Kilkenny walk a well-trodden path at Croke Park on Saturday. No county has been involved in as many drawn hurling finals and this weekend will be the county's fifth – sixth if you count the second replay in 1931.
That All-Ireland, 82 years ago – the only time any senior final has been twice drawn – against Cork is seen as the contest that transformed hurling into a mass-spectator sport but it is one of the two replayed finals lost by Kilkenny. The other was against Waterford in 1959.
In 1905, Kilkenny’s first season as champions, the final against Cork was initially lost but after objections and counter-objections a replay was ordered and Kilkenny retained their All-Ireland.
The most recent replay was against Galway two years ago and ended in a convincing win for Kilkenny. Maintain form In recent years Kilkenny have been maintaining that form. Saturday will be the third year running that the county has been involved in replays and during the 16 championships of Brian Cody’s management his teams have been taken to a second match on five occasions including earlier this month.
Coincidentally, just two managers have been in charge of the opposition for four of those matches. Anthony Daly was in charge of Dublin last year and Clare in 2004, winning in Leinster but losing the All-Ireland quarter-final of 10 years ago.
One of manager Brian Cody's selectors back then was Kilkenny's former goalkeeper, captain and hurler of the year Noel Skehan, who was inducted into the GAA Museum Hall of Fame earlier this year. He believes that Cody looks on replays as opportunities to improve performance and won't dwell too much on what happened the last day.
“They’ll be looking at this as an entirely different match, a clean slate. Brian will have reviewed the video and broken it down into what needs to be done better. Replays are never the same type of game and the approach will be to treat as another game completely.
“Going up the last day I thought it was going to be tight and I expect it will again but probably not in the same high scoring way. If you’d said to me that Kilkenny would score 3-22 I’d have expected we’d win by five or six. I’m sure Tipp would have been thinking the same. Cody mantra “Brian has always said: ‘it’s all about training’. He’ll have lined up the players and told them, ‘you all have a chance of playing’. He’ll have told them what he’s expecting and what he wants to do and he’ll pick the team according to what he sees in training.”
Kilkenny’s consistency in the Cody era should stand to them in replays because if they can maintain performance levels or better still, improve them it places a heavy burden on their opponents and that is what decided the replays against Galway this year and in 2012 even if Dublin got the better of them last season.
“A lot depends on the opposition,” says Skehan. “Tipperary have improved all summer but Kilkenny will definitely bring another performance. The bar will be raised that bit higher and improvements will be looked for in areas where they were a bit slack the last time and where Brian’s not 100 per cent happy.”
Speaking about Kilkenny’s last All-Ireland replay exactly two years ago, Daly made the point that extra matches are a drain on teams who have been on the road for a long time, citing his own playing career as captain of the great Clare side of the late 1990s.
“We never won what they won but by the end of 1999, we didn’t have the edge any more to keep winning and hating other teams. But Kilkenny are so unique they keep digging and going to the well.”
Cody has always been restless when it comes to team selection and coming up to All-Irelands has tended to emphasise that aspect of his management. In 2012 he gave Walter Walsh his first championship start in the replayed final and was rewarded with 1-3 and a man of the match display.
This season after Galway again held Kilkenny to a draw, the wholesale changes made created the team structure that has taken the county to another final.
And another replay opportunity.
