It was history in the making though without the crowds

TV VIEW: ‘OooooOOoooohhhh,” howled Marty Morrissey and Cyril Farrell in almost perfect harmony, like they were living side by…

TV VIEW:'OooooOOoooohhhh," howled Marty Morrissey and Cyril Farrell in almost perfect harmony, like they were living side by side on a piano keyboard.

What triggered their feverish tinkling of the ebony and ivory was Ursula Jacob’s wonder goal, Cyril concluding: “That’s unreeeeeeeal!”

It was too, the Wexford woman sending her surface-to-air missile past Aoife Murray in the Cork goal, an effort so exquisite Marty and Cyril almost fell out of the commentary box. It was, indeed, a sight to behold.

That concluded a spell where we had just the three goals in two-ish minutes in the Camogie All-Ireland final, Wexford getting the first (‘Game over!’), Cork getting the next (‘Game on!’), Jacob getting the third (“Ah here, God knows”).

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By full-time the RTÉ panel was a touch breathless, Therése O’Callaghan advising that we should “get the DVD machine going and just package the three of those matches today, send them out to all the schools in Ireland and let the children have a look at them”.

As ideas go, it was hard to top.

First up, Meath edged Down in a zinger of a Junior final, then Galway deja vued us with a last-minute equalising point from Rachel Monaghan in the intermediate final against Derry to force a replay. Leaving it late is becoming a Croke Park habit for these western folk.

“God, it was a cracker of a game,” said Jill Horan in the studio, but she was still scratching her head over that late-late moment when Derry were awarded a penalty, a nano second after scoring a (ruled-out) goal. “Huh,” was the gist of Cyril’s response, but, mercifully enough, Kate McAnenly buried the penalty, so her county wasn’t hampered by the whacky (dis)advantage rule.

So, the senior final.

It was 2004, when Tipperary did the business, when anyone but Wexford or Cork last won the senior title, so the bulk of the players on each panel weren’t exactly strangers to Croke Park.

All week Wexford had been downplaying the three-in-a-row hunting carry-on, insisting it wasn’t on their minds. By full-time, when she chatted with RTÉ’s Joanne Cantwell, captain Karen Atkinson’s grin conceded that maybe, it had crossed their minds. Twice in the past decade Wexford had banjaxed Cork’s three-in-a-row aspirations, so you had a notion the “Rebelettes” might be up for this one.

So, there was a bit of work to be done by Wexford before they achieved the feat, Cork just a little eager to regain the crown they last held in the dim and distant past of 2009.

“Unbelievable stuff Marty, this game has everything,” said Cyril when Katriona Mackey’s goal made it 2-10 to 3-5 for Wexford, the only let-down on the day was the attendance of 15,000. When the counties last met in the final, there were 33,000 there, so the whereabouts of the missing 18,000 is a bit of a mystery. “They call it camogie, but this is hurling at the highest level,” said Cyril, like calling it camogie was a bad thing. But sure, you know what he meant.

A three-in-a-row it was in the end, the breadth of Wexford’s achievement after a wonderful final almost as broad as the beam on JJ Doyle’s face when he spoke to Cantwell after the game, the Wexford manager vowing before the final he wouldn’t think about all this history-making lark until he was 94 and sitting in Croke Park watching the Wexford hurlers in an All-Ireland final. He’ll think about it before then, you suspect.

There was no history-making for Aidan O’Brien on Saturday as Camelot proved almost human in the St Leger at Doncaster, and Fame And Glory proved to be kind of the same at the Curragh.

“Here’s the vanquished from Doncaster just about to land,” said Ted Walsh as the O’Brien helicopter came in to land in Kildare. Well, he assumed it was the O’Brien helicopter, noting that since the demise of the Celtic tiger, “or whatever you called it”, there were significantly fewer helicopters occupying the air space above horse racing venues.

“At Galway one year there were so many helicopters it was like going in to Beirut,” he said.

Changed times indeed.

Although Camelot, no more than Cork, will, you can be sure, dig a little deeper to go one better next time, like ourselves, hoping to return to former glories.

Mary Hannigan

Mary Hannigan

Mary Hannigan is a sports writer with The Irish Times