Henry Shefflin will likely leave for Limerick a few hours earlier today, to ensure that he can take in Ballyhale Shamrocks’ game on TV before sending his Galway side out to face the All-Ireland champions this evening.
Shefflin has been involved in each of Ballyhale’s last five All-Ireland titles as either a player or manager but his hurling career is moving in a very different direction now, to such an extent that he won’t be present to see his club’s finest hour potentially, as they chase a historic three-in-a-row in their golden jubilee year.
The game at the TUS Gaelic Grounds is Shefflin’s first of note as Galway manager and high profile League ties like this can throw up something of a dilemma - they can’t be dismissed but shouldn’t be taken too seriously either.
“There’s a balance, I think,” says Aidan Fogarty, Shefflin’s former Kilkenny teammate who often shared heavy fields with him in February.
“League games and Championship games are totally different. Now I know the way the structures are, the All-Ireland is on July 17 this year so everything is a tighter schedule and you need to move a bit quicker, but I felt with League matches, when you prepared for them, management maybe mightn’t talk about the opposition.
“The team will be named for Sunday or for Saturday and you go home and you mightn’t even talk about the opposition. You might just say a few words.
“Championship, you might have a meeting, a full hour meeting about the team, it’s a different build-up, the coach is talking a lot more, Henry will be talking a lot more as the manager. You get a sense that there’s a bigger game here.”
Shefflin won’t be flippant about it either, however. A victory tonight would be a significant boost, but a performance from his developing team is the bottom line.
“A lot of the time you might be under pressure trying to get results but I think Henry, he won’t feel that pressure, he’ll just more want a showing from his Galway team, a bit of heart, a bit of spirit and just put it up to Limerick,” Fogarty says.
“And, on the flip side to that, Limerick now are after shipping a beating below in Wexford Park.
“They’re All-Ireland champions and, in my memory, anybody that comes to your home ground you want to be winning them games so Limerick will not want to be getting beaten by Galway at home, that’s for sure.
The League groupings this year have left Galway and Kilkenny in different sections once again and so Shefflin won’t be facing off against his old master Brian Cody until the counties meet in the Leinster Championship on April 30.
Members of Kilkenny’s four-in-a-row team share a WhatsApp group which hummed with speculation about the Galway manager’s job around the time of Shefflin’s appointment last October but has been quieter since.
“Something will happen again and it’ll explode but no, Henry I’d say won’t be taking part in the WhatsApp at all, rightly so in fairness,” Fogarty insists.
And whatever draws them out, it won’t be the Galway-Kilkenny Championship meeting when it comes around.
“You see, we all have a lot of respect for each other and I think even receiving a message with a bit of craic, a bit of banter with the lads, I don’t know whether it’s the thing to do, especially when someone’s the manager of a team so I think that there’ll be nothing said about Galway, there’ll be nothing said about Kilkenny and we’ll have the craic about other things.”
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