NHL DIVISION ONE FINAL KILKENNY REACTION:A NEW era for Dublin hurling, for sure: the end of another, perhaps. Brian Cody clearly doesn't like losing talk, and suddenly he's getting familiar with it, as – on the back of the All-Ireland final defeat to Tipperary last September – he finds himself not only explaining a Kilkenny beating, but also a performance that went badly wrong.
Cody doesn’t pretend otherwise; Kilkenny were outplayed, and there’s no denying it. Some managers might write it off as a once-off, but this one was real.
“I don’t think you can ever write anything off that happens in front of your eyes,” he says. “It happened so you can’t say you’d write it off, the same as you wouldn’t go home thinking everything is brilliant if we got two late goals and won. You have to be honest with yourself and it’s my responsibility to manage the team. If I write it off I wouldn’t be doing my job properly.”
As bad as Kilkenny were – only one forward scoring from play – Cody wasn’t quite in shock mode: either that or he hadn’t yet registered the shock. “Did it shock me? No. We haven’t been consistent right throughout the league. We’ve had periods of games when we have done well and periods of games when we haven’t done well. So, that’s the way it has been going for us. I was aware of the ability of the opposition we were playing today. Whether it’s a setback or not, we don’t know yet. We don’t know, we’ll have to wait and see.”
Cody doesn’t mind being as gracious in defeat as victory and paid credit to the victors.
“I’m not surprised at the quality of the Dublin team there, not in the slightest. I could see that for quite a while and I’ve said it many times and maybe everybody didn’t believe it. They have all the ingredients that are needed for a very good team, and they proved that right throughout the year and they have shown glimpses of it other years, but they proved it on a consistent basis this year.”
What made Dublin’s victory all the more convincing was the 0-22 to 1-7 scoreline they inflicted on Kilkenny, something which Kilkenny have done to others so often in the past: “It would be very difficult to win any game with a score line like that,” admitted Cody.
“I’ve never pretended we wouldn’t be interested in winning the league, I’ve always said of course we’d be interested in winning the league. We’re not going to shrug the shoulders, say we had our two eyes on the championship. We had our two eyes on today’s match. That’s it, and we came up very, very short. I’d say certainly the better team was Dublin.”
Cody didn’t accept the justice of the sending off of Eoin Larkin in the 26th minute however.
“It’s frustrating because he’s one of the cleanest players I’ve ever, ever, ever been associated with. So I’d have complaints. I didn’t think it was a sending off, absolutely not. He turned, he reacted like that. There was no strike involved in that. That’s a pushing motion. Certainly, I would have a problem with that.”
Cody denied seeing the incident involving John Dalton and Conor McCormack at the end of the first half: “I haven’t a clue, to be honest. In fairness, Dublin should have had a goal . . To blow the half-time whistle in a situation where a team is attacking is a very strange thing to do, I suppose. I would have had no complaints if he had blown the whistle if the ball was out of danger . . but they certainly would have got a goal there.”
