After Christy Ring fired a late winning point against Tipperary in a National League game a zillion moons ago, Mick ‘Rattler’ Byrne is reputed to have barked, “By God Christy, we’ll have to shoot you!”
ing’s reply is cut into the stone of folklore now. “Oh sure ye might as well Mickey,” he responded. “Ye’ve tried everything else!”
Maybe time grants old deeds implausible weight, but it feels like Ring’s place in the game hasn’t really softened across the years. He is still seen as somehow separate, a figure essentially transcending hierarchy.
The Mackeys and Rackards of his era are revered too, as is the unscripted poetry of more recent heroes like Keher and Jimmy Doyle and then the modern exemplars like DJ and Shefflin and Joe Canning.
Croke Park today brings together two other men pushing towards that status, TJ Reid and Tony Kelly. For Reid, this is the equivalent of a home field. But for Kelly, perversely, it is foreign grass, this being just his fifth senior championship appearance at GAA headquarters a full nine years after that transcendent summer of 2013 which ended with him as the first man ever crowned both Hurler of the Year and Young Hurler of the Year.
He was, at the time, 19.
A little context then: Ring hurled in an age of cold, knockout competition when – championship-wise – only the All-Ireland final got brought to the big house. Yet, by the age of 23, he’d already played as many senior championship games in Croke Park as Kelly has today.
It feels an aberration, given the Ballyea man’s status as Clare’s all-time championship top scorer, a man capable of the kind of scorching form that is propelling him into this All-Ireland semi-final against Kilkenny with an average personal haul from play exceeding 0-4 in the five games he has had involvement in.
Wexford did better than most to subdue him in the quarter-final, Shane Reck holding his own until his body essentially gave way. Darragh Egan spoke this week of watching a replay of the game and being struck by how utterly Reck committed himself to the role.
“You see Clare lads passing Shane with the ball and you’d nearly be saying, ‘Why don’t you go to them?’” explained the Wexford manager. “But you can’t. You actually cannot. Shane was just looking at Tony Kelly, similar to the way a football corner-back marks.
“That’s exactly what you have to do.
“But you need to have back-up too because it’s an unbelievably hard job to keep that man contained for 78 minutes or so. As we saw in the quarter-final, unfortunately.”
Some hurlers defy definition in traditional or conventional terms.
Kelly’s style is that of an innate gambler, a player not especially interested in the contact zone and certainly seldom seen running needlessly into traffic.
His game is, in some respects, a masterpiece of spatial understanding, one underpinned by game-intelligence that arms him with time forever elusive to the ordinary player.
He manages to play at what can seem an independent pace, always moving, always probing, always committed to heads-up hurling when so much of what’s around him is tangled up in a kind of closed frenzy.
There’s a freestyle dimension to what he does, something almost breezy and whimsical, in perfect sync with those videos of him at home in Ballyea drilling sliotars into a bin off both left and right.
Even that outrageous sideline ‘cut’ in the 74th minute of this year’s Munster final lacked a certain orthodoxy of process.
Kelly effectively signed himself up to the responsibility, despite Peter Duggan having already scored one from the other side of Semple Stadium. What if he missed?
The GAA carries a social media echo these days that is routinely toxic, grudging and ill-informed. For all of his brilliance in the preceding 73 minutes, Kelly knew he was putting himself at the mercy of the mob in that moment under the Ryan Stand.
And the angle was, at best, unpromising.
Yet he did not even take the customary opportunity to cut a little helpful elevation into the turf, just placing the sliotar down with his left hand, taking three steps back and – the stadium whistling like a neglected kettle – swinging so purely, his left knee almost touched the ground on impact.
Mercifully, he was oblivious to a bottle flying over his head at the time.
How many modern hurlers have that kind of psychological ease within? The cold-bloodedness. The indifference to circumstance? That capacity for big-day moxy?
Canning had it indisputably. TJ still does. Cian Lynch too. Kelly is at that celestial altitude now, yet – bizarrely – heading towards a field today on which he has played one championship game in eight seasons.
The hottest property in hurling nine years ago, he didn’t win a second All-Star until 2020 and – for four of the intervening seven seasons – failed to even make the longlist of nominees. It would be 2018 before he finally got back to play in Croke Park.
Clare’s collective struggles maybe mirrored his own because that team never quite managed to pull itself out from under the creaking weight of expectation left by 2013. A National League title in 2016 – secured by Kelly’s spectacular winning point against Waterford from under the Ryan Stand in Thurles – remains their only significant silverware won since.
Gerry O’Connor, joint senior manager with Donal Moloney from 2017 to ’19 and previously in charge with Moloney of the Clare minors and those three-in-a-row All-Ireland winning under-21s, recently expressed a view that – if anything – Kelly had simply been trying too hard in recent times. The Ballyea man himself isn’t entirely hostile to that view.
Speaking on Newstalk’s ‘Off The Ball’ in November 2020, he reflected: “I suppose the biggest thing I’ve learned the last few years is be patient with it, and working smart as well. Not trying to run around the place, looking to get on loads of ball and ending up doing nothing. I often found in my younger days, if I wasn’t on the ball early, I ended up traipsing around the field looking for it. I suppose for the first year or two after it (2013), you’re constantly trying to replicate it.”
Oddly, in that same interview, Kelly expressed a preference for winter hurling, specifically games played on rainy afternoons or in colder weather. This, he suggested, maybe dated back to his love of Harty Cup days in the colours of St Flannan’s.
That opinion is hard to credit when witnessing him at full tilt in summer conditions, difficult to reconcile with the energy he so palpably finds off firm ground, the ease of expression under the press of a huge throng, his simple aptitude for hurling’s biggest days.
Davy Fitzgerald, who introduced Kelly to the Clare senior panel in 2012 and, of course, guided them to that 2013 All-Ireland success, senses a player now finding even deeper reserves of power within.
“I like Tony as an 11 with the licence to go where he wants to,” says Fitzgerald.
“Like in 2013, it was his movement that created the first goal for us in the All-Ireland final replay. Cork just man-marked him and that left the whole centre open for us.
“Tony, for me, is able to see that kind of thing himself. He’s a phenomenal reader of the game and I think over the last two or three years he’s really embraced a leadership role in a big way. There’s no doubt that the other players look up to him hugely, they say it themselves.
“I’ve seen that side of Tony progress massively. He’s absolutely driving everyone around him on.”
Fitzgerald still finds himself smiling when reminded of a moment during Clare’s 2013 All-Ireland semi-final against Limerick when Kelly – from near a sideline – feinted to shoot off one side before flicking the ball over his marker’s head to score a glorious point at the Hill 16 end.
That moment captured Kelly’s freestyle brilliance. But it is a brilliance underpinned too by something more prosaic.
“Let’s say this,” says Fitzgerald flatly. “Tony’s able to mind himself out there as well, which is something all of the top players have. If they get a bit of a doing, they’re able to take care of themselves.
“He’s not going to hide. And that’s vital. Because to be one of the best hurlers in Ireland, you have to be a killer as well.”
That status hasn’t arrived cheaply, those closest to Kelly endlessly reiterating the huge personal investment of time and energy that has brought him to this altitude.
In Ballyea, they say his car is an almost constant sight outside the field, whether he be in the gym or outside practising frees.
He was missing for their county title win last season having, finally, accepted the need for ankle surgery on a long-standing problem last autumn. But that decision appears to have been transformative.
This then feels his rightful canvas. With hands sensitive as a pickpocket’s, a methodical mind and the most prolific stats on breaking ball in this championship, Kelly is making up for lost time here.
But it’s Kilkenny next. And nothing against Kilkenny is a joyride.
