LOCKER ROOM: Waterford's harsh treatment of their former manager came back to haunt them on the big day
CAR CRASH hurling. We looked at poor Waterford yesterday as they became the fall guys to history and at first we winced and turned away. No team deserves public dismantlement in the way that Waterford were laid bare yesterday.
This was Waterford's big day out, their first All-Ireland final since JFK was president and going about his business without any phobias about driving in downtown Dallas. Waterford were just as blasé yesterday.
Kilkenny offered Waterford the compliment of their cold, unblinking excellence, and Waterford had no answers. Perhaps no team could have summoned an eloquent riposte under the circumstances.
It was hard to watch, and for those Waterford players who have illuminated hurling for the better part of a decade we had hoped for more. You journey for all your adult life to the Promised Land and then find the environment too hot to live in. You realise that the epic nature of your failure is not what you will be recalled for. People will remember this fruitless desolate end, not the journey itself. . .
It can't be easy. You'd like anyone to remember their All-Ireland afternoon a little more fondly than Waterford will remember yesterday.
On the other hand, karma has a habit of hiding behind the next tree with a baseball bat behind its back and an evil grin hung between its chops. Yesterday karma stepped out and took a few big swings at poor oul Waterford. Karma left a calling card on the chest of its victim. The Winners Get to Write History. When Big Dan was taken off with a few minutes left yesterday there was nobody swerving to avoid the consoling hand of his manager. There was just nothing left to be said. Dan's public avoidance of Justin McCarthy's outstretched paw on the Ennis Road back at the start of summer had been the first surface sign of trouble in the paradise of the Déise. Yesterday ended the great adventure that has been 10 years of Waterford's striving. There will be regrets and recriminations now that the dust has settled.
Justin McCarthy was not without his detractors. There were those who said that whatever Justin did was all about Justin. (The same brick could be pegged at Davy Fitz, by the way.) But whatever Justin did, it worked for Waterford. It didn't always work, but it worked well enough and often enough for McCarthy to have deserved better than the treatment he got earlier this year after some of his players lay down and died against Clare.
Yesterday, at his press conference in the GAA's rather sterile and atmosphere-free underground media facility, Davy Fitz (with, bizarrely, a muted episode of The Simpsons playing behind him on two big screens) spoke about his position and how there were probably a few fellas with baseball bats lying in wait to give him a beating this morning. He is probably right. Davy himself didn't come well out of the Tony Considine business in Clare last year and bad blood will out.
The winners write the history. For Waterford and Davy this summer's wedding was a marriage of mutual convenience which carried too many bad auguries about it for love to blossom as it it did years ago with, say, Michael Bond and Offaly.
We thought when they made Justin walk Spanish down the hall that no good would come of it. Waterford started winning again though, and for a while we thought we were wrong and we were happy enough to be so.
Waterford needed an All-Ireland just as much as hurling needed Waterford to win one. The shafting of Justin McCarthy seemed to have brought its own reward as Davy Fitz's team faced a graduated series of challenges and ended up in an All-Ireland final.
So be it, we said. Waterford had a new voice in the dressingroom and when it comes to dressingroom sounds a change is often as good as a rest. Success would justify everything. Wouldn't it? It wasn't to be.
Waterford faced one of the greatest sides of all time yesterday and there was no shame in having lost. It is hard to imagine any team living with Kilkenny in the first 35 minutes of yesterday's game. Yet to lose by 23 points? To concede 33 scores? To be beaten more comprehensively than even Limerick 12 months ago? These things were unthinkable yesterday at 3:29pm.
Kilkenny got to write the history. Meanwhile, Waterford's summer will be the subject of an autopsy.
For Kilkenny, the routing of their neighbours won't have cost them a thought. And rightly so. The respect between hurlers is taken for granted and Kilkenny's respect for Waterford was shown in the ferocity of their commitment and the breadth of their excellence. Kilkenny wanted to score point number 31 as much as they had wanted to score point number 30 and point number one. They never condescended to Waterford but did unto them what they knew Waterford would do unto others if they got a chance.
In the end, Brian Cody was carried shoulder-high around the field in Croke Park, a great loopy grin on his face, his hat barely surviving on his head. He looked uneasy with the adulation and one wondered if he was thinking to himself that it was almost 20 years ago to the day that he was being barracked by some halfwits at home on the occasion of Kilkenny's homecoming after a less happy All-Ireland final.
What goes around comes around. Cody, like Justin McCarthy and like most managers, has his detractors. He resents the charge of ruthlessness, which is unfortunate because that is the charge most often laid at his door. His defence would be that anything that is done for the team and for the collective effort can scarcely be ruthless. It just fell to be his lot that he is the one who has to do these things, make the calls, drop the men, hear the tears.
Waterford would argue that in getting rid of their mentor they were merely being ruthless in the style established for top-level sport. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But the Justin McCarthy business left a lingering sourness which only an All-Ireland win could have banished satisfactorily.
Waterford got to their final after all these years. They did so without the mentor who did the most to get them there, the man who made hurlers out of players most counties would have discarded. And they lost by 23 points - a statistic that will haunt the county more eerily than the gap of 45 years since their last All-Ireland final appearance.
This morning when they wake to the realisation this hurling world is Kilkenny's and we all just live in it, will they feel Waterford hurling is farther along the line than it was any time during the McCarthy era? Or will Waterford hurling be digging in for a recession?
We don't know and it will be next spring before we care again. The cast and crew in Waterford will be different by then and they will be starting from year zero. They will begin again, as will any other serious hurling county hoping to challenge Kilkenny.
For Waterford, this will be a year to forget. In a funny way, yesterday's humiliation purged the sins of the McCarthy knifing. The hurling summer unfolded like a many-layered morality play and Waterford at the end lay centre stage, bleeding from their scattershot wounds. It was hard to watch but it feels okay this morning to go back to loving them .
As for Kilkenny. They get to not just write the history but to own it too. And not a voice in the house can begrudge them. Hand them 15 All Stars and be done with the year.
