All these years later, it’s still that little pebble in the shoe of Dublin hurling. Still the kind of thing that makes the nose twitch and the record scratch. On The Sunday Game after they beat Kilkenny a fortnight ago, Anthony Daly was the elder statesman of the panel. Jacqui Hurley threw to him to talk through a blinding montage of scores from the Dublin forwards and Dalo was soon in full gush mode. John Hetherton whipping them over both shoulders, Donal Burke pinging one off his stick, Ronan Hayes with a Zizou pirouette and a flicked finish to seal the win. “And look,” trilled Daly. “The wrists. The hands. One time, they were only manufactured hurlers, Jacqui. Now they’re classy hurlers.”And there it was. Manufactured Hurlers. A pointed phrase, echoing culture wars long ago. Don’t imagine Daly coughed it up by accident – he was half-joking, whole in earnest. Even now, 12 years gone from the job, the Dublin thing is clearly still in his bloodstream. And the manufactured hurlers thing still stings.“What did it really mean?” asks Conal Keaney. “To me, it was a way of saying a couple of things about Dublin hurling. It was saying (a) that we were all only basically footballers who played hurling. You know, that it’s a bit of an afterthought – ‘Ah, sure I’ll play a bit of hurling when the football is over.’“And (b) it was, ‘You’re not from the country so you can’t really play hurling like we can.’ It was essentially saying that nobody from Dublin is ever going to be a Joe Deane or a Joe Cooney or an Eoin Kelly. You’re not going to be that corner-forward with all the skills. “We heard about it obviously but it didn’t really have an effect other than to p**s us off. Because really we knew the attitude was, ‘You can compete away with us. But don’t beat us.’ We’d get patted on the head and told we’re great for keeping hurling going in Dublin. But as soon as we threatened to win, that was it.'What did it really mean?'Conal Keaney after the 2013 Leinster final. Photograph: Morgan Treacy “We sort of brushed it off. Anyway, Anthony called us plenty of stuff that was worse. Manufactured hurlers would have been tame enough. I remember him saying to reporters after one game that he’d have been better gathering up a crowd of lads at the Red Cow that morning and heading off. He didn’t really mean it but it didn’t really help!”Manufactured hurlers. There’s something quietly devastating about it as a phrase. Nobody knows exactly what it means but at the same time, everyone kind of gets it. It’s a sort of a hurling shibboleth, the kind of thing where, if you have to ask, you’re outing yourself as being outside the circle. A snooty old myth peddled by snooty old hurling men.The funny thing is, nobody actually said it. Or at least nobody said it that week, back in the summer of 2014, when it really blew up. Cyril Farrell had used it in a column in the Indo all right but that was a full two years previously in the wake of an 18-point defeat to Kilkenny. “Lads who have produced some excellent performances over the years looked like recently manufactured hurlers who didn’t quite seem to know whether to engage Kilkenny physically or to test them with a running game,” Farrell wrote in June 2012. But nobody took any great offence at the time. Or if they did, they kept it to themselves.But when Dublin lost to Tipperary in the 2014 All-Ireland quarter-final, it somehow took over the fallout. On The Sunday Game that night Donal Óg Cusack half-said it and half-didn’t: “You’ve a stereotypical view that exists out there in some parts, that Dublin are always ‘made’ hurlers. I never bought into that …”David O'Callaghan of Dublin and Galway's Fergal Moore in the 2013 Leinster final. Photograph: Donall Farmer/Inpho Ger Loughnane made the blanket statement that Dublin hurlers, “just haven’t got that flick of the wrist, that kind of wristwork that you associate with the Noel McGraths, the ‘Bubbles’ O’Dwyers of this world”. Later that week, Brendan Cummins said, “Dublin looked manufactured on Sunday, which is something I haven’t seen them look in a long while.”Inside the Dublin camp, they were mainly trying licking their wounds that week. They were league champions in 2012, Leinster champions and All-Ireland semi-finalists in 2013 and so 2014 was supposed to be the year they really kicked on. But Kilkenny torched them in the Leinster decider and Tipp beat them by 13 in the All-Ireland quarter-final. It was Daly’s last game. The empire had struck back.“After the magic of the 1990s, you had Kilkenny, Cork and Tipperary winning all the All-Irelands in the 2000s,” says Ryan O’Dwyer. “Anything outside of that is seen as, ‘What’s going on here?’ Dublin shouldn’t be successful. That shouldn’t happen. It should be the traditional counties. It came as a shock to the system.“What p**ses me off, as someone who represented Dublin, is that any time we beat one of the big teams, it was always, ‘Oh, Kilkenny were caught.’ It was never, ‘Dublin were brilliant.’ I think that still happens to some extent. Offaly haven’t got the credit they deserve for qualifying ahead of Kilkenny. It’s all, ‘What are Kilkenny going to do to get back to where they belong’?”Ryan O'Dwyer of Dublin and Shane Kavanagh of Galway. Photograph: Donall Farmer/Inpho O’Dwyer was able to look at the manufactured hurlers thing with a different perspective than the others. He grew up in Cashel and won a league with Tipperary before moving to Dublin and throwing his lot in with Kilmacud Crokes in 2011. He could stand back from it all and reason it out. Still arrived at the same verdict, all the same.“I could see why it was said, to some extent,” he says. “When the first Dublin development squads were coming through, you might have had a coaching that was a lot of drills, drills, drills. Whereas when I grew up hurling, it was a matter of throwing a ball in among a scrum of 20 young lads and letting them hurl away and develop their skills that way. So I understood that argument, even if I didn’t buy into it.“They were only saying it to put Dublin down though. That was the thing. It was meant as a way of disrespecting the Dublin hurling team. You could say any team set-up is manufactured. It basically means a team with a game plan, doesn’t it? “The Cork team that Donal Óg played on, sure they more or less manufactured a new way of hurling with the short passing and the running game. Would you be telling Ronan Curran he was a manufactured hurler? You’d be lambasted. But this always happens. There’s always someone telling you to get back down to your place.”Dublin's Niall McMorrow and Michael Carton celebrate with the O'Keeffe cup in 2013. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho Whether it was meant that way or not, ultimately that’s how the Dublin hurlers took it. Nobody could say a word about them when they were beating Galway and Kilkenny to win Leinster or when they were running Cork so close in the 2013 All-Ireland semi-final. but as soon as they took a couple of beatings at the hands of the higher-ups, they were given it right between the eyes.“There was a few of the lads on The Sunday Game around then that wanted to keep Dublin down,” says Keaney. “One hundred per cent, that was the case. I remember someone saying that there was no wrists in Dublin – I think that was Loughnane. That all helped with the narrative of us being manufactured or whatever.“But hurling was always as important to us as it was to them. Just because we live in Dublin doesn’t mean it’s any different. There was always an attempt to give this impression that they live with their hurls down in Kilkenny and Cork. But like, so do people in Dublin! That narrative was always frustrating.”Dublin manager Anthony Daly and Kilkenny manager Brian Cody after the 2013 Leinster semi-final replay at O'Moore Park in Portlaoise. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho It bugged Daly no end in the days and weeks that followed the Tipp defeat. In his autobiography, he tells the story of messaging Brian Cody after the Kilkenny manager came out and defending the skills in the Dublin squad. “I’d never texted Brian Cody in my life, but I took out my phone and tapped a few words on the screen: ‘Brian, just want to say thanks for what you said during the week.’ ‘Just thought it was a load of rubbish, Dalo,’ he texted back.”The players got over it the way all GAA squads do at one stage or another. They huddled in tight and parked themselves in the Strawberry Hall pub under the M50 and had a right old session. At one stage, wing back Mick Carton snapped a pic of them in full flow – O’Dwyer, Alan Nolan, Liam Rushe and the rest of them – and stuck it up on Twitter, back in the days when Twitter was fun.The caption? Manufactured drinkers.