DURING HIS TIME with the Kilkenny hurlers, Aidan Fogarty would often find himself in conversations with others about the future, and what lay ahead for his teammates.
Who would be destined for punditry? Who might be suited to a life in management? The usual topics to lubricate the chat of players in their prime. What’s 10 years when you’re young and hurling all before you.
But the future is now the present for Fogarty’s crew. The Emeralds forward announced his Kilkenny retirement in 2014 on the same morning as Brian Hogan. 15 All-Ireland medals between them on their way into the pasture.
Today, Fogarty jokingly admits that many of the Cats players of his generation have joined the meeja in some capacity. They probably didn’t think they’d ever join the Death Star back when they were players. But whatever about the deviations, there was one prediction from those days that did come true.
Derek Lyng was destined for management. Perhaps not a cert for the Kilkenny job, but they could all see him in a Bainisteoir bib with some team somewhere. Lyng is also an Emeralds player and is four years older than Fogarty. Their paths didn’t cross until they hurled together at senior level, but Fogarty also admired his clubmate from a distance.
“He would have been one of the dominant figures on the underage teams and I’ve a brother, Philip, who would have been in the same class as him and would have hurled with him. His father John Lyng would have trained me underage as well. They owned the Centra in Urlingford at the time,” Fogarty says.
Lyng was a selector with Kilkenny during Fogarty’s latter years on the squad. That’s where he got an insight into the kind of master that Lyng would come to be whenever there was a dressing room for him to take over.
“Brian Cody had great time for him and would have got Derek to talk in dressing rooms. He just had a great demeanor about him and manner about him. Even in his day job, he was an area sales rep for a pharmaceutical company and would have been dealing with a lot of people. He loves talking about the game and breaking down where you can improve.”
Emeralds are a junior club in Kilkenny but in 2013, they contested the intermediate county final against Rower-Inistioge. They lost out by two points in what would turn out to be Lyng’s final year as a club player. He had already began dipping his toes into management by taking the reins of the club’s U21 team.
Fogarty was a selector under Lyng during those early chapters of his mentoring career. A five-year stint on Brian Cody’s Kilkenny backroom team followed between 2014 and 2019 along with a term in charge of the Kilkenny U20 hurlers which ended in All-Ireland glory last year.
“He hasn’t stopped,” Fogarty says about Lyng’s ravenous hunger for hurling.
“I was selector with him and he trained them for two or three years. We got to a county final and were beaten.
“He was carrying a hip injury [in his last year hurling with Emeralds in 2013]. His hips were coming at him towards the end of his inter-county career too. But he had a great year for the Emeralds at wing forward. I think he scored four or five points from play in the semi-final. He was a real leader and, he never said it, but we all felt like this was his last year with the club. That was a driving force in itself.
“He’s still up there on a Saturday morning doing drills with U10s. He just loves the game.”
Lyng’s quality wasn’t obvious when he was young. Growing up, he was more of a squad member on teams rather than a clear starter. He never played county minor; couldn’t make the team when he was a student at St Kieran’s College, and failed to make the Fitzgibbon Cup team until his final year at WIT.
An eventual winner of two All-Stars in 2002 and 2003, his arc was built on graft rather than God-given flair. In a 2011 interview with the Irish Examiner, Lyng recalls how he rejected a dream job offer to pursue his Kilkenny dreams. In 2002, having just broken through to the Kilkenny seniors, Lyng had been offered a sales rep gig which included a juicy salary and a new Ford Mondeo. The trade-off however was that the work would be eating into his time with Kilkenny.
Such an arrangement could only go one way. The two couldn’t co-exist if his hurling was going to suffer. Brian Cody used his famous psychological trickery to help Lyng decide on which direction to take.
“I’ll leave it up to yourself,” he said, firmly putting the ball in Lyng’s court. He would have to take ownership of his call. And he did. He gave up the lucrative job opportunity, and the new whip.
“They were raging,” Lyng told Kieran Shannon in the piece. “They didn’t even meet in the office. I was just told to leave the keys at the front desk.”
Fogarty isn’t familiar with the story but accepts that the way he handled it was in keeping with Lyng’s character.
“I would say that’s a real Derek Lyng thing to do. You get one shot at being in around the Kilkenny panel. You can work for the rest of your life. His primary goal was hurling with Kilkenny. I probably would have done the same. You have to make sacrifices and I’d say he got sorted out after that.
“He was a real Brian Cody player. Tough as nails, and there was a drive in him that he wanted to succeed. It’s easy when some people just have the natural talent but Derek had to graft through it. He had to do more outside the field.
“He would have had a word with lads coming onto the panel. He looked out for me and made sure I got socks and togs. Small things that only the player would see. He would do it because he felt it was right. Not for his own grace.”
Sitting into a throne that was previously occupied by Cody always carried the possibility of struggle. Transition. Disappointment. Cody Hangover. Needs time. There were concerns that Kilkenny might regress in their first year without the 11-time All-Ireland winning manager.
Lyng did enough to keep the comparisons at arm’s length throughout the season. The Leinster round-robin defeat to Wexford was a bruiser but then came those late heroics in the Leinster final when Cillian Buckley smashed home a late match-winning goal. That result helped Lyng shake off the Cody talk.
Holding off the Clare resistance in the All-Ireland semi-final strengthened Lyng’s position at the helm all the more.
“We got to a league final, albeit we were beaten by Limerick by a lot,” Fogarty says, summing up the markers that Kilkenny have hit so far this season.
“But even in that league final, he didn’t throw on the likes of TJ or bust themselves to win it. He threw on a few young lads to give them the taste of it because he knew the game was gone. That takes experience and takes a lot of guile for a manager to do that in their first year.
“The Leinster final was a big kick for everybody. This Kilkenny team will die with their boots on. The standards are still there. The Clare semi-final was an even higher pitch because they came at us all guns blazing in the second half and we didn’t panic. Our mistakes were very few. We had composure on the ball.
“He’s definitely got a different stamp on the team. He’s the kind of person who will evolve and sit back and have a look at the situation and what he can improve on. The big thing for me was that there was no big difference between Brian Cody’s methods and Derek Lyng’s. Derek kept the fundamentals of Kilkenny hurling – hard work, honesty, work rate and keeping those high standards.
“He hurled under Brian so he knows what to do. And then he went in as a selector so he’s probably seeing the standards and changes that need to be implemented. It was a great learning curve. The Brian Cody way is the Kilkenny way. Get the basics right and go from there.”
Some 12 months on from the 2022 All-Ireland final, Kilkenny are back to challenge Limerick again. Fogarty has noticed a shift in attitude among Kilkenny fans. More hopeful than last year. Demand for tickets is greater too. Fogarty is confident that his county is better placed to win this time, but certain things will have to align for that to happen.
What an ending that would be for the man who had the bravery to take the job that many said came with huge risk.
“For the last 15 or 20 minutes [last year], we were just pucking ball aimlessly down and Limerick’s half-back line was just cleaning out. I think that’s something they’ve worked on. They can go short to Huw Lawlor or to the half-back line. We’re confident in our puckouts and hopefully we won’t panic and puck it down.
“One thing Kilkenny can’t let happen is let a big lead slip. They were eight points up against Galway in the Leinster final. We were five points up against Clare and they went two points ahead in the 52nd minute. If Limerick hit their purple patch in the third quarter, I can see them just pulling away. We can’t let them go seven or eight points ahead.”
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