LET’S SAY YOU’RE a young hurler and you want to play at the level of Richie Hogan one day. Do you need to do what he did in the years before the packed grounds and medals and awards? Well, “maybe not to the same extent,” he says.
Still, he doesn’t think anybody can make it near the top without putting in a “huge time and effort”. And it helps if the ceaseless work doesn’t feel anything like work, more one’s natural state.
Hurling to him was joy, something to be savoured, prolonged. Which is lucky because it has far more requirements as standard than many other sports, he says.
“We call them basic skills . . . but they are far from basic.”
You might not need to go to the extent, nevertheless, this is an idea of what life was like for a boy from the borderlands of Danesfort and Bennettsbridge in the mid-to-late 1990s.
After a primary school day he would arrive at his grandparents’ house at around quarter past three. His mother would collect him after work at half six. The time in between was spent in the 20-metre back yard, pucking the ball against the wall.
“I would have spent three hours a day, easy,” he says. “During the summer time it would have been more.”
The obsession would not diminish with age. By the time he got to secondary school a later bed time just meant more crashing of sliotar against concrete. At 10 or 11 o’clock one of his parents would have to call him in. Seriously, get to bed.
Hogan is among the more fluent and confident speakers you’d meet but he stalls a bit when asked why he never tired of the activity, and what he got from it from one day to the next.
It’s just what he did. There was a Playstation in the house which older brother Paddy used the odd time, but Richie “genuinely never picked the thing up”.
Even after training, he’d get dinner down and head back out again to strike, catch, touch and aim as the minutes and years went by.
“That’s what I loved to do,” he says. “I just really enjoyed it. I found it almost therapeutic. When I was in sixth year for example and I was studying quite hard to get a half decent Leaving Cert for myself I might do an hour of study and then go out to the back garden, bang the ball off the wall. It’s just a time while I’m clearing the head. For me it’s just a natural thing. It’s like coming in and sitting on the couch and turning on the TV.”
*****
There were more elements to Hogan than a true touch and clean strike, the type of qualities honed by the wall. There was another alley that helped him as a hurler. But that’s not why he took up handball, nor why he persevered with it for so long. Put simply, he just found it “really enjoyable as a sport”.
It was a sport he became a world champion in his age group as a 15-year-old in 2003.
The individual nature appealed, you had to find a way to victory by yourself and therefore build a winner’s mindset. “It’s all down to you.”
He credits the game with helping imbue in him a sense of agility and balance. Hand-eye-co-ordination too. Look at lads like Billy Drennan and Mark Rodgers he says, who have played the sport. “Brilliant guys to just snap a ball that comes in high or low.”
The ball “is flying so fast” in handball, he says. “You react and turn your legs over much quicker than everybody else, and that gives you a half a second of an advantage – and in hurling a half-second is like gold dust.”
You often need nature to coincide with nurture if you’re looking to progress to the higher levels of any sport. The old line about choosing your parents wisely applies here. Mother Liz was born to the McCarthy family, steeped in Bennettsbridge hurling and related to DJ Carey and James McGarry. Dad Sean captained John Lockes to junior and intermediate championships in Kilkenny and was considered unlucky in Callan to not get called up to the Kilkenny panel.
An older brother never diminishes one’s chance of sporting progress. And in Paddy, one year his senior, Richie had someone to wrestle, climb trees, jump off walls and play any amount of sport with.
“It’s ready-made competition, especially if they’re older,” he says, “Paddy was always a better player right up until we were adults, and you get dragged along to all of his games and training sessions as well as your own. You get extra practice, and you have to be a little bit tougher from a physical perspective if you want to get your hands on the ball in the back garden, let alone anywhere else.”
*****
Shane Keegan was standing on the sidelines of Fort Rangers’ pitch in Danesfort, damp and frozen, watching their FAI Junior Cup tie against Gorey Rangers one Sunday morning in late 2013. Things were not going well for the home side, and as result the player he had come to scout.
Keegan, who would go on to manage Galway United and Cobh Ramblers, was Wexford Youths boss at the time. He had travelled to watch Emmet Nugent play. By half-time Fort Rangers were 3-0 down, but the game was about to pick up.
From the line at half-time emerged Richie Hogan, and Keegan thought that if nothing else the entertainment level was about to rise.
He’d seen Hogan play soccer a few times and loved the control and verve he brought to the 10 role. Hogan, he says, had similar attributes as a footballer to the hurler; always a move ahead of the opposition, able to see things others couldn’t. The low centre of gravity helped Hogan to evade opponents and keep possession in unfavourable circumstances.
As Hogan ran on Keegan reasoned he must have had a club hurling match or training session elsewhere to cause him to miss the first half. The reality was different.
“It’s very random that you’ve brought this up,” Hogan says laughing.
He remembers the match. By then he was into his late 20s and a multiple All-Ireland winner and hadn’t played much soccer since he “was about 16”. Yet it’s a difficult game to leave behind for lots of reasons, one being that he’d paid his 50 quid membership so why not see if there was any chance he could play a few games during hurling’s off-season?
So he picked up the phone to the side’s manager Jim Cashin to be told that he could tog out for this FAI Cup game. And come the day they were short players, with Hogan a lonely figure on the bench.
So he wasn’t playing hurling elsewhere for the first half. “I was sitting on the line.”
At half time the manager approached. “He came over to me and said we’re going to put you in there and isn’t this great? The game is over so you can take a little bit of time and get your touch in.”
Three assists from Hogan followed, Fort Rangers drew 5-5 and went on to win on penalties.
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“I’ve never played again since,” he says.
Could he have been a somebody in the global game? In Kilkenny footballing circles Hogan was seen as a stellar talent, blessed with great potential. Hogan, though, says his prowess has been overstated.
He took up the game at “about eight or nine”, played a bit with a side called East End United in Bennettsbridge and joined Fort Rangers at “maybe 11 or 12”.
“Soccer is probably the second biggest sport in Kilkenny,” he says, “there’s a big, strong tradition.”
Hogan captained a Kilkenny and District League Kennedy Cup team that included Gary Breen, who went on to play for Manchester City in an FA Youth Cup final, at centre-half and Paul Murphy in goals. Hogan played at centre-mid in a strong side that got knocked out by Seamus Coleman’s Donegal.
“I think a lot of people will tell stories about my soccer career but the reality is I wasn’t very good at all,” he says. “I was very athletic and very sporty but I can count on one hand the amount of training sessions I ever did in soccer, it was mainly just I played a few games really, enjoyed it was really gone by the wayside by the time I got to about 16 because, you know, other things took over.”
Stories of him having trials at various clubs across the water have got back to him but “none of that’s true”.
“Any scouts that ever came to our games were told that this guy plays hurling and he won’t be going anywhere, and that was always made pretty clear,” he says. “I had a couple of trials with the Irish national team, went with Paul Murphy, in maybe U15 or U14, but I didn’t go too far.”
*****
Hogan is a hurler that suffered through injuries. You’ll have heard about his debilitating back problems by now that first flared up in 2009 but really began to inhibit him during the second half of his career.
If the life of a professional footballer wasn’t for him, then the life of a professional would definitely have made sense.
Ryan Byrne / INPHO
Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO
“No doubt about it,” he says. “If I was a professional contracted player to any sport the body wouldn’t have gone through anything close to what I had to go through. I had to work 40 hours a week and I had to drive two hours to training and about an hour and 15 minutes back.
“I didn’t reach anything close to my potential, because I wasn’t a professional sports person. Like, that’s just the reality of being an amateur. But I loved the game of hurling and it didn’t matter if I got paid for it or not. I was always going to choose that.”
The demands on amateur players at the high levels of the GAA are not unreasonable, Hogan believes. Nothing was ever asked of the players they didn’t want to do themselves; that they weren’t already leading on.
“We pushed the standards ourselves – the intensity around training, the regularity of our training sessions, the commitment,” he says.
If training was at 7pm, everybody would be there by 6.15pm, the earliest guy having arrived at 5.30pm. This is what happens in a high-performance environment, he says, “you’re trying to raise standards all of the time”.
In counties where there is no real hope of success at the end of the year he says coaches might be pushing the schedule, trying to show signs of progress, but in Kilkenny “it was genuinely always the other way round”.
He adds: “If anything we were demanding more of the management setup.”
*****
Stories of players’ obsessions over their hurleys are many – from TJ Reid standing over the Dowlings at Star Hurleys as they work the ash to Patrick Horgan often “putting my day into a hurley”, as he told Donal Óg Cusack before this year’s All-Ireland final.
Anthony Nash, writer of many good columns on this site, once told us that he and Horgan agreed that if they could have the mythical perfect hurley and a guarantee it wouldn’t break for a year they would pay €500 each.
What’s less usual is a player almost indifferent to the sticks in the matchday bag. Hogan is such a character. He’ll pick up a 34 now, and has used 35. For most of his career he had a 34-and-a-half.
“But I have gone to games where I would have a 34, 35 and a 34-and-a-half in the bag so I’m not particularly fussy about the length of my hurl, I could use anything really, within reason. I’ve often just picked up a hurl and been able to play with it and been like, ‘Ok, that’s grand’”.
The weight he wouldn’t describe as light but it “certainly wouldn’t be heavy.” He focussed on his wrists while striking – that being where his speed and power came from.
“I know others who use heavier hurls and they have a more mechanical swing and like a bit of weight behind it. I preferred to have a faster strike, so I always preferred a slightly lighter hurl.”
Two hurley makers kept him supplied. “Eric Roche was my local hurley maker who has since passed away, he was very kind to me. And I had always gone to Star Hurleys as well.”
What he did with those hurleys over the years was evidently remarkable, how any particular player did it is always more difficult to work out. There is the unknowable balance between what is a deliberate thought and what the mind and body unconsciously take care of when lost in the art.
Watch clips of Hogan and you’ll see by the amount of times he strikes under pressure with a full length grip. Are we reading too much into a few bits of film to suggest this was a policy? Possibly so, he says, adding that he shortened when he had to but as soon as he got a bit of time and space “I’m never shortening that grip”.
His idea of time and space is probably different to most peoples’ given what he could achieve in a tight spot while under duress.
“There were a couple of things for me that I concentrated in my own striking,” he says. “One was to try and strike the ball as quickly as possible once I threw it up and the second was, because I’m lower to the ground to other players, I always leaned a little back in order to get the ball above the player.
“So I would always strike up in the air more so than straight through the ball, especially if there was a defender in front of me . . . That would have just been my style, I would have struck off the back foot a lot more than the front foot. They would have been the things that I was maybe aware of, trying to just avoid that block. They were my little habits, if you like.”
*****
The areas discussed in this interview and more are covered in far greater depth in Hogan’s autobiography, Whatever it Takes, written with Fintan O’Toole from this parish. We’d recommend the read without any fear of bias to anybody interested in the life of an elite level hurler in perhaps the most elite hurling team of all. The story is rich in detail and anecdote and moves nimbly between the years of unforeseen success and the post-2015 period when Kilkenny stopped winning All Irelands.
As a result readers get a nuanced view of Brian Cody, from a player who said he “idolised” the manager from “the moment I landed on the Kilkenny panel”. Yet Hogan was also capable of questioning authority, especially as he grew older.
One scene depicts Cody and the player meeting in early 2017. Hogan is hungry for a more evolved tactical approach following an All-Ireland final defeat to Tipp the previous year. He tells Cody that he will do anything to win but “you only want to win your way”.
“He didn’t like that,” the reader is told.
Richie Hogan and Brian Cody. Tommy Dickson / INPHO
Tommy Dickson / INPHO / INPHO
All readers will have their own particular areas of interest in the story. For this one it was the sense of lament on Hogan’s part that he did not play more at midfield. He is keen to play down any sense of ingratitude and says he was honoured to play in any black and amber jersey, regardless of the number.
Still, it remains the case he played only full season at midfield, 2014, when he also won hurler of the year.
Converted forwards around the middle were not the norm at the time, he says. Many 8 or 9s seemed to be big, athletic units who would get through an amount of graft in 70 minutes. Yet Hogan felt he could get to the ball more quickly than most and then deliver the ball to the forwards swiftly. He had that handballer’s burst of pace over 10 yards and a soccer player’s spatial awareness and vision. Also, he had been a forward all his life and knew where they would run and knew the type of ball that would help them score.
“In the midfield I was on the ball maybe 30 times in the game where I was used to being in the inside forward line where you might only have three or four possessions in a game,” he says.
“You’re so dependent on the ball that comes into you. In the middle of the pitch you are fully in control. If you don’t get into the game, that’s your fault.”
Ask him if Cody was fair to him in his selections and he says “being fair to me is irrelevant”. The manager played him in the positions to best suit the team. Hogan went from being a centre-forward who would get selected at midfield, to an inside threat – a move that was hastened by the retirements of forwards such as Henry Shefflin, Richie Power and Eddie Brennan a couple of years previously.
“You learn to forgo your personal ambitions around where you play for the betterment of the team . . . But, yeah, a lot of the time I thought I could bring more to the team in those positions (midfield and centre-forward).
“I felt at the time I could link up the play better. They weren’t the type of player he (Cody) wanted in that area, he wanted people who were going to get hooks and blocks in, which I was perfectly ready to do, but that was the way he saw the game, that was the way he wanted to set up his team.”
When Cody “didn’t like” being told that he only wanted to win his way, what did he actually say? Hogan pauses and says he doesn’t know, it was quite some time ago. “The meeting just kind of came to an end.”
He adds: “Throughout my 16 years of playing with Brian, I had loads of difficult conversations where I was on the receiving end, and rightly so, and some where, you know, I was trying to improve x, y and z.”
Sometimes those meetings got tense, something Hogan wasn’t going to shy away from, and as for Cody . . . “he certainly wasn’t going to shy away from it”.
*****
Hogan retired in 2023. There will never be another All Ireland medal or a roar booming from four sides of Croke Park, like the one to meet his towering late point in the 2022 final as Kilkenny chased Limerick.
Great as all of that was, the accolades and recognition are not why it started and not where it ends. Even now when he goes home to his parents house in Callan, he’ll park up and walk into the garage.
“I’ll pull out a hurl and a ball and I’ll beat it off the wall.”
He’d happily stay out there till dark like when he was a child, but five or ten minutes later the back starts to give out. This is said with no sense of self pity. Much as he practiced so obsessively as a boy – this is just the way it is. Some things are better accepted than understood.
Yet you wonder whether all of the games he played when young, across three sports and countless teams, left him in a condition where he’s now in too much pain to do the thing that comes most naturally: puck the ball, control it and strike again.
Maybe so, he says, but it would be just speculation on his part.
“I played a gigantic amount of sport as a kid,” he says. “My memory of a child is, I was always playing matches. Very often I would play three or four games over a weekend and I’ve often been driven from a handball match to a hurling match and back to another handball match. I’ve often played soccer on a Saturday morning and then had a hurling game that evening.”
What he lacked as a youngster was a chance to “develop let’s say my biomechanics” or an athletic bearing, he says. “Get proper strength and conditioning training at the right time.”
He sees young players now as having bodies that are “set up in a way that can handle far more load” than his peers.
That, he says, is simply the way it was. Had he been born 20 years earlier he’d have a different set of injuries.
He leaves with no regrets and a lot to be grateful for. The game has enriched him “in an incredible way”. He’s been around people who were impressive characters, he says, creative, resilient, disciplined, willing to push each other, capable of getting the job done no matter how difficult things appeared.
All of those traits have been learned in the first 35 years of his life, which he thinks give him a “huge advantage for the next 35 years” as he throws himself into his professional and family life.
“I would have loved to have been paid as a professional sports person. Of course I would,” he says. “Not for the money. It would have been more to be able to dedicate myself full time to it.”
Dan Sheridan / INPHO
Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO
He’s given as much of himself as he could and feels he’s been repaid with interest. The success, the memories, the full life which comes with a singular focus, the people he’s played with; people he will always be close to. It all adds up to something only a “tiny, tiny percentage” of the population will ever experience, he says.
“I’ve been lucky.”
Whatever It Takes, Richie Hogan with Fintan O’Toole, is published by Gill.
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I didn’t reach anything close to my potential, because I wasn’t a professional sports person'
LET’S SAY YOU’RE a young hurler and you want to play at the level of Richie Hogan one day. Do you need to do what he did in the years before the packed grounds and medals and awards? Well, “maybe not to the same extent,” he says.
Still, he doesn’t think anybody can make it near the top without putting in a “huge time and effort”. And it helps if the ceaseless work doesn’t feel anything like work, more one’s natural state.
Hurling to him was joy, something to be savoured, prolonged. Which is lucky because it has far more requirements as standard than many other sports, he says.
“We call them basic skills . . . but they are far from basic.”
You might not need to go to the extent, nevertheless, this is an idea of what life was like for a boy from the borderlands of Danesfort and Bennettsbridge in the mid-to-late 1990s.
After a primary school day he would arrive at his grandparents’ house at around quarter past three. His mother would collect him after work at half six. The time in between was spent in the 20-metre back yard, pucking the ball against the wall.
“I would have spent three hours a day, easy,” he says. “During the summer time it would have been more.”
The obsession would not diminish with age. By the time he got to secondary school a later bed time just meant more crashing of sliotar against concrete. At 10 or 11 o’clock one of his parents would have to call him in. Seriously, get to bed.
Hogan is among the more fluent and confident speakers you’d meet but he stalls a bit when asked why he never tired of the activity, and what he got from it from one day to the next.
It’s just what he did. There was a Playstation in the house which older brother Paddy used the odd time, but Richie “genuinely never picked the thing up”.
Even after training, he’d get dinner down and head back out again to strike, catch, touch and aim as the minutes and years went by.
“That’s what I loved to do,” he says. “I just really enjoyed it. I found it almost therapeutic. When I was in sixth year for example and I was studying quite hard to get a half decent Leaving Cert for myself I might do an hour of study and then go out to the back garden, bang the ball off the wall. It’s just a time while I’m clearing the head. For me it’s just a natural thing. It’s like coming in and sitting on the couch and turning on the TV.”
*****
There were more elements to Hogan than a true touch and clean strike, the type of qualities honed by the wall. There was another alley that helped him as a hurler. But that’s not why he took up handball, nor why he persevered with it for so long. Put simply, he just found it “really enjoyable as a sport”.
It was a sport he became a world champion in his age group as a 15-year-old in 2003.
The individual nature appealed, you had to find a way to victory by yourself and therefore build a winner’s mindset. “It’s all down to you.”
He credits the game with helping imbue in him a sense of agility and balance. Hand-eye-co-ordination too. Look at lads like Billy Drennan and Mark Rodgers he says, who have played the sport. “Brilliant guys to just snap a ball that comes in high or low.”
The ball “is flying so fast” in handball, he says. “You react and turn your legs over much quicker than everybody else, and that gives you a half a second of an advantage – and in hurling a half-second is like gold dust.”
You often need nature to coincide with nurture if you’re looking to progress to the higher levels of any sport. The old line about choosing your parents wisely applies here. Mother Liz was born to the McCarthy family, steeped in Bennettsbridge hurling and related to DJ Carey and James McGarry. Dad Sean captained John Lockes to junior and intermediate championships in Kilkenny and was considered unlucky in Callan to not get called up to the Kilkenny panel.
An older brother never diminishes one’s chance of sporting progress. And in Paddy, one year his senior, Richie had someone to wrestle, climb trees, jump off walls and play any amount of sport with.
“It’s ready-made competition, especially if they’re older,” he says, “Paddy was always a better player right up until we were adults, and you get dragged along to all of his games and training sessions as well as your own. You get extra practice, and you have to be a little bit tougher from a physical perspective if you want to get your hands on the ball in the back garden, let alone anywhere else.”
*****
Shane Keegan was standing on the sidelines of Fort Rangers’ pitch in Danesfort, damp and frozen, watching their FAI Junior Cup tie against Gorey Rangers one Sunday morning in late 2013. Things were not going well for the home side, and as result the player he had come to scout.
Keegan, who would go on to manage Galway United and Cobh Ramblers, was Wexford Youths boss at the time. He had travelled to watch Emmet Nugent play. By half-time Fort Rangers were 3-0 down, but the game was about to pick up.
From the line at half-time emerged Richie Hogan, and Keegan thought that if nothing else the entertainment level was about to rise.
He’d seen Hogan play soccer a few times and loved the control and verve he brought to the 10 role. Hogan, he says, had similar attributes as a footballer to the hurler; always a move ahead of the opposition, able to see things others couldn’t. The low centre of gravity helped Hogan to evade opponents and keep possession in unfavourable circumstances.
As Hogan ran on Keegan reasoned he must have had a club hurling match or training session elsewhere to cause him to miss the first half. The reality was different.
“It’s very random that you’ve brought this up,” Hogan says laughing.
He remembers the match. By then he was into his late 20s and a multiple All-Ireland winner and hadn’t played much soccer since he “was about 16”. Yet it’s a difficult game to leave behind for lots of reasons, one being that he’d paid his 50 quid membership so why not see if there was any chance he could play a few games during hurling’s off-season?
So he picked up the phone to the side’s manager Jim Cashin to be told that he could tog out for this FAI Cup game. And come the day they were short players, with Hogan a lonely figure on the bench.
So he wasn’t playing hurling elsewhere for the first half. “I was sitting on the line.”
At half time the manager approached. “He came over to me and said we’re going to put you in there and isn’t this great? The game is over so you can take a little bit of time and get your touch in.”
Three assists from Hogan followed, Fort Rangers drew 5-5 and went on to win on penalties.
“I’ve never played again since,” he says.
Could he have been a somebody in the global game? In Kilkenny footballing circles Hogan was seen as a stellar talent, blessed with great potential. Hogan, though, says his prowess has been overstated.
He took up the game at “about eight or nine”, played a bit with a side called East End United in Bennettsbridge and joined Fort Rangers at “maybe 11 or 12”.
“Soccer is probably the second biggest sport in Kilkenny,” he says, “there’s a big, strong tradition.”
Hogan captained a Kilkenny and District League Kennedy Cup team that included Gary Breen, who went on to play for Manchester City in an FA Youth Cup final, at centre-half and Paul Murphy in goals. Hogan played at centre-mid in a strong side that got knocked out by Seamus Coleman’s Donegal.
“I think a lot of people will tell stories about my soccer career but the reality is I wasn’t very good at all,” he says. “I was very athletic and very sporty but I can count on one hand the amount of training sessions I ever did in soccer, it was mainly just I played a few games really, enjoyed it was really gone by the wayside by the time I got to about 16 because, you know, other things took over.”
Stories of him having trials at various clubs across the water have got back to him but “none of that’s true”.
“Any scouts that ever came to our games were told that this guy plays hurling and he won’t be going anywhere, and that was always made pretty clear,” he says. “I had a couple of trials with the Irish national team, went with Paul Murphy, in maybe U15 or U14, but I didn’t go too far.”
*****
Hogan is a hurler that suffered through injuries. You’ll have heard about his debilitating back problems by now that first flared up in 2009 but really began to inhibit him during the second half of his career.
If the life of a professional footballer wasn’t for him, then the life of a professional would definitely have made sense.
“No doubt about it,” he says. “If I was a professional contracted player to any sport the body wouldn’t have gone through anything close to what I had to go through. I had to work 40 hours a week and I had to drive two hours to training and about an hour and 15 minutes back.
“I didn’t reach anything close to my potential, because I wasn’t a professional sports person. Like, that’s just the reality of being an amateur. But I loved the game of hurling and it didn’t matter if I got paid for it or not. I was always going to choose that.”
The demands on amateur players at the high levels of the GAA are not unreasonable, Hogan believes. Nothing was ever asked of the players they didn’t want to do themselves; that they weren’t already leading on.
“We pushed the standards ourselves – the intensity around training, the regularity of our training sessions, the commitment,” he says.
If training was at 7pm, everybody would be there by 6.15pm, the earliest guy having arrived at 5.30pm. This is what happens in a high-performance environment, he says, “you’re trying to raise standards all of the time”.
In counties where there is no real hope of success at the end of the year he says coaches might be pushing the schedule, trying to show signs of progress, but in Kilkenny “it was genuinely always the other way round”.
He adds: “If anything we were demanding more of the management setup.”
*****
Stories of players’ obsessions over their hurleys are many – from TJ Reid standing over the Dowlings at Star Hurleys as they work the ash to Patrick Horgan often “putting my day into a hurley”, as he told Donal Óg Cusack before this year’s All-Ireland final.
Anthony Nash, writer of many good columns on this site, once told us that he and Horgan agreed that if they could have the mythical perfect hurley and a guarantee it wouldn’t break for a year they would pay €500 each.
What’s less usual is a player almost indifferent to the sticks in the matchday bag. Hogan is such a character. He’ll pick up a 34 now, and has used 35. For most of his career he had a 34-and-a-half.
“But I have gone to games where I would have a 34, 35 and a 34-and-a-half in the bag so I’m not particularly fussy about the length of my hurl, I could use anything really, within reason. I’ve often just picked up a hurl and been able to play with it and been like, ‘Ok, that’s grand’”.
The weight he wouldn’t describe as light but it “certainly wouldn’t be heavy.” He focussed on his wrists while striking – that being where his speed and power came from.
“I know others who use heavier hurls and they have a more mechanical swing and like a bit of weight behind it. I preferred to have a faster strike, so I always preferred a slightly lighter hurl.”
Two hurley makers kept him supplied. “Eric Roche was my local hurley maker who has since passed away, he was very kind to me. And I had always gone to Star Hurleys as well.”
What he did with those hurleys over the years was evidently remarkable, how any particular player did it is always more difficult to work out. There is the unknowable balance between what is a deliberate thought and what the mind and body unconsciously take care of when lost in the art.
Watch clips of Hogan and you’ll see by the amount of times he strikes under pressure with a full length grip. Are we reading too much into a few bits of film to suggest this was a policy? Possibly so, he says, adding that he shortened when he had to but as soon as he got a bit of time and space “I’m never shortening that grip”.
His idea of time and space is probably different to most peoples’ given what he could achieve in a tight spot while under duress.
“There were a couple of things for me that I concentrated in my own striking,” he says. “One was to try and strike the ball as quickly as possible once I threw it up and the second was, because I’m lower to the ground to other players, I always leaned a little back in order to get the ball above the player.
“So I would always strike up in the air more so than straight through the ball, especially if there was a defender in front of me . . . That would have just been my style, I would have struck off the back foot a lot more than the front foot. They would have been the things that I was maybe aware of, trying to just avoid that block. They were my little habits, if you like.”
*****
The areas discussed in this interview and more are covered in far greater depth in Hogan’s autobiography, Whatever it Takes, written with Fintan O’Toole from this parish. We’d recommend the read without any fear of bias to anybody interested in the life of an elite level hurler in perhaps the most elite hurling team of all. The story is rich in detail and anecdote and moves nimbly between the years of unforeseen success and the post-2015 period when Kilkenny stopped winning All Irelands.
As a result readers get a nuanced view of Brian Cody, from a player who said he “idolised” the manager from “the moment I landed on the Kilkenny panel”. Yet Hogan was also capable of questioning authority, especially as he grew older.
One scene depicts Cody and the player meeting in early 2017. Hogan is hungry for a more evolved tactical approach following an All-Ireland final defeat to Tipp the previous year. He tells Cody that he will do anything to win but “you only want to win your way”.
“He didn’t like that,” the reader is told.
All readers will have their own particular areas of interest in the story. For this one it was the sense of lament on Hogan’s part that he did not play more at midfield. He is keen to play down any sense of ingratitude and says he was honoured to play in any black and amber jersey, regardless of the number.
Still, it remains the case he played only full season at midfield, 2014, when he also won hurler of the year.
Converted forwards around the middle were not the norm at the time, he says. Many 8 or 9s seemed to be big, athletic units who would get through an amount of graft in 70 minutes. Yet Hogan felt he could get to the ball more quickly than most and then deliver the ball to the forwards swiftly. He had that handballer’s burst of pace over 10 yards and a soccer player’s spatial awareness and vision. Also, he had been a forward all his life and knew where they would run and knew the type of ball that would help them score.
“In the midfield I was on the ball maybe 30 times in the game where I was used to being in the inside forward line where you might only have three or four possessions in a game,” he says.
“You’re so dependent on the ball that comes into you. In the middle of the pitch you are fully in control. If you don’t get into the game, that’s your fault.”
Ask him if Cody was fair to him in his selections and he says “being fair to me is irrelevant”. The manager played him in the positions to best suit the team. Hogan went from being a centre-forward who would get selected at midfield, to an inside threat – a move that was hastened by the retirements of forwards such as Henry Shefflin, Richie Power and Eddie Brennan a couple of years previously.
“You learn to forgo your personal ambitions around where you play for the betterment of the team . . . But, yeah, a lot of the time I thought I could bring more to the team in those positions (midfield and centre-forward).
“I felt at the time I could link up the play better. They weren’t the type of player he (Cody) wanted in that area, he wanted people who were going to get hooks and blocks in, which I was perfectly ready to do, but that was the way he saw the game, that was the way he wanted to set up his team.”
When Cody “didn’t like” being told that he only wanted to win his way, what did he actually say? Hogan pauses and says he doesn’t know, it was quite some time ago. “The meeting just kind of came to an end.”
He adds: “Throughout my 16 years of playing with Brian, I had loads of difficult conversations where I was on the receiving end, and rightly so, and some where, you know, I was trying to improve x, y and z.”
Sometimes those meetings got tense, something Hogan wasn’t going to shy away from, and as for Cody . . . “he certainly wasn’t going to shy away from it”.
*****
Hogan retired in 2023. There will never be another All Ireland medal or a roar booming from four sides of Croke Park, like the one to meet his towering late point in the 2022 final as Kilkenny chased Limerick.
Great as all of that was, the accolades and recognition are not why it started and not where it ends. Even now when he goes home to his parents house in Callan, he’ll park up and walk into the garage.
“I’ll pull out a hurl and a ball and I’ll beat it off the wall.”
He’d happily stay out there till dark like when he was a child, but five or ten minutes later the back starts to give out. This is said with no sense of self pity. Much as he practiced so obsessively as a boy – this is just the way it is. Some things are better accepted than understood.
Yet you wonder whether all of the games he played when young, across three sports and countless teams, left him in a condition where he’s now in too much pain to do the thing that comes most naturally: puck the ball, control it and strike again.
Maybe so, he says, but it would be just speculation on his part.
“I played a gigantic amount of sport as a kid,” he says. “My memory of a child is, I was always playing matches. Very often I would play three or four games over a weekend and I’ve often been driven from a handball match to a hurling match and back to another handball match. I’ve often played soccer on a Saturday morning and then had a hurling game that evening.”
What he lacked as a youngster was a chance to “develop let’s say my biomechanics” or an athletic bearing, he says. “Get proper strength and conditioning training at the right time.”
He sees young players now as having bodies that are “set up in a way that can handle far more load” than his peers.
That, he says, is simply the way it was. Had he been born 20 years earlier he’d have a different set of injuries.
He leaves with no regrets and a lot to be grateful for. The game has enriched him “in an incredible way”. He’s been around people who were impressive characters, he says, creative, resilient, disciplined, willing to push each other, capable of getting the job done no matter how difficult things appeared.
All of those traits have been learned in the first 35 years of his life, which he thinks give him a “huge advantage for the next 35 years” as he throws himself into his professional and family life.
“I would have loved to have been paid as a professional sports person. Of course I would,” he says. “Not for the money. It would have been more to be able to dedicate myself full time to it.”
He’s given as much of himself as he could and feels he’s been repaid with interest. The success, the memories, the full life which comes with a singular focus, the people he’s played with; people he will always be close to. It all adds up to something only a “tiny, tiny percentage” of the population will ever experience, he says.
“I’ve been lucky.”
Whatever It Takes, Richie Hogan with Fintan O’Toole, is published by Gill.
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GAA Hurling Interview Richie Hogan Whatever It Takes