'I couldn't have asked for any more' - JJ Delaney

He watches the strike before switching attention to the umpire as the ball flies over his head. There's a brief moment of confusion before it's clear the decision has gone upstairs to Hawk-Eye but Delaney's gaze stays fixed on the umpire. He doesn't even look at the big screen.

This could be it. His last act as a Kilkenny player to lose an All-Ireland final to Tipperary. It's only when the crowd lift and he hears the cheers that he realises they're still alive.

That might have been the end. His first involvement with Kilkenny was in 2000 when he was called in as a corner-forward. That didn't last too long and he was outside the house until the following summer.

Kilkenny had played the whole league without him in 2001 but after performing well for WIT against the Cats in a challenge game, Brian Cody got on the phone.

"He asked me if I was interested in coming in and that was it."

Decoration

Fourteen years of almost endless decoration later and his final act came down to the width of his thumb. They survived and he got the fairytale send-off.

That didn't seal his decision though, he's keen to stress. Whatever happened last year, he was gone. You see, the previous December, Delaney had made the decision that 2014 would be his final year. He told his girlfriend of his decision and they sat on it.

To the rest of us, he looked as sharp as ever. His hook on Seamus Callanan in the final will make show reels for decades to come but he could feel time clawing at his door.

There was no one thing but a combination of things. His personal life, a desire to give Fenians, who have flirted with relegation from senior in recent years, his best while he still can all pushed him towards staying away.

"I knew my time was finished with inter-county hurling, it's not that my time is up with hurling - I am going to hurl away with the club.

"You wouldn't put one finger on it or it wasn't one game where I came out of it thinking, 'I have to stop now.' It was just a few things coming together. It wasn't a decision I made lightly, but every time I came back to it, it was a case of 'yeah, you are doing the right thing retiring in this situation'."

"When you're turning 30 you're going to play more worse games than you are better games, you're not going to dominate games any more. It's just you'd be hoping that one of the better games you will play will be in the big games. It's human nature. The game is getting faster, you're getting older."

Coming into last year, he wasn't sure where he stood in Cody's plans after an unsatisfactory 2013. As it happened, he was front and centre, entrusted once again with the cherished full-back position.

By the end of the season, he had a ninth All-Ireland medal, another All-Star award capped by that memorable intervention on Callanan. If you're going to go out, it doesn't get any better than that.

"Like, you're your own worst critic. You know if you got a good game or if you got away with a few things, like, if your man drove a couple of balls wide that he should have scored.

"Maybe you've been lucky or someone was covering you, you know yourself at the time. You can bluff everyone else and make excuses but you can't bluff yourself at the end of the day. That's the big thing.

"You tell yourself that you either played well or you didn't. Look, I was happy with last year, it wasn't all doom and gloom. I was very, very happy with the year. I was very happy with the way it went and again that justified my decision go at the end."

Of all the Kilkenny defections, Delaney will be the biggest loss. Of the 75 championship games that Brian Cody has taken charge of, Delaney and Noel Hickey can account for 68 starts at full-back. Three others make up the remaining matches.

Delaney has no fears for Kilkenny though. Paul Murphy would be a fine replacement at No 3 he says. Jackie Tyrrell is there too even if he was temporarily seconded by baseball. Tyrrell, he says, will struggle with the code change because "he's going to find it very, very hard to hit the ball without hitting someone before".

Goodbye

The final goodbye came on the team holiday. Even that worked out well for Delaney, a lifelong Manchester United fan, as he met Edwin van der Sar by chance.

And that was it. After the team holiday, he left the text groups. There's no temptation to go back either. The possibility of a tenth medal doesn't have much pull. After all, he points out he has plenty to be thankful for.

He thinks of his first day out marking Rory Hanniffy in the Leinster championship. Hanniffy's minor team beat Delaney's Kilkenny a year earlier and he rates Hanniffy highly but with Offaly, he hardly got a sniff of a medal.

"The way it went with the draw and the replay, you couldn't have asked for any more."

And that was it. A dream ending to a dream career. "I was just kind of, 'That's it, we'll go out like that'."