KILKENNY v WATERFORD THE MEN WHO PLAYED FOR BOTH COUNTIES: Keith Dugganon those men from the relaimed parish of Ferrybank, between Waterford city and Kilkenny, who ended up playing for both counties.  

THEY ARE a curious and distinguished band of brothers, the hurling men shared by both Kilkenny and Waterford.

Only the restless grey waters of the Suir divides the counties but the inevitable cycles of work and marriage, of instinctive loyalty and, most importantly, of life on the Ferrybank side of the river has meant the hurling rivalry between the counties could never be straightforward. The phenomenon of Kilkenny men migrating south and wearing the Deise colours may belong to the 20th century but in hindsight, the only wonder was it happened so seldom.

"We are a unique group," acknowledged Nicky Power this week. "And I believe there are only two of us left."

Power was something of an underage prodigy, hurling three years with the Waterford minor teams between 1956 and 58 before graduating to the intermediate team in 1959. But by 1961, he had been drafted into the Kilkenny senior squad and spent three seasons with the black and amber side before he was unceremoniously dropped off the panel just before the 1963 All-Ireland final against Waterford. Power was working as a garda in Dublin then and found himself without a club affiliation.

Power had hurled as a teenager with Slieverue, the Kilkenny village on the extreme southern edge of the border and lived in neighbouring Ferrybank, a place that had always been something of a conundrum for State cartographers and for GAA officials.

He recalls when the official county boundary line was moved by about 100 yards towards Waterford at one point and at the 1934 GAA congress a motion was passed to officially transfer Ferrybank back to Waterford. But you cannot map the gravitational pull on hearts and minds and like most youngsters of his generation, Power identified strongly with Kilkenny. It made sense to him to hurl with the senior team, given the opportunity.

He never experienced any direct hostility because of his decision but on those nights in Nowlan Park in August '63, it became clear the Kilkenny officials were acutely conscious of his situation. In so far as he ever received an explanation for being cut, it related to his being from Ferrybank.

"There were a few rumours. It was thought it mightn't look well, that it wasn't worth it. There were sensitivities involved. But it came as a bit of a bombshell. I was disappointed. It was pretty brutal, just to be gone like that. In fact, I didn't even get a ticket to the match. Not even to a supper or anything like that afterwards. Most of the lads, I never met them again."

As it transpired, there was another man playing in that All-Ireland who was in a position similar to Power's. Michael "Broyly" Walsh had grown up in Slieverue and had enjoyed a distinguished career with Kilkenny. He was centre back with the 1957 champions, one of Kilkenny's most fondly remembered successes as it ended a 10-year wait and marked the first season in charge of Fr Tommy Maher, the eminent trainer from St Kieran's College.

That match marked the opening chapter of an intense period of rivalry with Waterford. In 1959, the neighbours made it through to the final again and on this occasion, Waterford were the superior side, winning the replay by 3-12 to 1-10.

Walsh had emerged on a Slieverue team that contained Paddy Buggy, Dick Rockett and Seán Griffin and won the county senior championship for the first and only time in the club's history in 1954. Three years later, they made the final again. Their defeat by John Lockes hastened the break-up of the team.

In Dermot Kavanagh's definitive book, A History: Kilkenny Senior County Finals 1887-2003, Walsh is described as Slieverue's best player in that disappointment. The team may have been fading but Walsh was a young hurler on the rise.

By the early 1960s, Slieverue had been reduced to the junior ranks and Walsh - who had married into a Waterford family, was working with Clover Meats and living in Ballybricken - decided to pledge allegiance to Mount Sion. It marked an end to his days in black and amber and, in fate's devilish way, it meant he next saw his former team-mates in a packed Croke Park for the 1963 All-Ireland final.

Sitting in the Tavern bar on a fresh sun-dappled Tuesday afternoon, Walsh grins wickedly as he remembers the greeting he received when he was sent into what was a riveting match with 20 minutes to go.

By any standard, it was a fairly provocative reunion with his old comrades and the Kilkenny players were keen to let him know how they felt.

"They were, boy. The first fella nearly broke my ankle with a belt of a hurley the first ball I went for. The referee gave me a free but if it happened now, he would have been sent off. I was hoping to get into the match quicker, to be honest with you. Because there was one fella in the Kilkenny teams - I won't mention names - but he wouldn't have got the same scores if I had been playing on him. I knew his style of hurling. I suppose Waterford didn't want to change the team too much. It was a decent Waterford team but ah, they were too loose. They left Eddie Keher too much room - he got 14 points and they were fouling him the whole time."

Waterford managed to score six goals that day and still lost 4-17 to 6-8. "Six goals on Ollie Walsh!" Walsh marvels now. "I never heard tell of it."

When Walsh had made his decision to transfer to the Waterford city club, he heard no entreaties from Kilkenny officials.

"They didn't say a word. Didn't ask me what I was going over there for at all. One certain fella asked me: 'What about the county?' I said: 'I can declare.' He never said a word back to me. Then they were calling me a medal-hunter in Slieverue, my old parish. A lot of people over the bridge didn't like me for what I had done. Even in Clover Meats I heard it: medal-hunter. I only wanted to play top-class hurling. I never really thought about playing with Waterford when I joined Mount Sion. Then the county selectors asked me to come in and I thought: 'okay, if you think I am good enough'.'

But Waterford had landed a gem. Walsh had a reputation as a fine centre back and had enjoyed whatever highlights were available in 1950s GAA culture. The '57 team toured New York the following spring and played the Polo Grounds in 110 degree heat, where they lost against a strong ex-patriot side and were none too heartbroken about it.

"The Kilkenny jerseys were very thick then and long-sleeved. The heat was something else. The poor lads who took a drink couldn't handle it at all. They were always jumping into the pool to cool off."

In the 1959 final, Walsh held Tom Cheasty scoreless in the final and in the replay he was moved from number six to centrefield and then to left back after John McGovern got knocked out cold, leaving a gap in centrefield. Even in 1962, his last year with Kilkenny, Walsh held an aging Christy Ring scoreless on the way to league success. He was an established and important Kilkenny player but once he made his decision to leave, nobody was going to twist his arm. However, he feels certain the Kilkenny selectors would have picked him if he had elected to stay playing junior hurling with Slievrue.

"They would have, yeah," he says. "I knew they would have."

Nowadays, Walsh still has the lean frame of an athlete and he can recall the details of 40-year-old hurling matches instantly and is equally sharp on the current championship season. He slaps his knee with a rueful grimace in explanation as to why he won't be in attendance tomorrow for the first September meeting between his former teams since '63: he is waiting the call for a knee operation.

For now, he moves comfortably with a cane and his stomping ground is the hallowed hurling high ground of Waterford city, between the green in Ballybricken and the hill leading up to Mount Sion.

He knows the modern sons of Waterford to chat to, particularly Tony Browne and Ken McGrath, whose sports shop is a few minutes walk away. He won three county championships with Mount Sion, a period that gave him another chance to play on Ring (Glen Rovers won that encounter) and this area is home.

But his loyalty to Kilkenny never wavered and he half revels in his mock notoriety as Ballybricken's honorary Kilkenny man now that the sloping streets are noisy with talk of Sunday's final.

The reasons behind Walsh's decisions are either as complex or as simple as you want to make them. They may boil down to the universal desire of all sportsmen to simply play in whatever contest they can. For the 70 minutes in '63, Kilkenny simply became a team he wanted to beat - perhaps more intensely for having been part of it. But now, in his senior years, he badly wants to see the black and amber men complete the three in a row.

As we talk, the proprietor of the Tavern stops to joke with Walsh about the outcome of the match and remembers a day when Donal Foley, the distinguished former columnist and news editor with this newspaper, stopped into the pub to carry out an interview. Foley was a Ferrybank boy and in January 1976 he wrote a column that went some way to explaining the instinctive leaning that Ferrybank kids of the 1930s had towards Kilkenny.

"It was the river Suir that gave Ferrybank its separate identity as a kind of native reservation opposite Waterford city, which we tended to look upon as alien. We thought of ourselves as part of Kilkenny and of the great hurling men of that county. It was the river which divided us. It was a kind of protection and although we often cross the bridge or took the ferry to go to Waterford, we never really felt at home until we were back on the other side again."

Nicky Power experienced the same natural draw to the Marble City and the hurling jewels north of Ferrybank. It was a strange thing, as though the Suir was so wide as to make the city across the way seem unimaginably distant.

"To us, the river just seemed like a natural boundary," says Power. "When we crossed that bridge, we were in Waterford and when we went back, we were in Kilkenny. I am glad I played for both counties, though. I am not too disappointed. I may have not have put as much into the game as I wanted to and I accepted easily enough the disappointment [of 1963] and got on with my life. But I have always followed Kilkenny and look forward to them winning the three in a row now. Then, my sons and my brothers are ardent Waterford followers. Others in the family are Kilkenny followers.

"And they are closely divided on the issue. They are pretty serious about it. And a lot of families from that area would be the same. Waterford will have 31 counties behind them in this All-Ireland. They won't need our sympathy."

Power acknowledges that, however inadvertently, his hurling career led him to walk in the footsteps of a revered man. In the 1930s, Loughlin "Locky" Byrne was the subject of controversy when his glittering minor career with Waterford (he played for the senior team in the 1931 Munster final at just 17) abruptly metamorphosed into a stunning series of senior shows with Mooncoin and, shortly afterwards, Kilkenny.

Byrne was born in Sallypark which, like Ferrybank was in the parish of Slieverue and the diocese of Ossory. In addition to the emotional affinity with Kilkenny, Ferrybank was, for GAA purposes, affiliated to the black and amber county. However, Byrne was caught in no-man's land after the resolution in Congress to "return" the place to Waterford. The Waterford county board suspended him after he declined to show-up for a match against Clare in the 1936 Munster championship, his selection more of a ultimatum than an invitation.

That sparked off a bitter row in Kilkenny when the Dicksboro club objected to two Mooncoin players (Byrne and Dinny Duggan) following their defeat in the senior semi-final of 1937. The issue of Byrne's legality led to the Kilkenny county board issuing a decision that the match should be replayed - without Locky Byrne. Mooncoin forfeited the match in disgust rather than line out without their player and by 1938, Locky was back in the colours of Mount Sion.

The importance of those spats paled just three years later when Byrne died, at the age of 27, after a quick and losing battle with TB. He is buried in Ferrybank.

"The grave is neat, tidy and well kept, down by the left at the back of Ferrybank church," wrote PM O'Sullivan in an essay that appeared in the Sunday Tribune before the counties met in 2004.

"His is the lowest lying name on the headstone. A memorial plaque, funded by both county boards, is surely warranted after such distinctions - perhaps laid by the Suir in what was Sallypark. There could be no better symbol of what was an extraordinary and doubled career - none, that is, except the composition of his pallbearers. Half were Mount Sion men. Half came in the road from Mooncoin."

So much of the haziness and uncertainty of location and loyalty that has afflicted Ferrybank and the shifting territory around it seems caught up in the haunting story of Locky Byrne. It seems fitting his legend has been remodelled and the passage of time allows for Byrne to be remembered as an independent spirit whose love of the game transcended county divides.

Nicky Power grew up hearing vivid memories of Byrne.

"To us, he was kind of . . . I won't say a god, but the supreme hurler. And it was for that we knew him, not because he had hurled with both counties."

But that distinction gives Power an attachment to Byrne of which he ought to be proud. There were several others - Matt Gargan from the early 1900s, Eddie Carew of 1948 vintage, Davy Walsh of Dunamaggin are among those name-checked - but no more than a handful. The chances of such a dramatic shift in allegiance among players in the contemporary game are surely slim.

Nicky Power will be in Croke Park tomorrow, 45 years after missing out on the final he might have played in. Michael Walsh will pass on the tickets he is entitled to buy as a former Kilkenny hurler to his sons and watch the match at home in the city.

He has steeled himself for a good fortnight of slagging if Waterford become champions for the first time since 1959. He has nothing but the warmest memories of his hurling years with both counties: he still laughs when he recalls the night that Jim Walsh ducked in behind the goal under the shade of darkness for one of the three laps the team was ordered to run by Fr Maher. He rejoined his comrades for the last circle only to singled out by the priest when they returned to the centre circle to run a solo lap for the enjoyment of the others. But against that, he has treasured memories of his days hunting in Munster with Waterford, not least in 1966, when he was county captain. If people had problems with Michael Walsh's decision, then that is their business. Most of the bitterness is locked in the past anyway. To him, it is water under the bridge.

Of all the insults thrown his way, though, "medal hunter" seems way off the mark. How could any hurler who turns his back on Kilkenny be accused of being in the game for the trinkets? Michael Walsh smiled his mischievous grin when asked if he ever regretted the All-Ireland medals he might have won in black and amber - the Cats won the MacCarthy Cup in '67 and '69 as well. He was quiet for a moment. Across Waterford city, the schools bells were starting to ring and blue and white flags were everywhere.

"Well, sure, one is as good as half a dozen. Isn't it?" That, of course, depends on whether you have Waterford or Kilkenny in your soul.