LIKE THE REST of us, Brian Cody’s joy was our joy. Everyone, barring those with Galway tendencies and sympathies, was struck by the image of Cody celebrating the dramatic end to the recent Leinster hurling final.
Cillian Buckley knifed through all the narrowing angles to stitch a goal with the last play of the game, giving Galway no chance of a recovery.
Soon after, the final whistle went. The Kilkenny players and manager Derek Lyng performed a ‘pile-on’ on top of Buckley. The win showed that little has changed for Kilkenny in 2023, although some of the restraint has evaporated.
Cody in a pile-on? You’d suspect he’d rather accept an invitation to take part in ‘Married At First Sight.’
Most photographers would have followed the glorious scenes on the field. Not Piaras Ó Mídheach, who had his lens on Cody at that point and caught him in a pose of stupendous excitement in his Sunday civvies, the only hint of his former life with a trademark baseball cap.
The Cats have the Last Laugh!
— sportsfile (@sportsfile) June 11, 2023
Former Kilkenny manager Brian Cody celebrates among fellow supporters after the dramatic end to the Leinster SHC Final between Kilkenny and Galway at Croke Park!
📸 @SportsfilePOM https://t.co/zkZRQGUI8V pic.twitter.com/Tm06W6xGK6
There have been times when Jackie Tyrrell didn’t see enough of that side of him. As the Kilkenny corner-back and James Stephens’ clubmate, their relationship was business-like. Perhaps the pragmatist in Cody understood that any perceived favourtism towards one of his own would be hungrily sniffed out by other panel members.
It might, as Tyrrell explained before, upset that precious balance of ‘calculated instability’ that fed the insecurities of even the front-line Cats with the sharpest claws.
All those in-built suspicions soon evaporate with enough time and space. The picture of Cody provoked a fondness in Tyrrell when he spotted it.
“He’s a very special man. At the end of the day he is just another GAA man. He’s back as a fan, you see him in the stand getting great delight out of the win,” he says now.
“He’s back training our own club as senior manager and you see the evolution of a person where you play for your club, you play for your county, you can manage your county and then slip back into the club dynamic, supporting them whatever way you can and becoming a fan of the county team.”
Tyrrell is still floating around the club himself. He played a bit of football into the early part of the year where Kilkenny like to cram it, and he’s still togging out for the club’s Junior hurlers.
There’s always plenty of chat around Kilkenny hurling as he zips from appointment to appointment in his job for Tirlán, formerly Glanbia. The difference now is he doesn’t have to keep his head down and avoid it. And neither does Cody. That thing of theirs was a deadly pursuit, but now they can wave across the porches at each other in contended retirement.
“That’s the beauty of this game that we have. There’s always a role for somebody, whether you are Brian Cody at the top table winning All-Irelands, or you are a guy putting the flags out around the field,” says Tyrrell.
“The GAA is very unique in that respect and I thought it was a lovely snapshot of him, just very relaxed and happy like any fan going up to Croke Park to win the Leinster title.”
There’s no way they can be as relaxed on Sunday. Clare face Kilkenny in the second semi-final and they will be coming with a reservoir of hurt from last year.
Despite taking Limerick down the stretch in Munster, they limped through an All-Ireland quarter-final win over Wexford.
Leinster champions in 2002, Kilkenny had four weeks to rest for whoever was served up. They consumed Clare whole, 2-26 to 0-20. The Banner went into a close season knowing they had the minerals to do something, but before all that, their timing had to be worked on.
All of this is new territory for Derek Lyng. A successful spell managing underage talent and mentoring senior teams is still taking a bath with your socks on. Until you stand along the line as the main man.
Say, Pádraig Mannion had have booted the ball three inches higher and out of Buckley’s reach in the Leinster final? Galway would have been champions and Lyng would instantly have been facing questions as to why he had turned a five-point win into a two-point loss to the same opposition in twelve months.
But to win it this way in the final play, shows that Cody’s house-style remains. It’s no surprise to Tyrrell.
“Derek would definitely be his own man. But I think Brian has ingrained that spirit that has stood over the test of time and Derek has continued it on,” he says.
“Derek would stand for a lot of things that Brian would have. Derek was very much a Brian Cody man. Brian loved the understated, really hard-working underdog. You think of Martin Comerford who came from nowhere, Derek himself, Conor Fogarty of these worlds, he loved those kind of guys.
“So for Derek to take on the mantle from Brian, I’m sure Brian couldn’t have picked a finer soldier for that.”
He adds, “It was a huge fillip for Derek to win the Leinster title in his first way and the manner in which they did; never giving up, the last passage of play, guys out on their feet, TJ Reid at 35 still in the corner working so hard.
“So it’s a huge confidence builder for Derek going into this All-Ireland semi-final that whatever happens against Clare, we will go toe to toe with them and die with our boots on. If we are to be beaten, it won’t be through lack of effort or fight.”
Tyrrell has no desire to go into management, beyond helping out once a week with the James Stephens’ U6 team, where they set up stations and do a bit of free play, before games, finishing each night with a mass Tug-O-War game that leaves everyone departing with smiling faces.
When he talks about his playing career, it’s always in the collective. Even when he specifically refers to himself.
‘What can ‘we’ improve? When ‘we’ had a bad game,’ he will say.
The ‘we’ is a reference to Brother Damien Brennan. A noted hurling figure in Kilkenny, Tyrrell has mentioned his powers for years and he was a prominent figure in Tyrrell’s autobiography, ‘The Warrior Code.’
Recently, Mark Townsend produced a book on Brother Damien’s life, entitled, ‘Brother Damien Brennan: The silent man behind the Kilkenny success story.’
Tyrrell was asked to write the foreword. It in itself is a lovely piece of writing and finishes with the heartfelt, ‘I think about him every day and I miss him every day.’
Throughout the pages, several Kilkenny players lay out their debt to the native of Laois, who managed Kilkenny minor teams to All-Irelands before playing a secretive, low-key mentorship role to some of the best players the sport has ever seen including Tommy Walsh and Henry Shefflin.
Before Tyrrell met Brother Damien, he had four All-Ireland medals. Which begs the question of what he even needed at that point?
“It was probably the enjoyment part of it,” he explains.
“I was very caught up in, instead of looking forward to the next game or the next training session, enjoying it and living in the moment, I was almost looking back, over my shoulder.
“Kinda waiting for something to go wrong, to be dropped or have a bad game. I was putting myself down and it came from my younger years when I had poor games with Kilkenny. There was some scar tissue there that I was holding onto.
“He never spoke about them directly to me, but he broached them in a gentle way. He challenged me and we kept speaking about it. He told me to let it go, to forget about it and move on.
“Now, that was a journey. It wasn’t like one day we spoke about it and then we just forgot about it. But by doing that, he kind of freed me from those doubts.”
He cites one example of a ball being stuck in a ruck when he was playing an All-Ireland final against Cork. He was there hoping it might dribble out to him. When it did, he pulled first time and flaked it straight into the middle of the ruck again, anxious for it to be anywhere but near him.
With some gentle counselling from Brother Damien, he came to crave that ball coming to him, so he could express himself.
“When I went to him first of all, I went because I was having injuries. I thought he was working on me physically. But he was working on my brain, on what I was about and challenging me. Pushing me to let go of all this stuff,” he states.
“He brought me back to basics. It’s just a game. I was giving too much power to the people in the stands and worrying about what they thought instead of worrying about what I was about and my career and what I wanted out of it.”
Nobody could argue with the methods of Cody and his inner circle. He stuffed players’ pockets with All-Ireland medals. But you don’t get a sense there would have been many Yoga retreats or fluffy stuff, let alone an examination of your feelings.
“I definitely think that it was an environment that they created,” says Tyrrell.
“But within that, there was parts of it that were maybe, I don’t know, perhaps crippling for some people?
“You earned that bit of ‘arm around the shoulder’ from time to time. When you were going well and working on this, that or the other.
“A lot of the time it didn’t come, so that was where Brother Damien was, for me, personally. Sometimes you might go down to him and you would be dreading it if you had a bad game.
“You’d be worrying about the things you worked on, if we didn’t really do. But I know JJ (Delaney) related it as well, his struggles and how he might have looked for that (mentoring) and it never really came. That guidance. But Brother Damien was there in the background and you could reach out to him and gave you that time. He gave you the support and an ear to listen.”
Maybe Cody knew. Kilkenny is a small county and half his panel was heading out to Callan to meet with him.
But either way, it’s another year. Kilkenny are looking to get back to another All-Ireland final. It’s been a quarter of a century since they faced into a semi-final without Cody on the line.
It’s Lyng’s side now. And this is base camp for all Kilkenny teams.