All-Ireland Hurling Final:CHAOS REIGNS. Tipperary are All-Ireland champions for perhaps an hour and the preparation, the orchestration, the forensic planning; it all gives way to a kind of delirious chaos in and around the Tipperary dressingroom.
Players emerge in dribs and drabs wearing stoner smiles and carrying hurleys over shoulders. Liam Sheedy scampers past the open door, a towel around his midriff and a dopey grin on his face. Eoin Kelly ambles out holding the Liam MacCarthy, promptly hands it to a group of waiting children and leans against the wall falling into easy conversation with friends. It has been nine years but they do not treat the famous silverware as if it is a stranger.
Sooner or later, most players drift away towards the reception area and the tunnel underneath the Hogan Stand has gone quiet by the time Lar Corbett makes his appearance. The amicable Thurles man comes strolling along with Shane McGrath as if they are window shopping on Grafton Street. He seems blissfully unaffected by the novelty of rapping home three quality goals in an All-Ireland final.
“The win. It was all about the win,” he asserts when asked about the scores.
“It is no good coming up here and scoring three goals and losing to Kilkenny. The win. That is what it is all about. It is the whole year wrapped up in 70 minutes. What can you say? It is unbelievable.”
He shrugs when the request comes to recall his three scores – for the record and that. Corbett is one of the old-timers on this young Tipperary team, one of the veterans who can recall the dim and distant days of 2001 when the Premier County last won an All-Ireland title. But in almost a decade of hurling, he had never lost that nervy, electric potential for delivering eye-catching goals from the blue. Now he has done that on the unforgettable stage.
Temperamental hamstrings was the price he paid for stunning speed and more than most, Corbett has suffered the loneliness of the road to rehabilitation in years when Tipperary’s future did not look so rosy. But in this final of finals, his persistence and that natural speed and talent fell into perfect synchronicity. He tells of his goals with as little gloss as he can muster.
“I saw a high one coming in and I was able to catch it. But when you look at the second goal there . . . Noel McGrath hand passed the ball and I just saw it there . . . it was unbelievable. He had the ball and he could have taken a handy score but he saw the man and backed him.
“You have to look at Bonner Maher for the third goal. He was on the flat of his back on the edge of the square and he held on to the ball . . . could have had been called for over carrying but no, he got up and gave the hand pass out and the hard work was done. And that is what Tipperary has been about for the last number of years. It does not matter who gets the scores as long as we put in the work rate. And the thing about it is that if the work rate is put in the ball will spill out to someone.”
His third goal, delivered in the third minute of injury time with the sky dark and the drizzle wild and spitting was a moment of absolute poise in a maelstrom.
“I will never again say that I have anything until the referee blows the final whistle. Because I think last year there was about a two-minute period in the second half when we looked up and felt ‘do we have this’. And I think it is about the biggest mistake you can ever make in hurling. I will never ever make that mistake again. Paul Curran hit on it in training during the week. Against Kilkenny I don’t think you can ever say that you actually have it until the referee has blown the whistle because they are the best in the business at scoring goals.”
In the All-Ireland final of a year ago, three goal chances shimmered into being for Tipperary and were not taken. Eoin Kelly was among those who remarked on those missed opportunities in the days before the match.
“You have to have goals on your mind when you are playing Kilkenny,” Corbett says. “What do they have on their mind in the other dressingroom year in and year out? Goals. There is no point in us going out and deciding that we will take the points. So we had goals on our mind. Eamon O’Shea said to us that there is goals in this team, go and get them.”
And with that Corbett saunters away. Some quiet day, perhaps in November or December, the enormity of his achievement in this All-Ireland final is going to hit him.
