ON GAELIC GAMES:NO COUNTY does "out of the blue" like Galway. During the close-on 40 years of their modern hurling identity, they have delivered the unexpected – from euphoria to dismay – so often as to be paradoxically predictable.

Tipperary, with their fine and weighty traditions, had to assemble a formidable side and make incremental progress during three seasons through league, provincial and All-Ireland competition before they could take Kilkenny in the championship.

Galway have done it three times – more often than any county – to Brian Cody’s Kilkenny. I was once told that young barristers are advised when defending clients involved in car crashes never to tell a judge that the other vehicle “came out of nowhere” but with Galway, there’s no option but to risk the court’s displeasure.

Cody had a weary demeanour in the post-match conference – not in the sense of being tired of the whole business but rather a “told-you-so” reproachfulness.

“I haven’t a different story to what I had before the game,” he said. “I said they were capable of beating us and we were capable of beating them on different days, whatever way the game works out.”

In 2001, Cody’s All-Ireland champions were hustled out of the All-Ireland semi-finals at a stage when the hurling chatter du jour was whether DJ Carey, Charlie Carter and Henry Shefflin constituted the best full-forward line in history.

Cody is rarely comfortable with superlatives. The qualities he is most quoted as admiring are honesty, industry and humility – as in the medieval memento mori rather than false modesty. In other words no one’s too big to fail.

You can imagine him being haunted by the conversations that began to spring up in recent weeks: how the championship was over and the extent to which depression stalked the land as another Kilkenny All-Ireland assumed the status of the inevitable.

Cody’s first All-Ireland as a player came against Galway 37 years ago. Coincidentally it was greeted as evidence that the team of that era – three All-Irelands in four years – was possibly the greatest of all time.

The win was also the last MacCarthy Cup success of the team coach, Fr Tommy Maher, who took the county to seven All-Irelands in 18 seasons – a feat made all the more remarkable by the presence in those same years of the great Tipperary team of the 1960s, the Cork three-in-a-row side of the 1970s and, within Leinster, a frequently menacing Wexford.

Maher’s coaching genius made Kilkenny the pre-eminent modern hurling power. Since his first year in 1957 when, by his own account, he reluctantly agreed to take on the team, Kilkenny have won 20 All-Irelands, whereas Cork and Tipperary have managed 11 and 10 respectively.

The 13 that weren’t won under Maher’s baton were all conducted by his apprentices; every single successful manager, including Cody, had played for him in the 1950s, ’60s or ’70s – a more direct and fruitful legacy than even Kevin Heffernan’s in Dublin football.

The Godfather of Modern Hurling – the Fr Tommy Maher story by Enda McEvoy (Ballpoint Press, €14.99) recounts the achievement.

In an age which future historians will have no difficulty in chronicling, such is the volume of publications detailing individuals and events, we sometimes forget how patchy the literature of the GAA was before the 1990s.

This is a terrific book, which illuminates a story and a personality about which surprisingly little has been told.

The thesis holds that modern hurling originates in 1957 when a young priest took charge of Kilkenny. The county hadn’t won an All-Ireland in 10 years and could have, according to the author’s musings, been on the way to a similar status to Limerick, a fanatical hurling county with no modern tradition of success.

Kilkenny’s reputation was for stylish but non-confrontational stickmen (as the old jibe had it, Kilkenny for the hurlers, Tipperary for the men). Maher broke down their game and reconstructed it along more robust lines.

Skills would be remorselessly practised so they became second nature and wouldn’t falter under stress. Astonishingly hand passing had been largely ignored in the county and that too would be practised so that it became part of the arsenal but only when players needed it for quick despatch, because a hurled ball travelled faster than any courier.

Weaknesses in technique would be identified and a remedial course of exercises prescribed – to be executed under supervision again and again in training.

Not a great believer in tactics, he prepares players to give optimal performances but is also well briefed on opponents and supremely confident.

When badgered to make changes in a championship match, he laconically suggests that everyone wait and let the Wexford lads make theirs first – because they always get them wrong.

Before the 1975 final he tells Paddy Downey in an interview in this newspaper that short of Galway getting lucky goals, “I can’t see them beating us”.

None of what came to pass after 1957 would have been possible without a conveyor belt of talent and as a teacher and later president of St Kieran’s College, the hothouse of Kilkenny hurling, Maher had a hand in that as well.

There’s not a huge amount about him personally in the story beyond vignettes of his pastoral and educational career but the book is a testament to what someone did rather than who they were.

Maher was a good hurler but a county career was impossible given the restrictions on clergy. He played his only match for Kilkenny – remarkably in the 1945 All-Ireland final – and even that was a struggle. Dr Patrick Collier, the local bishop, called to bless the team at their last training session only to be told that there was a clerical student on the team.

Surprised that Maher hadn’t requested his permission the Bishop of Ossory may have been, but he was hardly going to pull a member of the team at that stage. “I suppose I can’t stop you now,” he told the errant hurler.

A year after that final triumph in 1975, when in pursuit of a first three-in-a-row won on the field (the final leg of the 1911-13 sequence was won in the committee room after a dispute over venue), Kilkenny ran into a whirlwind in the Leinster final, losing 1-6 to 2-20 to Wexford.

Looking back at 1976 one of Maher’s distinguished alumni Billy Fitzpatrick makes what now appears as an unwittingly prescient point.

“You’d wonder what might have happened afterwards had there been a back door at the time. Being beaten by so much was a surprise. Being beaten wasn’t. That was always capable of happening with Wexford. Every few years they were going to beat you.”

Cody might say the same about Galway, as he prepares to plot one of the few courses uncharted by Tommy Maher.