Monthly Archives: August 2012

Kilkenny Hurling Books its Place in the Final… Again!

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“Gimme that f***in’ ball!” Sir JJ Delaney & Tommy Walsh Esq. demonstrate how things are done in Kilkenny to Mr Maher.

Question: How do you make Kilkenny play at their best and ensure that they win the All-Ireland yet again?

Answer: You beat them early on in the season.

Kilkenny produced a second-half display that was simply stunning yesterday. This was the Kilkenny of old: back to their belligerent, dirty, skilful, brilliant best. The last few years of  being beaten in a League Final by Dublin, being beaten in an All-Ireland by Tipperary and, (the straw that really broke the camel’s back), being beaten by Galway for THEIR Leinster crown! (They weren’t even a Leinster team!) have finally caused the genteel mask to slip. They were only fooling us all along.

Can you imagine the dressing room after the Galway defeat? The spitting and the shouting and table-banging ? I wasn’t there, of course – I’m only using pure conjecture here, but you can be certain that Mr Cody was unhappy and would have mentioned this fact on several occasions as he knelt down in front of each of the brave warriors that had so failed him on this fateful day and gently spoke to each in turn.

You could see the anger mounting as Kilkenny were forced to go at the All-Ireland the long way around; having to play the likes of Limerick and totally messing up their training schedule.

Since the Waterford/Kilkenny massacre of a few years ago at the All-Ireland final, it was clear to anyone that part of Kilkenny’s success lay in interpreting and carrying out their own set of highly physical rules in hurling. It was time to put a halt to their gallop for the sake of clean hurling and, perhaps, for the sake of hurling generally, as nobody else could compare with them.

Referees suddenly got a bit tougher. They stopped letting Kilkenny backs away with the illegal shoves and ankles taps and they paid particular attention to the Kilkenny tactic of surrounding your opponent and beating him up until he releases the ball.

Things seemed to change. Dublin beat them to a major crown. Cody whined and whinged and cried “conspiracy!” He was partly right, of course, but it also looked as though Kilkenny had been found out and that their crown was beginning to slip.

The second half unleashed the original Kilkenny once again. And do you know what? We kind-of missed it.

Galway must atone for the grave sin they committed. They will suffer a heavy defeat in Croke Park in September.

Front cover“My Father: A Hurling Revolutionary, the life and times of Ned Power” is out on paperback.  Click here for further information, pre-order and excerpt.

Hurling Books and How to Write Them

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There was a time not so long ago when I couldn’t finish a book – I literally could not get to grips with reading the whole thing through to the end without nodding off or getting distracted in some way and only ending up reading a couple of pages at a time, then losing the momentum of the story and finally abandoning it.

The only books during that time that kept me interested enough to finish them were “The Gingerman” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude“. Those days are long gone and I’ve no trouble flying through books these days, but the length of the book is an important factor in measuring how much you enjoy it.

Yawn! Getting through too much detail has its toll
Yawn! Getting through too much detail has its toll

All credit to the likes of War and Peace, but I’m firmly on the side of keeping it brief. If a book sticks to the essence of the story without deviating too much, staying humorous as much as possible, then it will entertain and grab you and you won’t want to put it down. Moreover, if it hasn’t waffled on, then you’ll want to read more by the same author.

There is a problem with a lot of GAA books, hurling books and other sports books in that they are overloaded with waffle. There’s a dilemma, for sure, to be faced by the authors of such books: If they are being written primarily for the benefit of the fans of the subject, then the assumption is that the fan/buyer will want to know as much as possible about their beloved subject. The tendency, therefore, is to make sure to cram as many facts, figures, scores and results as possible into the thing.

The trouble with that is that it makes it boring and that has been a problem that has plagued such books. They become reference books.

In setting out to write this book, ( about former Waterford hurler and skills coach Ned Power) I wanted it to be not so much a reference book but entertaining in the first place, and devoid of the boring overload of technical detail that drags down similar books.  Hopefully, that’s been achieved – we’ll see what people have to say…

Front cover“My Father: A Hurling Revolutionary, the life and times of Ned Power” is out on paperback.  Click here for further information, pre-order and excerpt.

Waterford fall short at the end

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Waterford fell at the final hurdle in a game that looked like theirs. Having out-fought and out-hurled their opponents, they managed to get their noses in front with ten minutes to go. A three-point lead is not an easy one to hold, however, and Cork came good at the end thanks to their substitutions and to Waterford’s loss of Shane Walsh (surely one of the most exciting new additions to the team).

It could have all been so different for hurling books and fans of Waterford hurling if substitute Eoin McGrath had managed to grasp the ball that was knocked into him. He had the goal pretty much at his mercy but in tight games, it all comes down to millimetres. That fumble was a turning point, you felt, and so it was to be.

Cork stepped things up a gear from that point on and you always felt that the pendulum simply wouldn’t swing back in favour of Waterford in the time that was left.

A lot of positives are to be taken from this campaign. Waterford were there or thereabouts in all the important games. Michael Ryan and Co have re-instilled the county team with a lot of the virtues that we have associated with Deise hurling. They are playing with some skill. The big men have come through on the big days and we have seen the introduction of some exciting new players, as well as making use of experience (Tony Browne, of course – a star of the championship still).

Roll on next year, when we’ll hopefully have figured out a plan to get those vital goals when they’re needed so as to finish off the opposition.

Front cover

“My Father: A Hurling Revolutionary, the life and times of Ned Power” was released in November 2009 and was long-listed for the William Hill Irish Sports Book of the Year in 2010.  Click here for further information, pre-order and excerpt.