Brian Cody: 'We don’t have any excuses, we don’t want excuses'
It was put to Brian Cody that 2018 had been an “outstanding” year for his team.
Their early exit from the 2017 race, Michael Fennelly’s retirement in January of this year, and a bad beating at home to Clare on the first weekend of February — their second of the league — saw Kilkenny tipped for relegation from Division 1A and not fancied to do much else thereafter.
They’d finish the spring as league champions, had brought Galway to a replay in the Leinster final, and were just outsprinted to the line by Limerick in what was their third game in 14 days.
Maybe outstanding was overdoing it, but you certainly couldn’t class their 2018 season a failure or, indeed, regressive.
“It’s never an outstanding year when you don’t win. Our ambition will always be to win,” said Cody.
“The expectations from everybody, everywhere were that we would absolutely not be on the radar for anything. But I think that would never be our expectation or thinking because we’d always have great ambition and great belief in Kilkenny hurling and I think that was proven well today.
“We didn’t win but we went down very, very marginally to a very, very good team. That’s how it ended for us today.”
The Kilkenny boss acknowledged that Limerick’s response to Richie Hogan’s goal was decisive.
“It was a huge response and a terrific response but that’s the quality they have.
“They’ve been showing it all year, and it’s over to them now to bring it on forward to the next game.
“It was a great time to get a goal and it was a great score but that was just one score in the game. They finished very, very strongly and that was it.”
This being Kilkenny’s third game in as many weekends was not a factor, he insisted. “We don’t have any excuses, we don’t want excuses. There are no excuses. Not even remotely thinking about the fact that we played three weeks in a row. It beats not playing. No, nothing to do with it at all.
“It was a very good game and there was serious spirit shown by both teams. Obviously, conditions changed from what they had been for the past five or six weeks almost, so the ball was greasy and slippery.
“We started off decent, we got a couple of nice scores. They came back strongly and dominated the last 15 minutes of the first half and again in the second half, I thought we went in strongly and created some very good chances.
“From our point of view, I thought we were excellent in so many facets of the play; attitude-wise, spirit-wise, and hurling-wise. We created a huge amount of scoring opportunities I would say, unfortunately, they weren’t all converted but that’s par for the course. On many days we didn’t create enough chances. But that’s sport.”
Cody concluded: “It hasn’t been all plain sailing all the year with everybody, but, regardless, we’ve always worked with a panel of players and their commitment and never-say-die attitude is strong and I think they proved that again.”
