Cork show who wears trousers

GAELIC GAMES:Next Sunday Croke Park will bulge at the seams as we gather to commemorate and perhaps recreate an All-Ireland semi-final which has lived 30 years in the memory without dulling. Yesterday the cathedral was half full for a semi-final which faded from the mind before tea-time.

Meath and Cork have plenty of history and that history has plenty of spice. That they should have served up such an oddly bland confection as yesterday's game is surprising. That Cork won by a margin of 10 points is mildly shocking.

Still, these games are there for winning, not for posterity. Cork duly advanced to their first All-Ireland final in eight years.

It was a banal, unremarkable game but one which still provided us with some story lines. Cork have come back to the big time with a team not so much unloved on Leeside as unconsidered. Cork had gone limp in two successive semi-finals and little hope was held out for them yesterday going up to face a sturdy and improving young team from Meath. And yet . . .

They began slowly and were lucky to be allowed retain the services of Noel O'Leary when an off-the-ball incident brought about a brief melee and a yellow card. Whether there will be a reconsideration of the severity of O'Leary's punishment will be a key issue on the near future for Cork.

For yesterday, however, they were unperturbed. After the fighting, they tore away into the game and scored with a facility and ruthlessness few had suspected they possessed, especially in the absence of James Masters.

Cork's was a good performance to get them through a dull game. Billy Morgan surprised Meath tactically by giving up on the battle to get his players to supply good ball to the towering Michael Cussen at full forward and pulled Cussen out to the centre-forward spot, where he looked like a footballer rather than a cherry picker.

Meath just never showed up for work. Having spent the last couple of months sailing with a freshening breeze behind them, they seemed surprised by the squalls they encountered yesterday and were unable to chart a way out of trouble.

"You have to hand it to Cork, they were very strong all over the place," said Meath's manager Colm Coyle. "They had their homework done on the Meath forwards. They gave us very little time or space. There were too many areas of the pitch where we didn't perform. It was just one of those days. There aren't many players in our dressingroom who can say they did themselves justice today."

Cork exhibited a strong central spine and by the time Kevin O'Connor scored the game's only goal, off a slightly fortunate deflection from the fingers of the Meath wing back Caoimhín King the game was over with 20 minutes left, and Morgan, who has endured a series of bad days here on semi-final afternoons, had the luxury of watching his side coast home.

For a man whose steadfast belief in the possibilities of Cork football have so often been unrewarded by either success or public affection for his teams, this was a great day.

Nothing about Morgan is uncomplicated though. Billy is a one-man soap opera, a man who is never dull and whose enduring presence seems to enliven every passing season.

Yesterday he provided us with an incident more colourful than anything the game had offered: Trousergate! His happiness had subsided by the time he came down the tunnel to the dressingroom area and the gauntlet of microphones. Asked for his view on the game Billy first inquired who exactly was asking for his view.

These were fraught moments. If Billy kept his grievances in formaldehyde they could scarcely be more perfectly preserved. He considered the answer, deemed the media organ involved to be one with which he currently had no beef, and then began laying into the so-called media experts.

He hadn't gone far with his thoughts when a decent crowd of so-called media experts gathered around to listen.

Billy was reflecting that the lads above in the press box had given him plenty of ammunition and was just noting that some of the ammo had been supplied by people standing in front of him when he spotted a representative of that media organ which in Cork they refer to as de Paper. Billy isn't a subscriber, apparently.

He snatched the tape recorder out of the hand of the man from de Paper and then, bizarrely, slipped the instrument down his trousers while continuing to speak.

He turned his attention to a third question (none of us could turn our attention the same way; words and phrases like "dictaphone" and "Billy Morgan and his amazing media organ" kept flashing up in our minds) and then announced, "I'll have to go, lads."

He vanished off down the corridor, leaving the so-called media experts gaping at each other. What thoughts he left behind were brief and succinct.

"We have been so maligned," he said, "but we knew that was in this team. If the so-called experts were looking at the situation and the way we could play I can't understand it. I mean the Sligo game was a difficult game to play and we won it by six points. They underestimated Louth and yet we came along today . . ."

They came along yesterday and did what they have failed to do in each of the last two years. They won an All-Ireland semi-final, and semi-finals are the forgotten prologues to every September story. Cork are there. We wait to see who joins them on the dance floor.