Offaly's resurrection complete

Ripping yarns and tall tales. This was a hurling summer to tell the grandchildren about, won in the end by a team whose legend needs no embellishment. Offaly. It ain't what they do. It's the way that they do it.

"Unbelievable really," said Brian Whelahan, the genuine sorcerer on a day of conjuring, "but this Offaly team, you never know what we are capable of. Sometimes we don't know ourselves."

They won their second All-Ireland hurling title of the decade yesterday. Not just that, though. They have tattooed their personality all over this year's competition. Typically, yesterday the Faithful county's most gifted generation of hurlers played like dilettantes until they needed to roll up the sleeves and get their hands dirty. Then they dissected Kilkenny with surgical expertise.

Yesterday they required a more prolonged spend of energy than the five crazy minutes at the end of the 1994 final, during which they scored 2-5 to win that All-Ireland, but this victory still wore the strange character of hurling's most enigmatic team.

Kilkenny, unbeaten all year and with a reputation for doing brisk business in finals, were just swept away by a team which located their collective will at just the right time. It was the last and most emphatic consummation of the fertile promise which has been tantalisingly evident since the hub of this Offaly side first emerged as brilliant underage hurlers .

In their topsy-turvy way, Offaly have resurrected themselves several times this summer. Yesterday they did the same, recovering from a shaky start to deliver a performance that was so comprehensively vital and alive that we could only rejoice in their knack for rolling back the rock.

Offaly were miserable and pallid for the first 20 minutes yesterday and when Charlie Carter, the Kilkenny corner forward, latched on to a straying ball and deposited it in the back of the Offaly net, things looked especially grim. Kilkenny scored the next two points to go five ahead.

Offaly were only just getting interested, however. Two points behind at half-time they restricted Kilkenny to six points after the break while ripping into them at the other end of the field.

Joe Errity and Brian Whelahan, two old friends who grew up together in Birr, scored the goals that swung the momentum Offaly's way.

Errity first: "I was going through and following the ball. Just dropped it and pulled on it. Didn't know where it was going. It just happened to hit the corner."

Then Whelahan: "It helps when the ball breaks for you. It broke well for me. I suppose I got a couple of balls I'd never get again. It seemed to come into my hand. I turned and had a bit of space and, luckily, they went. Them's the breaks."

They seem dazed and confused? Well, how is this for a season: Merely adequate against hapless Meath. Awful, but lucky against a weakened Wexford. Truly dire in a low intensity Leinster final against Kilkenny.

At that point their big bluff celebrity manager, Babs Keating, resigned before he was impeached. He was replaced by a big man with no reputation.

Michael Bond. Double-oh-zero as the little joke went.

We imagined the scenes as the hapless Mr Bond walked in for his first night amongst the most difficult hurlers in the country. The gentlemen of Offaly putting down their cocktails, extinguishing their cheroots.

"Ah, Mr Bond, we've been expecting you."

They seemed neither stirred nor shaken by Bond's arrival. They played Kilkenny in a challenge game two weeks later and lost by 20 points.

They were terrible against Antrim in the All-Ireland quarterfinal. Expecting to be summarily guillotined by Clare, they got a draw the first day. The world assumed they would disappear after that. Indeed. Almost fatally bloated with over-confidence, they went 10 points behind the next day, but the referee blew the the game up two minutes early with Offaly just in touch.

Offaly fundamentalists occupied the pitch in Croke Park. A replay was granted. Bam! Clare were sucker-punched out of the competition.

Just Kilkenny left. And Offaly produced 50 minutes of perfect hurling to become the competition's first back-door champions. Of course, as a county they are officially against the back door rule. They don't believe in second chances.

Given that their summer reads like one long tall story it seemed fitting that their best defender, Brian Whelahan, should have scored 1-6 of their winning total.

Whelahan finished the game suffering the effects of 'flu and with a torn hamstring. Kilkenny offered a prayer that he wouldn't be assassinated by snipers and go to town on them altogether.

"I would like to say switching Brian Whelahan from the backs to the forwards was sheer inspiration," said the ebullient Michael Bond afterwards. "Brian was suffering from a heavy flu. His legs were dead. So I sent Michael Duignan back. It's unbelievable that Brian could play at such a high level and he such a sick man."

Michael Bond's own story is among the best of an incredible season. For the principal of a busy community school in Loughrea, Co Galway, winning the hurling All-Ireland looks as if it might be the basis of an inspirational talk to his pupils along the lines of "What I Did On My Summer Holidays".

Within 30 minutes of the final whistle yesterday he was talking about how it would be virtually impossible for him to continue. If he vanishes into anonymity again there will be a certain symmetry to his legacy.

With nothing more impressive or current on his hurling curriculum vitae than training the successful Galway Under-21 team in 1983, Bond has marched into a county where turmoil is a hurling way of life and somehow coaxed the Offaly team to the best hurling of their careers. "It has made my year," he said yesterday, amidst the noise and clatter of a celebrating dressingroom, "but the thing is that I'm in a job that entails a lot of work. That's foremost in my life. When I retire I'll be able to come back again maybe."

Around him the team which almost self-destructed under the weight of its own ennui was marking the end of a long season.

Bond recalled one of his earliest experiences with them, the fateful challenge game in Nowlan Park.

"I thought they were going well in training and we put out a bunch in the challenge match and they were ripped apart. I found out a lot that night. Johnny Dooley got a bad facial injury and Kevin Martin got a bad knee injury. A lot of people reckoned that we shouldn't have even played that match."

In Kilkenny, when they came off that evening, having humiliated their most passionate enemies, they should have listened to the winds. That's all there was to hear. In the Offaly dressing-room it was quiet, too quiet.

The boys of summer were about to get serious.