“I was angry watching it.”
The Brian Cody vs Henry Shefflin battle has not settled down following Kilkenny’s Leinster final win over Galway last weekend.
The famous but frosty handshake between the two managers in their last meeting, circled the media for weeks, and stirred many debates and opinions about a possible dislike between the two sides.
Shefflin won the last round but it was his old master who won it in Croke Park, and once again, the aftermath of the game has resulted in some unusual talking points.
On the latest episode of the GAA Hour, Diarmuid Lyng discusses the handshake, and Cody’s celebrations following the game with former Limerick star Niall Moran.
“I was angry watching it,” admitted Moran. Genuinely angry, okay, first and foremost we have all qualified that none of us have left the endearing legacy that Brian Cody will leave on the landscape of GAA.
“I most especially am not qualified to pass comment on guys who have won All-Irelands, both as a player and multiples as a manager.
However, the one thing that I will feel I should comment on is every time we take to a field to train a team, or to train, I always use the Kilkenny model, their approach, the qualities that they have are the thing that you always want to instil in your team.
“And their biggest quality that they always had, was a sense of being the ordinary, as in, just sense that… as you said, they’re great people.
“The genuine, the honesty, and I know what you say with the honesty and integrity on the pitch, but off the pitch like, Kilkenny people, you just enjoy their company.
“They’re great fun, great humour, but there’s great sense a person in them, it’s the one thing that I, as a fan of Limerick, would take the most pride in our group, is that I do think that they’re just, from the manager down, they’re a very, very nice group.
“Most self respecting mothers would love for their daughters to marry one of them, and I suppose you see the pictures of the boys without their tops in the paper today, I would say they definitely want to marry them,” Moran joked.
“On a serious note, I was angry. It was obvious that this was a kind of playground fight spilling onto Croke Park. Like obviously what happened that day up in Salthill, that stunned Shefflin.
“I don’t think he saw it coming, and maybe the incident or the way it happened, I don’t think it was meant as what it was. Cody’s mind was gone onto the ref, and the handshake became irrelevant in his head at the time, but obviously people paid attention to it and it manifested.
“So the obvious thing here was, the game was over, he won his match. There’s nothing worse than a bad winner, a bad loser you say he doesn’t like losing, a bad winner, like the game was over.
“When have you ever seen Cody going on, eulogising his players after a Leinster final win? Even after an All-Ireland final win, you seldom see it, he might do it with his management.
“He went and he was talking to the Galway boys, I have personally never seen him show an opposition that respect. It was as if it was a case of the cat who got the cream, and saying ‘now little boy, back in your box.’
You can listen to the full discussion on the GAA Hour now.
