogan has played every match he's been fit for.

Away back
Last year's Leinster final was the first time Kilkenny lost a game he'd started since that Wexford defeat away back at the beginning.

Hidden a little in the fog surrounding Henry Shefflin’s knee in the 2010 All-Ireland final was the fact that Hogan missed the game injured. Tipperary haven’t beaten Kilkenny when he’s been in the team.

They set off again for another tilt this weekend, aiming for a three-in-a-row with apparently only one team around to stop them. The sun has been a welcome imposter these past few weeks – Hogan says he tried four times to put away his winter training gear before he managed it for good.

"We were still wearing skins in up until about a month ago. We were playing one night in April in the snow and we were wondering if it was ever going to end. I had nearly forgotten what it was like to have to put Vaseline above the eyes to keep the sweat out."

A pillar
The other imposter recently returned, of course, has been Brian Cody. At least that's how they welcomed him. "A few of the lads shouted, 'Who's the new guy?' when he landed back," says Hogan. Presumably, from behind a pillar or some such.

“It did feel strange without him. If you were to say it didn’t, you’d be lying. Maybe now it wasn’t as pronounced as it might be later on in the year. He has that aura about him and he commands respect. Guys do want to hurl for him as well and that’s a huge thing.

“So it was unusual for those couple of matches not to have him around. But at the same time, we knew he wouldn’t be there. It wasn’t a case of turning up for the game and realising just then that he wouldn’t be around. We had a couple of weeks to get our heads around it. We knew that he wouldn’t be there and that where ordinarily he might walk around the dressingroom beforehand having a quiet word with you individually, you had to take care of your own game now.

“And look, we’re big enough now to do that. It might have been a bigger issue if we were a younger team but we’re all fairly mature and fairly seasoned.”

None of which is good news for Offaly ahead of Sunday.