In a GAA world where teams now have extensively populated backroom teams with strength and conditioning coaches and nutritionists the norm, it's curious to think just how recent the dark ages were.
On Saturday's Off The Ball, Kilkenny's Tommy Walsh recalled how their rivalry with Cork in the mid-2000s forced a change in mindset for the Cats.
In 2005, Walsh, a nine-time All-Ireland winner, was still dining on full Irish breakfasts while at work. Cork players, on the other hand, had diets more suited to top class athletes.
We were the top dogs and they were trying to take it off us. Theses were the new guys with the new ideas. They were looking at everything off the field. It was just a different era, if you can throw yourself back to that time.
We were under the strictest of mindsets that it didn't matter what you did off the field. If you turned up to training on Tuesday night and gave it absolutely everything for an hour and a half, tore into your man, did everything right for that hour and a half, you were getting yourself ready for Sunday. Once the match came, whoever had the most heart won the match.
Cork were coming then that if you look after yourself off the field, stay out of the chipper. I remember 2005 I was on the buildings. I had a breakfast every single morning five days a week at 10 o'clock. I didn't know that wasn't right for you. Looking back now, I was playing OK in the matches but I wasn't going great in training.
Strange as it may seem, the idea that Cork players were eating pasta rather than bacon, spuds and cabbage came as a revelation for the Kilkenny panel.
There was a fierce contrast in the way we thought. They were eating pasta at the time and we thought this was unbelievable. We were still eating spuds and bacon and steak.
As time went on, what they were doing was right. At the time we weren't thinking like that. They're not going to come up here now and show us how to prepare, we know how to prepare. Suddenly they beat us for two years, 2004 and 2005. We went from being top dogs to a team in transition in 2006. We wanted to show them that we were back.
Walsh said that players never admitted publicly that their regime in terms of diet and conditioning needed to change. However, due to Cork's success, 'slowly but surely' it did.
You can listen to Tommy Walsh, JJ Delaney and Aidan Fogarty on Off The Ball below.
Picture credit: Stephen McCarthy / SPORTSFILE
