LOCKER ROOM: We watched again as Limerick continued its wretched habit of letting its best down

IN CROKER yesterday, between the dampish squib of the minor game and the grim inevitability of the senior stuff, the big screens showed one of those thrumming video compilations that simultaneously made one feel thrilled and jaded.

One hundred and twenty-five years of the old gah and they had an unfeasible amount of the sizzling highlights vacuum packed into a few minutes of film. Of course, technology having lagged behind sport for so long, the bulk of these clips were harvested from games that this ancient wreck attended as boy, man and then decrepit oul’ fella.

It was jarring to be sitting there in Croker watching it all unfold again. The Dubs for instance were poorly represented after 1958. Mikey Sheehy’s goal AND Eoin Mulligan’s weighed against Jayo’s semi-final score against Cork in 1995, but that’s not a quibble. Others fared worse.

What was amusing or strange was how sentiment suffocates prejudice in the end. Players I despised as a kid flashed across the screen in the bizarre hairstyles that they got famous with and each time the heart went ‘ah wouldya look, jaysus he was great’.

Entire teams, whom I would have shut the curtains on had they turned up to train in the back garden, had me swooning. Old loves remain more steadfast than enmities though. You forgive your enemies, but you don’t ditch your favourites. There on that dank day in 1973 were Limerick putting paid to Kilkenny. I was 10 years old that summer. The Dubs had yet to be reinvented and that Limerick team strode through the imagination leaving giant footprints and a lingering affection for the unadorned style and thrills of Limerick hurling.

It was odd to be watching those fleeting moments while waiting for Limerick and Tipperary to take the field yesterday. The GAA attachment to the underdog is such that most neutrals would have enjoyed a Limerick win, but would have awoken this morning knowing it was a guilty pleasure and that Tipperary have a better chance of scuttling Kilkenny next month. The precise odds on that happening are probably still generous enough after yesterday’s farrago but every underdog must have it’s day.

Tipp’s three goals in the opening quarter killed off the romance for the day and probably the year unless Tipp themselves can rekindle it. What was troubling for anybody who enjoys Limerick hurling was to see a great servant like Mark Foley going down with yet another ship in Croke Park.

How do some fellas stick it? Those epic careers which can be condensed into a few seconds of highlights. Thirteen years of excellence and service from Foley and Limerick remain the same sorrowful mystery they have been since 1973.

And Ollie Moran. Foley and Moran missed what passed for the good years ( 1994-1996), but Ollie left behind a promising rugby career (he was an Under-20 international with Ronan O’Gara) to concentrate on his hurling. The promise of the early 1990s was a dowry that came with the deal.

Limerick hurling keeps letting its best down. Cornered and overshadowed by the superpowers of their own province and producing sporadic waves of players who never seem to get past the age of hurling adolescence. You sat and looked at the big screen before the game started yesterday and marvelled at how often Limerick have been character actors in other people’s movies.

There, of course, were the two lost All- Ireland finals of the mid-1990s. Offaly in 1994, rubbing the sleep from their eyes for five final minutes in which they left Limerick jilted near the steps of the Hogan . . . Wexford in 1996. Who could resist them. History’s sweethearts.

They are environmentally unfriendly in the indiscriminate way they use up managers and underage prospects alike. You still smack your forehead when you think of it really don’t you? Three successive under-21 All-Irelands. And?

It has to be cultural this tolerance for pain and humiliation. Some counties invent ways to lose which haven’t been thought of before.

And yet, yet, yet! You still have to love them and root for them. You have to study them and rise with them and fall with them again and again.

When Limerick were coming through rain-soaked qualifier after rain-soaked qualifier, nobody thought of September 6th. In this past week though the old self delusions flowered again. A powerful half-back line! O’Mahony emerging as serious stuff. Maybe one Moran and Shocks to get the mojo back and Tipp to be the narcoleptic selves for a bit.

Could happen. Could happen.

After five minutes yesterday, and Eoin Kelly’s opening goal, you still thought it could happen. The hurling was all loosey goosey, the touch on both sides was flabby and the game seemed ripe to be plucked by whoever really woke up first.

After 15 minutes, of course, it was over. Whatever happened after the point of Tipp’s third goal you never thought of Limerick’s 10-point comeback two years ago or of the league final recovery in 1992 or the Munster final heroics four years later.

This was ghastly and it was terminal.

And it was in keeping with a season which won’t make many inroads into the GAA’s highlights reel. It has been a hurling summer of cold and unrelenting logic. Teams who should win have been winning. Teams who should lose generally have done just that. Waterford got a little kick before death. Dublin and Galway made pulses gallop briefly, but there has been an actuarial sense of order about the entire thing.

Since the first Sunday in May we have been expecting that Tipperary would joust with Kilkenny on the first Sunday in September and, unfairly to Tipp perhaps, even in the moments when they have looked sublime we have longed for some flux, some jeopardy, some romance.

It’s cultural though. On the highlights reels the same colour jerseys crop up again and again. Nothing in their water supply. Lots in their mind set. When it came to the crunch only another big three team were going to be there to tilt with Kilkenny on All-Ireland final day. It may be eight years since Tipp were there and it may be an inevitability that Kilkenny would be there but it’s culture and the demands of culture which separates the big achieving counties from the also rans.

Limerick will recover from yesterday and soon it will be fashionable to be a Limerick hurler again, but 1973 will be further away than ever. Big three culture wouldn’t tolerate such a gap in the reel.