KILKENNY’S EDDIE BRENNAN has retired from inter-county hurling, according to reports.
The 33-year-old has enjoyed a massively successful career with the Cats, winning eight All-Irelands, ten Leinster titles, four National Hurling Leagues and a quadruple of All-Star awards.
RTE state that Brennan has decided to call time on his Kilkenny career as Brian Cody’s men prepare for the 2012 league campaign, and becomes the second high profile member of the panel to walk away, following James ‘Cha’ Fitzpatrick’s retirement in November.
Late last year, Brennan revealed how hard it would be to walk away from Kilkenny hurling. He said that he decided to prolong his career after the side failed to secure a fifth All-Ireland in a row against Tipperary in 2010.
“It’s something that is there in the background – will I or won’t I? First and foremost, I have to sit down with Brian to talk about it. You would have a fair idea yourself about what lies ahead,” he said in December.
“This time last year, if we had have won the five-in-a-row, I probably would have gone. It’s a huge part of your life, when you’re involved in hurling, and it’s hard to walk away from that.”
While Brennan had been used more sparingly by Cody in recent seasons, his importance to the team was highlighted by his powerful run to set up a Richie Hogan goal in last September’s All-Ireland Final win over the Premier County.
He made his Championship debut for Kilkenny in 2000.
About time! Murrayfield is dreary and cold at the best of times when no one is there for pro12 games it’s even worse. Interesting to see if Easter Road pitch will take the additional games. Hope it works out for Edinburgh. Scottish Rugby is pretty low now outside of Glasgow! Would be nice to have another club to add to both existing pro 12′s.
Good move for “Embra” after Glasgow showed the way with their own relative success in their stadium-switch and now have decent, passionate support and finally a successful team. So hopefully Embra see similar decent attendances and relative success, which will be good for raising the value and merit of the Pro12 League.
As an Edinburgh resident, I’m very excited by this news. I long ago gave up on going to Murrayfield to watch Edinburgh: it was a thoroughly demoralising experience to be surrounded by 64,000 empty seats at each game. The rugby was generally crap, too.
Murrayfield is fantastic in the 6N when it is crammed and in full voice, but has always been a major handicap to developing Edinburgh Rugby.
Easter Road is a really nice ground – very close to the pitch. The corners are all open, so swirling winds will be interesting!
Hard to make any money when renting a stadium.
Even harder to make money when:
a. No-one goes to your games because the atmosphere is abysmal
b. You never win anything because even your players are dejected taking the field in an empty concrete bowl
I think it would be a good call by Edinburgh to make the switch to smaller ground to get the ground buzzing and get the passionate Scots behind there team, maybe looking at what Leinster did and do renting the RDS then take the crowd to the Aviva for big matches, Murrayfield for the Heineken cup matches quarter finals and stuff. Good call.
Edinburgh in a quarter final??
Remember they knocked out Toulouse a few years back in a quarter final
Edinburgh were in the quarter final a few years back and knocked out Toulouse