Michael in the middle

“It was a bad time, mentally and everything. You can get yourself into a hole there and keep digging. ‘Would I ever get back out on to the field again?’ ‘Is this year a write-off again?’ That’s what I was thinking. It was a really strange time.”

The riddle took weeks to solve. Less than a fortnight before the All-Ireland semi-final he was exposed to contact in training for the first time since early June. Then, against Limerick, they started him. In the All-Star phase of his career that became the pattern: in 2012 they parachuted him into the All-Ireland quarter-final after a three-month absence; a year before he lined out in the first round even though he “hadn’t trained at all”. Kilkenny’s desire to put Fennelly on the field exceeded whatever reasonable doubts existed about his readiness.

Last summer? His ankles went haywire. “Went over on both of them — horrificially. Three-month job on either one.” He blitzed his rehab to play against Waterford and Cork but once he returned to club training he knew he couldn’t continue. The tendons in his ankle had stopped functioning, one of the ligaments was on the point of rupturing; it was as if his ankles had been fed through a blender.

“You end up getting an operation if it does rupture and there’s a danger that you might not play again. There’s no guarantee coming back from an operation like that. . . It has been constantly stop-start, stop-start.”

In the long sit-and-suffer phase of his Kilkenny career, though, Fennelly’s injuries and setbacks had a different status. It reflected his place in the group. They wanted him to get better but there was no mad rush. Between 2006 and 2009 he started just three championship matches. One of those summers was sabotaged by a broken wrist, in another he was reeling from a bout of mumps. The basic issue, though, was selection. Others were preferred.

At the stage door he joined the queue. Kilkenny had a big cast of understudies who, in order to be stars, only needed the limelight. Fennelly fitted that profile. He was captain when Kilkenny won the under-21 All-Ireland in 2006 and when Ballyhale Shamrocks won the club All-Ireland six months later he was man of the match in the final. It was only a question of time. The problem, though, was that the question changed: ‘How long?’ turned into ‘How long more?’

“A lot of people said when Derek Lyng retired that I’d fall in there. Maybe that was a mental thing [on my part]. Consistency was the one thing that was thrown back at me at times. I wasn’t consistent enough. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t.”

It wasn’t the kind of environment in which your feelings were monitored and stroked. Emotional stamina was presumed. When Fennelly went searching for feedback he was greeted with positive vibes but the only meaningful expression of their opinion appeared on the team sheet.

Occasionally, however, a message would arrive. “Before the 07 final Michael Dempsey [trainer and selector] said, ‘Look, start getting stuck into training. Just start plugging in.’ Maybe that woke me up. Maybe I was holding back a small bit. He said, ‘Look, let rip here for the next two weeks.’ I got in then at half-time against Limerick.”

In 2009, though, there was nothing anybody could say. His club were county champions and at the beginning of the year they nominated him as the Kilkenny captain. He won his place for the opening round of the championship but when Galway had them on the run he was the first player replaced. He didn’t play another minute until September. After Kilkenny won the Leinster final he was coaxed onto the podium to accept the cup but standing there in his tracksuit pants and his painted smile he didn’t look like the captain and he didn’t feel blessed.

This year Kilkenny have another non-playing captain. Fennelly says he hasn’t raised the subject with Lester Ryan but he understands the torment. “It’s only when I was captain that I realised how hard it is. If I was looking in from the outside I’d be like, ‘Ah sure look, how hard is it to go up and lift the cup? You should be delighted that you’re captain. Just a privilege doing it.’ But for me, it was just playing – you have to be playing.

“Mentally it was horrible. It really was. The Tipp captain that year [Willie Ryan] was a sub as well. He was talking to me afterwards and he mentioned one or two headlines in the papers — The Invisible Captains or something. You want to be walking the team out and doing the captain’s duties.”

He came on midway through the second half when the game was in the balance, scored a point and made a positive impact. When he lifted the cup he didn’t feel so much like an imposter. But that winter he wasn’t sure if his heart was in another campaign of auditions and rejections. On the team holiday he confided in Michael Kavanagh that he was thinking about quitting.

Ballyhale’s run to the All-Ireland club final in March postponed the need for any decision; by then his season was rolling. Lyng was gone, so was Richie Mullally. Light, at last. How good was he in 2010? Going into the All-Ireland final he was averaging 21 plays a game and was Hurler of the Year elect until Lar Corbett’s hat-trick adjusted the rankings. A year later he won the award by acclaim.

At centre field nobody could live with him. When he emerged first he was tall and leggy like an unfurnished colt but over the span of his inter-county career he has added 20lbs to his massive frame. In the coliseum he plays the gladiator. There was a moment early in the 2011 All-Ireland final against Tipperary when Fennelly landed Shane McGrath on his backside: it was a statement hit that resonated around the field. This is how we’ve come to play: follow me.

Then his power faded for a while. When injury struck again in 2012 he couldn’t recover his form. In the drawn All-Ireland final against Galway he touched the ball just twice. Last year he was devastating in the League final but patched up and under par in the championship. There was one play in last year’s quarter-final in Thurles when he accepted a puck out from Eoin Murphy 65 metres from the Kilkenny goal and three Cork players descended on him like hyenas; Fennelly was turned over with the kind of manoeuvre that Kilkenny had patented.

“I wouldn’t say it was the end of something [losing last year] but it was the end of a road that we’d been on for seven or eight years. Every year we were in the All-Ireland final. We faded away against Cork which normally doesn’t happen. Henry [Shefflin] getting sent off and other fellas not hurling well. . . It was a strange time, being free in August.

“We went to the Galway races. We were saying, ‘Everybody does that, we may as well do it.’ But it wasn’t that good. It was raining. We had a lot of distractions in Kilkenny last year. A lot of injuries. The year was messy. This year the younger lads are in and they’re driving things. They’re mad to win All-Irelands.”

In his personal life it was a year of massive change. He left his job in the bank and by the end of the year he had completed a masters degree in sports performance at the University of Limerick. For the winter he went to Australia. Tadhg Kennelly set him up with the Sydney Swans, observing their pre-season training and helping out in the gym. He loved it and left it.

“The first thing on my mind [when the year turned] was, ‘I got to get back.’ A lot of young blood was coming into the panel. [I was thinking] ‘This has to be a big year for me with all the injuries last year’.”

It hasn’t turned out the way he planned. Not yet. The coliseum awaits.