Straight shooting Henriques calls it for Cats

Diarmuid O’Flynn

FOR a couple of decades now Barry Henriques has been calling it as it is on local radio in Kilkenny, a broadcaster so colourful he is now almost as well known in his adopted county as some of the greatest names in hurling. A former dual player himself, played minor with Laois in both hurling and football, his earliest brush with the mighty men of Kilkenny wasn’t very positive.

“We got to a Leinster final in 1958, lost to a Kilkenny team that had the likes of Eddie Keher, Martin Coogan and all those lads.” Hurled Eddie off the pitch I suppose? “The man wasn’t born who did that, even when he was only a minor!”

In 1973 he moved to the Marble City: “Left Aer Lingus in London, married a Kilkenny woman, one of the famous Lennon greyhound dynasty, and settled here.”

He’s a straight shooter, is Barry, from the hip every time, so, call the game this weekend, Kilkenny and Waterford in Croke Park in the All-Ireland semi-final?

“I think Kilkenny will beat them with plenty to spare,” he says, without hesitation.

“I’m reading the vibes at training and I see a paranoid hunger that hasn’t been there for at least two years – it’s like the original hunger we all talked about, when they devoured Cork in the All-Ireland final of 2006 to start the four in-a-row, that die-for-Kilkenny attitude we all knew so well. I think Waterford just might get a dose of that.

“I’ve not seen Henry Shefflin as lean or as mean, ever, as he is at the moment – he’s like a racing snake. He has added a new dimension to his game and we saw it against Dublin in the Leinster final, a physicality, a ferocity in the tackle we never saw before. He was always an immense hurling presence but he has now added a raw physicality to that. The other night in training Richie Power’s helmet was split in two, and all anyone said was ‘Get him another f***ing helmet!’.

“Jackie Tyrell got a ball at left-corner-back and three Kilkenny forwards met him, drove him off the pitch and wore him off the hoarding under the old stand. That has not been present in Kilkenny for quite some time.

“Eoin Larkin is flying in training — he’s better proportioned below the water-line now than he was earlier in the season! Another man hurling very well, belting lads out of his way, is Noel Hickey – he’s still coming through boned, rather than going around in a half-circle. They’re all flying. It’s a well-worn cliché now about a great team, the last-gasp effort, the last-ditch attempt, but all that was said last year.

“I don’t want to go beyond the Waterford game because something could happen there to make me look very foolish, but I can’t see that happening, whatever that is.”

But what of Waterford, surely he’s not dismissing them out of hand?

“No, they’re a coming team regardless of what happens this weekend. People are talking of John Mullane, Eoin Kelly, Tony Browne, Brick Walsh, all those guys, that maybe the graph has turned a little south, but the younger players are really good hurlers and I was very impressed with a lot of the lads on their U21 team that was beaten by Clare in the Munster final a couple of years ago.

“They are undoubtedly good hurlers but apart from one or two, those lads wouldn’t have anything like the maturity or the physicality of Kilkenny, of the likes of Jackie Tyrell, Brian Hogan, Eoin Larkin, Michael Fennelly, Michael Rice and those lads, not a one of them would have the hurling nous of a Henry Shefflin or a JJ Delaney or a Tommy Walsh, all of whom are strong men also.”

The refereeing though, reckons Barry, could have a bearing. He’s a strong proponent of the Brian Cody school of refereeing, as seen in those famous Kilkenny training sessions, but definitely not a strong admirer of the standard of refereeing inside Kilkenny.

“They’re killing our hurling. There are a few exceptions but I’d give you a list of 45 referees in this county and if you were to bate them all into a barrel, mash them up and churn them for a day, you wouldn’t get a pound of a decent inter-county referee out of them! And there’s a lot of them out there, in a lot of counties. A lot this weekend will depend on the referee, how much he lets it flow.

“I went to Kilworth in Cork last week with a Kilkenny U16 squad, Brendan Fennelly, meself, Joe Hennessy, Joe McGarry, Richie Mulrooney, two teams. I’m with the first squad along with Brendan and James, and we thought we had a nice little team, we had worked on them for a few weeks. I’m telling you now, Cork bet us into next week – they were frightening, it was like a fathers-and-sons game.

“We had agreed beforehand, no whistle – throw it in, blow it up for half-time, same thing for the second half, maybe blow for an odd 65 to keep the referee awake. But let them at it.

“The lads over them was from the St. Finbarr’s club, I asked him where this team had come from – ‘listen boy, we went up to Kilkenny and saw the way ye were training up there and we said, this is the way to go; to hell with all this of the lovely game, the artistry – we can do all that as well. But the element that was missing from our game was Kilkenny’s physicality, and that’s what we’ve been doing with these boys since last January.’

“Well, that spit-in-your-eye then flatten-you presence of Kilkenny is back, and we got a glimpse of it in the Leinster final, though that was a different proposition again — there was a huge element of pay-back in that one. It was the Walsh Cup final loss, the draw in the league, then the heavy defeat in the league final – the Leinster final was payback for all that, because Kilkenny people believe that even in their wildest dreams Dublin shouldn’t even be entertaining the idea of beating Kilkenny.”

Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/pwVkhbgpVBI/post.aspx

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