Kilkenny search for former glories in new hurling landscape

By John Harrington

When Kilkenny defeated Galway in the 2015 All-Ireland SHC hurling final it was the 11^th time they had lifted the Liam MacCarthy Cup in the span of 16 years.

Eight of those All-Ireland titles were won in the 10 years running up to and including 2015, and there was no reason to suspect that Kilkenny’s dominance of the game was about to wane any time soon.

The team that won that 2015 All-Ireland Final had an average age of just 26 and looked like they had plenty left in the tank.

Were you to tell a Kilkenny supporter back in 2015 that they wouldn’t win a single one of the following 10 All-Ireland titles they simply wouldn’t have believed you such was the supremacy of the Cats in that era.

The players wouldn’t have believed you either. Paul Murphy was corner-back on that 2015 team, winning his fourth Celtic Cross in five years.

You ask him now had he any inkling that Kilkenny were about to endure what is now the longest stretch the county has gone without winning the Liam MacCarthy Cup and he shakes his head definitively.

“No,” says Murphy. “In 2015, you definitely thought that, at the very least, you might go another two or three years without winning one.

“That was the thinking at the time, but to go this length, I think a lot of counties themselves would have not thought they would have gone this long.

“Really, it's that Limerick team that landed in the middle, particularly the current batch of Kilkenny lads, because I think in any other generation, they might have been good enough to actually go and win one.

“Particularly then not getting over the hurdle of Clare last year, when Clare go on and win it as well.

“Nobody in Kilkenny expected us to be going this long. I think us in Kilkenny, we do believe that the panel is good enough to go and win an All-Ireland. You see Eddie Brendan now going in with the management as well.

“There's continuity in the management. There's a lot of good players there. So we believe that there is an All-Ireland winning team there, but the field is very balanced in hurling at the moment.

“It's very balanced. There's a lot of teams that can have a serious tilt at an All-Ireland at the moment, but I think Kilkenny will be looking and saying, Tipperary going winning the All-Ireland this year, Robert Doyle's hurl was the width of Kilkenny being in an All-Ireland final this year.

“They're not that far away at the moment, but it is hard to picture since 2015.”

The pain of that fine margins All-Ireland semi-final defeat to their great rivals this year surely stung all the more when Tipp then went on to beat Cork in the All-Ireland Final.

If you were a Kilkenny player or supporter watching the Premier County run riot you were surely thinking that could have/should have been us.

Tipperary’s unlikely All-Ireland success this year was down in no small part to an influx of talented young players like Darragh McCarthy, Robert Doyle, Sam O’Farrell, and Oisín O'Donoghue.

Kilkenny have been relying on pretty much the same cast of players for the last four years or so and will probably need to find a few bolters of their own if they’re to be transformed from nearly-men to All-Ireland champions in 2026.

Murphy hopes that Kilkenny manager Derek Lyng can find a couple of new players capable of making an immediate impact, but believes what will really make or break them is their ability to keep their key men fit for the duration of a championship campaign.

“I don't think they're looking to make too much of a shake-up, to be honest,” he says.

“They've introduced players, and I think they've given a lot of players a lot of opportunities and a lot of runs.

“It's something you can't be critical of, of Derek Lyng, that he hasn't given lads opportunities. But I think at the moment, really what they're looking at is, Adrian Mullen had the injuries over this year. You'd like to see the likes of himself, Eoin Cody, Huw Lawler and the lads.

“They're the lads that make up the core of that team. You want those lads on the field as much as possible.

“So Adrian Mullen probably didn't have the impact he would have liked this year, and maybe Kilkenny will be looking for the likes of those players if they are to win an All-Ireland, to be performing every single day.

“And yeah, maybe bolstered by the injection of a few new younger players. Kilkenny have been making under-20 All-Irelands, minor All-Irelands over the last few year. So they'll be looking to take two or three from that.

“I think every inter-county team is looking to inject that new blood the whole time. But again, I'd probably go back to the point that Kilkenny will look at this and go, we were a puck of a ball from being in an All-Ireland final.

“So we're not too far off the mark as it is. But realistically, the facts will show that we fell short at an All-Ireland semi-final again.

“So I don't think Derek will be looking to reinvent the wheel, but maybe just again, inject that small bit of new blood again to the panel.”

There are now just three players on the Kilkenny panel with All-Ireland senior medals – TJ Reid, Richie Reid, and Eoin Murphy.

A county like Kilkenny simply isn’t accustomed to what is now, in relative terms, an All-Ireland famine, so you’d wonder will that weigh more and more heavily on the current generation the longer it goes?

“I don't think they'll look at it from the point of view of that, oh, it's 11 years, and if we don't win, it'll be 12 years. I don't think they'll look at it that way,” says Murphy.

“But I think Derek, from having been in dressing rooms with Derek as well, Derek is a very proud person and a very proud, I suppose, Kilkenny man.

“And he'll be certainly harping on the point that, look it lads, we do so much for ye, but it's ye lads who go out on the pitch, and it's medals in or out of your pocket that if you don't win a All- Ireland. Derek has his All-Ireland medals.

“So I think very much Derek will put the onus on the players, that look it, you have one shot at this in your career, and you have to go and win one.

“I don't think they'll look at it and say it's 11 years, it's 12 years. People are talking about Cork like that and different things, but I don't think we're looking at Cork saying that's their downfall, that's the reason they're not winning All-Ireland.

“This year it was tactical, it was structural, it was whatever it was, but nobody's looking at them going, oh it was the mantle of 20 years trying to get over that.

“So I don't think the Kilkenny boys will look at that, and speaking from experience being in the dressing rooms, it's not something I would have thought at the time that I was joining the Kilkenny panel, that I'd just lost to five in a row.

“That wasn't really motivation, so I don't think it'll be a motivating factor for them.”

Kilkenny haven’t won a minor All-Ireland title since 2014 and their 2022 All-Ireland U20 success was the only one they won in the grade in a span of 17 years.

Just one player from that U20 team, Killian Doyle, played in this year’s All-Ireland semi-final against Tipperary and that was only for the dying minutes of injury-time.

In contrast, graduates of the Limerick team that Kilkenny defeated in that final like Shane O’Brien, Colin Coughlan, Adam English, and Aidan O’Connor are already well established as county senior players.

Is there any concern in Kilkenny that their conveyor belt of talent simply isn’t working as well as those of their rivals?

“Well two years ago, two or three years ago maybe, the county board asked Mick Dempsey to set up a committee and reassess the structures in Kilkenny, and he did do that, and appointed Mick Fennelly then as the head of the academy, I suppose you'd call it,” says Murphy.

“They also met with the schools. They met with the clubs, and basically tried to make it a bit more coherent, because I think if you go to any county at the moment, whether it's football or hurling, there is a little bit of people kind of doing their own things, and that's even without introducing third level into it, the UCDs and the DCUs and so on. So Mick Dempsey did do that and headed up a panel.

“I think at the moment, there is a bit more singing off the same hymn sheet being done, and I think every county is kind of looking to do that, but Kilkenny have done that.

“I suppose they're trying to accommodate, the big thing is trying to accommodate younger players and not burning them out as it would be if you're playing colleges, playing minor, whatever it may be.

“So at the moment, I don't think there's a concern to be honest, because they met three representatives of each club, so the clubs were aware this was happening.

“They went to all the schools and the secondary schools, so I think everybody was aware that this had happened, and that if you wanted to get your speak in, get your speak in.

“So it's been addressed, I suppose. And the one concern people would have is that if these things are just drifting, then they're not addressed, but in fairness, Mick Dempsey and his committee, I think they did address that.”