Who will be the next generational talent to emerge in Kilkenny hurling ranks?
SHORTLY AFTER MICHAEL Fennelly retired in late 2017, he put a final message into the Kilkenny senior hurlers WhatsApp group, imploring the younger players to step up.
The eight-time All-Ireland winner felt he'd let the first few years of his own senior county career pass him by. That he'd waited for a spot in the team to open up when he should have been pushing players out.
He had current Kilkenny manager Derek Lyng in mind and acknowledged that while he waited for Lyng to retire, Michael Rice and James 'Cha' Fitzpatrick snuck in ahead of him.
'I told them to just jump straight in there and don't be holding back for a year or two or three years thinking you'll get your place then at that time,' revealed Fennelly of his WhatsApp message.
Eight years on, Kilkenny are enduring their joint longest ever streak without All-Ireland success and, as far as another household name goes, a truly generational talent to mirror those of the golden era that the Shamrocks man played in, they're still waiting for one to emerge.
One of Fennelly's colleagues during the boom times, Jackie Tyrrell, addressed the issue during a chat with Radio Kerry after the 2021 Championship.
'We just haven't had a 'wow' hurler since Richie Hogan came in in 2007/2008 – that's 13 years ago,' said Tyrrell.
'Every year, if you go back, there was a 'Cha' Fitzpatrick, there was a Richie Power, there was a Tommy Walsh, a JJ Delaney, a Henry Shefflin.
'We had all those players coming through in the space of 10, 15 years. We've now gone 13 years and we haven't had this wow hurler come through since TJ Reid and Richie Hogan.'
Hogan retired after the 2023 season though Reid is still going. And Kilkenny continue to lean on the 37-year-old for inspiration.
TJ Reid. Ken Sutton / INPHO Ken Sutton / INPHO / INPHO
That's understandable, of course. He is a generational talent but as one of just three players left in the squad – his brother Richie and goalkeeper Eoin Murphy are the others – with an All-Ireland senior medal from 2015, he is increasingly surrounded by a silver generation of performers.
Tyrrell did suggest that Eoin Cody, in time, could be a genuine iconic figure. Joe Canning, a 'wow' player back when Galway were at their peak as All-Ireland champions in 2017, said something similar about Cody ahead of the 2022 All-Ireland final.
Going through the players individually for his Irish Times column, Canning pointed to Cody as a player who 'has the potential to be one of the great Kilkenny forwards'.
But while Cody went on to collect an All-Star in 2023, a mixture of injuries, patchy personal form and Limerick's excellence has so far prevented him from making that leap to superstardom.
Neither Lyng nor his predecessor Brian Cody can be accused of sitting on their hands on the issue. The Allianz League is the home of experimentation and Kilkenny have been busy doling out spring-time debuts. Even in the five-game Covid affected campaign of 2020, Cody used 34 different players in the league, searching in every nook and cranny for the next TJ or DJ.
He used 32 players in 2022 while Lyng performed his own trawl after he took over in 2023, handing competitive game time to 37 different players in that season's league with the figure standing at 35 for the 2024 league and 32 this year.
The opportunity to experiment in the championship is rare so when Kilkenny and Wexford faced off last Sunday week in a dead rubber Leinster SHC tie, Lyng got creative again.
Peter McDonald, Zach Bay Hammond, Padraic Moylan, Killian Doyle, Luke Connellan, Peter Connellan, Billy Drennan and Owen Wall all started their first championship games of 2025. Gearoid Dunne, Niall Shortall and Shane Staunton came on for their first appearances in this year's championship.
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Luke Connellan impressed, pinching two points, but Wexford won and, afterwards, Lyng wasn't enthused by the overall display, lamenting the fact that Kilkenny 'didn't get the result and a better performance'.
The search, it appears, goes on.
Eoin Cody. Leah Scholes / INPHO Leah Scholes / INPHO / INPHO
Adrian Mullen, like Cody, has the potential to be one of Tyrrell's 'wow' players though time is not on his side. His younger brother, Jake, has been ripping it up in the minor championship this year and is definitely one to watch in the longer term with potential marquee status in mind.
Mullen the elder played that game against Wexford at centre-back in a novel switch.
Fionan Mackessy, the former Kerry star, lined out too, just his third championship start for Kilkenny after making the unlikely inter-county transfer. Kilkenny have rarely done those sort of transfers over the years. Lyng is clearly having to search for something that Cody was gifted with – stellar talents in virtually all lines of the pitch.
Kildare's Joe McDonagh Cup final manager Brian Dowling spoke recently about breaking through to one of Cody's senior teams as a teenager. He was gone after a couple of seasons and never got a second chance. Dowling said it left him with a tonne of regrets.
Cody had that luxury, to simply turn to his bench and beckon forward the next phenom who, typically, came armed with All-Ireland minor and U-20 medals.
Between 2002 and 2014, when Cody was in charge of the seniors, Kilkenny teams won five All-Ireland minor titles and four All-Ireland U-20 titles.
Since 2014? Not a single minor win and just one U-20 crown, in 2022.
Moylan, Doyle, McDonald, Drennan and Dunne were all on that successful 2022 U-20 team. Doyle is among a talented bunch of young Kilkenny players who won a Croke Cup medal with St Kieran's College. The college won back-to-back titles in 2023 and 2024.
Moylan won a Fitzgibbon Cup All-Star earlier this year with DCU. Plenty more, like Harry Shine, a St Kieran's graduate who started against Offaly in the championship last month, have come to the senior panel with significant reputations.
'There are players that have come up through the Kilkenny ranks that are very talented, the likes of Harry Shine,' said Walter Walsh, who famously displayed his own prodigious talent with 1-3 for Kilkenny on his debut in 2012 against Galway in an All-Ireland final replay.
This year's U-20 team reached the All-Ireland decider, losing out to Tipperary, and, who knows, big full-forward Marty Murphy from that team could yet be the next Walter Walsh. He's from the same club too. Eoghan Lyng from the 20s team is already on the senior panel, coming on against Antrim in the Leinster championship.
Most likely though, Kilkenny will go with tried and trusted again for today's Leinster final. Martin Keoghan, at 26 years of age and on the panel since 2018, has been their best player this season. More concerning, the average age of the team that lined out against Dublin in Round 4 – the last time they fielded their strongest team – was 28.
'They still haven't found a player like Tipperary have found in Darragh McCarthy,' said Walsh.
Kilkenny manager Derek Lyng. Ken Sutton / INPHO Ken Sutton / INPHO / INPHO
Not that Lyng is complaining about any of it. For him, the sum of all his players' individual efforts is adding up to a powerful collective. And waiting for history to repeat itself and for another Henry Shefflin or Tommy Walsh to materialise doesn't keep him up at night.
'We compare all the time to the past teams and we have to stop doing that,' he said after the win over Dublin.
'We have a team here that's competing really well and competing hard. I think there's probably a narrative that we're going to be the team that was there 10, 15 years ago, whatever it was. That's not the case. It's Kilkenny of 2025.'
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