AFTER A weekend that appeared to strengthen the prospects of Kilkenny achieving a record five-in-a-row, National Hurling Co-ordinator Paudie Butler has said that counties should try to emulate what the champions have done and also celebrate their excellence.
He added that although Sunday was a chastening experience for Dublin the phenomenon of exceptional performance is common to all sports and acclaimed the team as the best in the history of the game.
“We don’t despair because this is a super Kilkenny team the same as Aidan O’Brien some years has a super string of horses or as Usain Bolt is going to dominate sprinting for a while. When Brazil win the World Cup people say it enhances the World Cup – not that the whole thing is gone to hell.
“I would say that Kilkenny are hurling at the highest level that’s ever been hurled. In the past three years they’ve performed at a higher level of technical and physical hurling than was ever played in anyone’s lifetime.”
Asked was it not dispiriting that a county which had put so much into its development as Dublin should end up as exposed at senior level as they were in Sunday’s Leinster semi-final, Butler pointed out that no sport can guarantee the connection between coaching and development on the one hand and ultimate success on the other.
“In the real world there are no guarantees of winning. We have to be realistic. We can see this from the professional sports that no matter how much money they spend there is no certainty of success. Everyone has to hold their head and keep the rational mind working. There’s never a guarantee that Ireland can do well in a particular sport but that doesn’t excuse us from doing the best we can.
“My job is to build morale and coaching expertise so that every youngster in the country gets the best coaching that’s going. For some winning the Christy Ring is the pinnacle, for others a Rackard Cup is a lifetime achievement but for me the most important thing is that we have more and more people hurling.”
It is one of the harsher realities of the game at present that whereas the chasing pack need to be investing particular effort in reforming their systems it has been Kilkenny that have made the biggest strides at developmental level and innovated a system that continues to reap considerable success at under-age level at the same time that their senior team is in the ascendant.
“What we’re seeing today is the result of what was happening around 1994 and ’95, somewhere around there. Once Offaly, Clare and Wexford won All-Irelands the old hurling counties really woke up and put together developmental structures. That’s an unfortunate outcome for other counties trying to get to the top. But Kilkenny are now benefiting from their county board taking a hard look and a structured approach to what they were doing. That didn’t happen in a lot of counties – they leave it to Coiste na nÓg or leave it to Cumann na mBunscoil but the county board has not ever dedicated a meeting to discussing the state of hurling, taking a cold, hard look at what they’re up to. Until that happens it will be haphazard.
“The Kilkenny county board held a single meeting with nothing on the agenda only under-14 hurling in the county. That couldn’t happen anywhere else. It wouldn’t be taken seriously enough. If you go to a county like Kilkenny where the colleges are strong and the clubs are strong the kids are getting hurling for 12 months. Other counties are hurling for maybe three or four months and sometimes the seasons are shorter. In the stronger dual counties hurling might only be played for 30 per cent of the year. They’ll have to improve that if they’re going to catch up so we certainly have challenges.”
