Hurling & Football Heroes

1st Oct 2013

That gammy grey mist and those dirty low clouds hanging over most of the county in the week before the replay against Clare were never a good sign. All of a sudden, after a summer of blue skies, flip-flops, sunburn and 99’s that would make the brown bums on the Copacobana jealous Mother Nature is odd with us again.

Who wouldn’t be proud of our never-say-die hurlers though. Every time we thought they were dead and buried they sprung back to life like zombies.
 

Getting to the final produced displays of Rebel pride in places all over Cork like this one Blackpool Shopping Centre

They say rugby is a game of inches, if so, then hurling must be a game of nanometres. The slightest microscopic movement, the tiniest physical influence on the sliotar was crucial in deciding at which end of Croker the next flag would be raised as the game wore on.

In the high speed roulette-wheel scrambles for possession the ball is continually turned over and back. Just when you thought a Clareman had the ball in hand it would be flicked out of his hand by a bypassing lattice of Cork ash. Then knocked from his hurley by the air flow of incoming Banner bás until eventually this GAA-specific ‘Chaos Theory’ produced an seemingly random outcome and someone ran clear with ball in hand.
 

Despite the miserable conditions Rebels still turned up to greet their heroes

It was though every molecule and atom inside Croke Park had a say in the game. At times it felt that something as apparently insignificant as the amount of tape on a player’s hurley might end up deciding the match – had the player been slightly less generous wrapping it around the stick then it wouldn’t have been thick enough to generate enough friction to plamás the ball off an opposing hurley.

As fans on the losing side we are the ones who have spent the last week ruing missed chances and opportunities. Lots of fans on our sports forum have been talking about watching that last heart-racing minute in the drawn game over and over again when we were one point up for 34 seconds.
 

Yay! After the disappointment of Saturday Ann Marie Walsh and her team saved the weekend

Many Cork fans will be able to give you an excruciatingly accurate account of exactly what happened millisecond by millisecond from when Hoggie struck that final point to Donal O’Donovan’s Roy of the Rovers life-saver for the Banner - particularly the forensic detail of the movements of Cathal Naughton and Stephen Moylan.

Oh the self-torture we impose on ourselves thinking about the could-have beens! At least we had our amazing ladies footballers to take the edge off a tough week. Their record in Croke Park is bordering on ridiculous and as well as a fantastic season for the hurlers their victory adds up to a great GAA season for Cork.