In the end the game was elevated to chaos, hurling’s original state. Shapes and plans collapsed. In the bedlam, passes failed, bodies fell, blind clearances were cheered to the heavens. The machine logging turnovers exploded. Everything was desperate. Gloriously, agonisingly desperate.
And then, when the final whistle blew, nobody could swear to the score. The giant scoreboard in Croke Park read Tipperary 4-21, Kilkenny 0-30, but before the match officials left the field they stood in a huddle for three or four minutes, doing their sums or getting their story straight.
Word of the uncertainty spread quickly. In their live coverage, the BBC attributed 4-20 to Tipp. If the scoreboard had been wrong, then Kilkenny had spent the last couple of minutes of stoppage time pounding the Tipp square for a goal they didn’t need. Two points would have saved them; they had chances for two points and tried to spin each of them into a goal.
The disputed score was Noel McGrath’s point in the final minute from a wide angle. The green flag umpire tried to catch the ball as it came down from the netting, but the umpire in control of the white flag waved his hands immediately, and emphatically, indicating a wide. On the scoreboard, though, Tipp had gone four points up.
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If the umpire was wrong, Hawk-Eye would surely have had a word in the referee’s earpiece. Over the years, those interventions have not been uncommon. If the referee stops play and makes the shape of a TV screen, it invariably means that the umpires have made a mistake. Play resumed.
In answer to questions after the game, a GAA spokesman said that 4-21 for Tipp was the “official score”. That’s what appeared on the GAA’s website. However, that story changed within an hour. Contacted by a reporter, the referee James Owens said that Tipp had scored 4-20.
At 7.40pm, nearly two hours after the game had finished, the GAA confirmed that 4-20 had been Tipp’s total. “The GAA acknowledges there was confusion over the final score,” read a brief statement. “The CCCC is awaiting the full referees report in order to establish how the initial mistake occurred.”
The only score that matters is the one that appears in the referee’s report. An error had clearly been made by the scoreboard operator.
Did it make a material difference to the outcome? It made a material difference to Kilkenny’s real-time assessment of their needs. Everything else is conjecture.
In his post-match press conference, before Owens had offered his clarification on the final score, the Kilkenny manager Derek Lyng made nothing of it. He said he thought there were three points between the teams. That was the sum of his answer.
And still Kilkenny nearly saved themselves. John Donnelly beat Rhys Shelly with a rocket in stoppage time only for Robert Doyle to block the shot on the goal-line with an outrageous piece of scramble defence. Doyle followed the ball out until it was cleared and then dutifully ran back to take up his station next to TJ Reid, who was standing a yard from the Tipp goal-line, frozen to the spot.
It was a mesmerising match and by distance Tipperary’s best performance since the 2019 All-Ireland final. Reduced to 14 men when Darragh McCarthy was sent off for a second yellow card offence 12 minutes from the end of normal time, Tipp explored the depths of their bloody-mindedness. With terrific clarity, they kept going.
In a blistering cameo, Andrew Ormond and Jason Forde combined for three scores in as many minutes, to put Tipp a point up with 68 minutes on the clock. Ormond was fouled twice for frees that Forde converted from long distance with unerring conviction, and then Ormond fed a pass to Forde under pressure for another towering score from under the Hogan Stand.
The game, though, was blown apart by Tipperary’s fourth goal in the last minute of normal time. In the Kilkenny D the ball changed hands two or three times, frantically. Paddy Deegan looked like he would clear it and lost it. Finally, the ball was poked into Oisín O’Donoghue’s path and the young sub fired a thunderbolt into the top corner of the Kilkenny net. It was a goal fit to win any match.
This was Tipp’s third successive championship victory over their bitterest rivals, the first time they have run up such a sequence in more than 50 years. The prize is another meeting with Cork, the first ever between these counties in an All-Ireland final.
Their recent history is one-sided. Cork beat them by 18 points in last year’s championship, by 15 points in this year’s championship and by 10 points in the League final to boot.
Now everything returns to zero.
