WE’RE BESIDE ourselves trying to think of an appropriate analogy. A bust of Ronan O’Gara poised to shoot the rugby ball from outside for a three-pointer; A carved Roger Federer holding his racquet with the gip of a Chinese table tennis player; Bernard Dunne, in bronze, with his right leg striking out . . .hah, so!

For the Wexford players of 1968, theirs was a glorious year as the Model County won both the All-Ireland senior and minor hurling titles for the first and only time.

Last year, being the 40th anniversary of that achievement, those senior and minor teams were honoured, or, as is now the allegation, dishonoured by the Wexford County Board during half-time of last September’s hurling final.

Unforgettably, or, unforgivably the presentation left the 1968 team aghast and insulted by what they received to mark the achievement.

Not for them a trophy of a hot -blooded Gael fetching a high ball but the more considered study of a golfer.

Nicely balanced, calm in demeanour, the figurine is unmistakably addressing the ball in a typical golfing stance.

Replete with golfing shoes, tidy ankle socks, golfing top with fashionably elasticated cuffs and shorts, the morphed memento shows a hurley artistically welded to his hands and a sliothar at his feet.

“I would not even put this with my trophy collection. I never subsequently took it out of the box,” said corner back of the ’68 side Ned Colfer after the queasy reality dawned on him. “It’s a trophy I don’t care if I never see again.”

Maybe the county board believed no one would notice but as the cast figure holds the hurley with the right hand some inches below the left in preparation for a golf shot, the optics certainly seem more Carnoustie than Croke Park.

For an organisation that does the most original line in culture and heritage, as Colfer says, “they could have done better”.

Adding that the Wexford team was “not like Kilkenny, winning All-Irelands every other year,” the controversy has thrown up a curious thought.

Up there in his bespoke Dublin house among the vast collection of baubles that is Pádraig Harrington’s trophy room, stands a hurler with a big-bossed lump of a driver swinging from the hip.