Simplicity itself.
When you have hurlers as good as they produce in Kilkenny, you don’t need to say much to motivate them.
What do you say to a group of men widely regarded as the best hurlers of this generation, and perhaps of all time?
Brian Cody is a big fan of keeping it simple at all times, and he’s never had time for complicated hurling tactics, or hurling schemes.
Beat your man, and if all 15 players win their personal duel, that should be enough.
The Kilkenny boss is not known for his manic speeches either, preferring to be more cool and calculated on the sideline, and his secret to success has often been described as his personal one-to-one man-management.
And we have gotten a glimpse inside his incredible mind thanks to Tommy Walsh, who, in a brilliant interview in today’s Daily Mail, reveals the seven simple words that Cody used to build up his confidence ahead of games.
“Brian wouldn’t be going around having chats with you. He’d never ask you to watch this or watch that, your left side, your right side. He’d just say: ‘Go out and take over the field’. That’s all he ever used to say to me.”
“When he says that to you, you’d be saying to yourself ‘Let’s go be Man of the Match then’. It didn’t always work out, but that’s how’d you’d feel.”
So that’s the Kilkenny secret under Cody. How did no-one else think of it?
Walsh also revealed the reason he loved hurling so much, and was so bloody good at it, was down to a lack of PlayStation’s when he was growing up in Kilkenny in the late 1980s.
“We had nothing to keep us in the house. Televisions were poor. You only had one or two. Playsation? I remember the Sega Master System was only starting to come, – nobody really had it.”
