It wasn’t always like this. Pick a year. Choose carefully. Mind the gaps. 1992, maybe?
“Limerick are making a rare Munster final appearance,” said Michael Lyster on The Sunday Game. Fourteen of the Limerick players were experiencing it for the first time. Tommy Quaid was the exception. He had waited 11 years, convinced by a shimmering mirage in the distance.
In the history of Limerick hurling, though, 11 years didn’t make him the head waiter. Limerick were often missing; unable to be there; not expected. And then? A Munster final would appear from their wildest dreams and it would bring a different kind of torment. At least they knew what the longing was like; that pain could be managed with practice.
The 1992 Munster final was a classic horror of its genre. They travelled to Páirc Uí Chaoimh full of hope, buoyant from a storming victory in the league final, and by half-time they were 10 points down.
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For Cork’s first goal Tomás Mulcahy dropped the hurley, juggled the ball from his right hand to his left, like a fast bowler, and kicked it to the net on the tenth step. He delayed his celebration for a few seconds and then came up with something sheepish to perpetuate the fiction. The goal stood.
Mark Foley’s father Vincent was a Limerick selector that day and young Foley was a hurley carrier. He was 17. Niall Moran was nine years of age. It was Limerick’s first Munster final since before he was born.
“I vividly remember drinking a two-litre bottle of cola going down in the car,” he says. It was a hot day. His only other memory is Mulcahy’s goal.
When Limerick reached the 2007 Munster final, Foley was their veteran left half back and Moran was wing forward. In the first 10 years of Moran’s Limerick career, that was the only Munster final they reached. Waterford beat them by nine points. Rare and precious are often married but sometimes they are incompatible.
“Much different from the current group of players there was a huge sense of achievement in actually getting there,” says Moran. “For a lot of Limerick supporters at the time that was nearly the height of their ambition for the group. That’s where the county was at.
“It was a huge experience. If you’re reared on the game and you’re reared on the folklore of it, it was surreal to find yourself part of it. But I probably felt you were more part of the experience than the game. That was my abiding thing about it.”
Foley was brought on to the training panel as a teenager in 1994, after Limerick had won the Munster final. A year later he was an unused sub when Limerick were raging favourites to defend their title and lost to Clare by nine points. Losing a Munster final to Clare was complicated by Munster hurling’s class system, as it existed them, enshrined and observed.
“It was a bitter pill to swallow,” says Foley. “The people of Limerick would consider it a bad day out if you lost a Munster final to Cork or Tipp but if you lost to Clare that didn’t go down well at all.
“I remember being inside in Limerick [city] that night and a lot of the Clare crowd would have gone home through Limerick. I was with a few of the players and the Clare crowd were up and down O’Connell Street and around Henry Street and back up again. It was like a ticker-tape parade through Limerick city. You just had to bite your lip.”
For most generations there was suffering. The Limerick team of the 1940s lost five Munster finals in six years. Between 1956 and 1970 Limerick’s only appearance in a senior provincial final was in football. Kerry beat them in 1965. Eamon Cregan kicked five points, equal to Mick O’Connell’s tally that day. In Limerick, though, football wasn’t the opium of the masses.
The outstanding Limerick team of the 1970s became acquainted with Munster finals but that didn’t diminish Limerick’s capacity for self-sabotage. Cregan tells a couple of stories. In 1975 he had a torn hamstring, a condition in GAA players that was a mystery to modern medicine.
“They tried poteen and vinegar to fix it,” says Cregan. “Then I went to a doctor and he injected something into my leg and I was told, ‘You’re grand, you’re fine’. After about 10minutes I turned sharply and my hamstring went again. I called the selectors and they said, ‘Stay on until half-time’. I’m there with a damaged hamstring, playing centre back, unable to move, in pain, and trying to catch Willie Walsh.
“At half-time I said, ‘I can’t move my leg,’ so I was put up full-forward. I played 70 minutes in the Munster final in ‘75 with a torn hamstring.”
That year Cork started a run of five Munster titles in a row. Limerick lost to them again in 1976 and once more in 1979. That’s another story. The Limerick team travelled in cars. One of Cregan’s friends, a missionary priest, drove Cregan’s car with another couple of players in the back. The team was scheduled to meet at 1 o’clock in Hayes’ Hotel in Thurles but by 12.30 they were stuck in traffic outside Holycross, marooned on a country road.
“At 2 o’clock we were still stuck in traffic,” says Cregan, “miles from the pitch. My friend the priest eventually called a Garda on a motorcycle. He got violent with the Garda. He said ‘For f**ks sake,’ – this is a priest now – ‘we have players here and we can’t get to the f**king pitch. How are we going to play a Munster final?’
“We went off our rockers altogether. There were three other cars with players behind us. Eventually we ran. We got our hurley and gear out of the boot and ran. We got into the dressing-room at half past two and the match was at quarter-past three, having had nothing to eat since nine o’clock that morning and having run for 2½ miles. The preparation was crazy. It was just bad planning. Cork beat us out the gate, but what did we expect?”
A year later Cork were on the cusp of the same record that Limerick are chasing this weekend: six in a row. Limerick spiked their guns. For the first time in 40 years they had beaten Cork in a Munster final. The team ate dinner in Hayes’ Hotel, with a curtain pulled across the ballroom for a tissue of privacy. It was just a temporary injunction.
“This man came over to us,” says Dave Punch. “He looked elderly to me at the time but he came up to congratulate me and he congratulated everyone on the panel. But then he started bawling crying because it was the first time he had seen Limerick beat Cork in a Munster final. It was something that stayed with me.”
The next time that Limerick beat Cork in a Munster final, 33 years later, Moran was playing. On a blistering day in the Gaelic Grounds the Limerick crowd flooded the pitch in waves. Baked into that win was all kinds of losing.
“I genuinely thought we’d never see it,” says Moran. “In conversations that you’d have with the modern generation I don’t think they quite get it. I don’t think they’ll ever quite get it, to be honest. That day was a real outpouring of emotion for everything that had happened in the previous decade. If all you have known is heartbreak and disappointment and everything that goes with it, the day you get success everything comes flooding out.
“At some stage you nearly gave up believing that it would happen. There’s emotions there that you cap and there’s dreams there that you shudder to believe. It’s completely at odds with this Sunday.
“YouTube wouldn’t have been a major thing in 2013 but I remember looking back at the 1996 Munster final below in Cork and seeing Ciaran Carey being shouldered off the pitch [after Limerick’s previous Munster title] and you’re looking at that maybe for inspiration. We were basing it off something that had happened in ‘96.
“There are people in Limerick who will tell you, ‘Ah sure, whatever about the six-in-a row [in Munster] we’re going to get five All-Irelands in a row’. But we gave all our lives trying to win the one-in-a-row in Munster. You’d be talking to young lads about it and you’d be embarrassed to tell them you only had one Munster medal when everywhere they look lads have five of them. You gave your life eulogising about winning one.”
In the Limerick squad this weekend only Nickie Quaid, Declan Hannon and Graeme Mulcahy have experienced the pain of losing a Munster final. The three of them have six medals now, one more than Mick Mackey, two more than Cregan. Christy Ring won nine. Is that number out of their reach? Are you sure?
The pain subsided. No feeling is final.
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