Locker Room:You are David. You show for the bout at the appointed time with a slingshot in your back pocket. Hee hee. The bell goes. Goliath lifts a large boulder and drops it on you. This is not what you had hoped for.

The best-laid plans of mice and men have fairly stringent expiry dates. Limerick pressed Waterford in the All-Ireland semi-final with an intensity that surprised even themselves. The intensity was drip-fed by a succession of goals.

Yesterday in the first 10 minutes Limerick were buffeted and beaten. Everything else was epilogue. Stephen Lucey found an elbow in his face the first ball he went for. Huge hits went in all over the field. Aretha sang R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Kilkenny had two points as a starter. Andrew O'Shaughnessy mishit a free. Kilkenny had a sideline cut. Eddie Brennan took the ball into his custody and continued his merciless interrogation of the young corner back. He turns one way. Then the other. Pops a goal.

You are Séamus Hickey. Nineteen and smart and inspirationally brilliant. This is your day. You attack the ball. A juggernaut hits you. Knocks you one way, which is into the path of another juggernaut. That hits you too. Nothing stops. Next thing Brennan has the ball. Again. This isn't going to be your day.

Henry Shefflin's year has been long and glorious and if he believes in the gods as a firm who collect what they reckon they are due with some vig thrown in then he can't have been surprised yesterday when they knocked on his door.

Henry was torturing first Stephen Lucey and then Brian Geary. His movement was mercury-quick, his touch faithful, his goal an exhibition of the steel and guts which sustain his reign. He had a point from a free and a point from play also.

Then there was a thumping on the door. They had come to take their due. His knee went.

One of those sickening twists that get men in the press box nudging and pointing and murmuring. Henry is f****d.

He didn't appear for the second half. When the game was over he stood in the tunnel under the green canvas awning with his hands on his hips, stood alone and looked out at the sea of madness upon which Tommy Walsh was being bobbed about shoulder high and delirious. Hands waving, fists clenching, the sea roaring ceaselessly as it beat itself off the lower deck.

Henry stood and watched. Waved to Ned Quinn. Waited till it was time to hobble up those steps and do what he had dreamed of doing since he was a small tow-headed boy banging a ball around in the squash court behind his father's pub in Ballyhale. The moment had come. The gods had taken their price before the deal went down though.

You are Brian Begley. You are 100 feet tall and your hand is an evolved form of magnet. Sliotars fall from the sky like sparrows and nestle in your great paw. You go for one ball and then another and each time the experience is the same. King Kong is slam dancing right behind you. They keep dropping the high balls. Now it's just making you miserable.

You won't beat Kilkenny with high balls. Or with mere hunger. You might beat Waterford with those things but Kilkenny live in a different place. There is nothing which hasn't been used upon them this past decade or so. The high ball is one of the more rudimentary ploys. A bow and arrow against a fortress.

The best break Limerick got all day was the high ball which dropped over a thicket of players and into Ollie Moran's keeping. Goal.

More typical was what happened just two minutes earlier. Ollie dinked a perfect ball up in front of Brian Begley. The full forward claimed his ground and went for the catch. It would be easier to claim some ground for Allah on a patch of the Gaza strip. The ball spilled. The clearance was caught brilliantly by Brennan. He was fouled.

Richie Power cashed the free.

You are Andrew O'Shaughnessy. The papers have been pumping you up big like a dose of steroids. It has made you a little uncomfortable. You hoped nobody was reading it. There's a guy, Jackie Tyrrell, standing beside you. He leans forward like a greyhound in a trap. A hungry greyhound. He eyes you like you were made of mincemeat. You can tell he is an avid reader.

It must have been a difficult day to be Richie Bennis or Gary Kirby. There is a routine mentors have when things are going badly. Take off a corner forward. Take of the other corner forward. Throw your hat at it.

They had corner forwards stacked ass high on the bench but their best hopes were out there on the pitch. Drowning.

All day long the Limerick full-forward line struggled. Not a score from play between them. There would have been more room to hurl inside a confession box. And more leisure time for repentance too.

You are Ollie Moran. You are close to being the hurler of the year. You have scored 1-3 from play in your first All-Ireland final. Against Kilkenny. But there are 10 minutes left and you are still six points down. The ball squirts out to Tommy Walsh, this damn terrier of a wing back. He drives it over your bar from 70 yards. Seventy yards out on the right sideline.

Tommy Walsh didn't bother with a helmet yesterday. He discarded the trademark red lid on the day that Limerick were coming to town to put it up to them. As a statement of intent and bravado it was backed up by everything he did.

Has there been a feistier cat since the O'Connors of Glenmore hung up the black and amber? Two points while putting a forward in his pocket and feeding him that diet Joe Brolly speaks of. Scary.

You are Gary Kirby. There are seven minutes left in the All-Ireland final. Your players are six points down. Always six points down it seems. You remember 1994. Less time left then this. Offaly blew through your dreams like a hurricane through a trailer park. You look to the skies. No hurricanes today.

Limerick. Limerick. Limerick. Their hurling is a mystery. Usually sorrowful. Sometimes joyful. It was hard travelling to Croke Park yesterday as the Deputy (under) Dawgs for the People's Favourites.

Bad enough to have lost their last two All-Ireland final appearances to happy-clappy winners like Offaly and Wexford, but to be pillaged by Kilkenny while people in the stands wrote wistful postcards to Waterford, signing off with the words, Wish You Were Here.

If the gods took a little back off Shefflin yesterday, it must be time to bestow something on Limerick.

You are Richie Bennis. Your face and your words have brightened a good hurling summer and taken some of the intensity out of a business which has all the lightheartedness of war.

You come down the tunnel and dawdle at the crossroads.

No easy options. The media are straight in front of you. Your silent, grieving, broken dressingroom down to the left. The Kilkenny dressingroom down the right. From the right suddenly there rises like a tsunami a swelling version of The Rose of Mooncoin, followed oddly by a few lines of We All Live In A Yellow Submarine. You are Richie Bennis. At the crossroads. You stop and talk to the plug-uglies of the media.

You are David. Goliath is singing. You say to yourself that if being crushed by a large boulder doesn't kill you it will at least make you stronger.

While nobody's looking you toss your slingshot away. Must be more than one way to skin a cat, or take down a Goliath.