Asked, after it was all over, if had been a difficult afternoon to be Cork City manager, Liam Murphy smiled a little mischievously. "Not at all," he grinned, "sure, with the way we've been playing lately, I always knew we were going to win."

Deep down, in fact, we probably all knew it for even before you start to consider Cork's form or the relative strengths of the opponents faced by the two title contenders yesterday, there was a far more compelling reason for feeling that Shelbourne would not successfully retain their title. Leaders simply don't win this league if it ends up coming down to the last day.

Bohemians's success yesterday was, in fact, the fifth time that a team had leapfrogged the front-runners to lift the title in the final round of matches in the last 11 seasons. As coincidence would have it, Murphy was the City skipper back in '91 when Dundalk did it to the southerners and so, he admitted, he had a good deal of sympathy for Shelbourne.

The Dublin side, though, were probably feeling sufficiently sorry for themselves to make the southerner's pity surplus to requirements. This was the third time in six years that their failure to win on the last day had cost them the title.

And the fact that Dermot Keely's Dundalk had been the beneficiaries in '95 when both they and Derry City had blown it will have been of precious little consolation to anybody at Tolka Park yesterday, least of all the manager himself who said shortly after the final whistle that it was still too soon for him to successfully express the scale of his disappointment in words.

"The bottom line, though, is that I'm not going to talk any crap about being unlucky or about the best team not winning the league," he said. "The best team does win the league; Bohemians won it and they are the best team so I congratulate them on what they have achieved."

While he and his players were largely indifferent to the fact that they will now join Longford Town in the UEFA Cup, everybody in the City camp was positively jubilant that another win, their eighth in a 10 match unbeaten run since Murphy took over, had earned them a place in the Inter-Toto Cup.

"The fact is," said their goalscorer Ollie Cahill, "we feel the season has ended too soon for us with the way we're playing at the moment, but we're all really looking forward to having a real go at it again after the summer."

Certainly if they could produce displays like this on a consistent basis there would be much cause for optimism at Turner's Cross. Cahill's fine 45th minute strike might have flown in the face of the home side's general first half superiority but the visitors defended with a determination that, even allowing for a terrible Stephen Geoghegan miss early on and much better attempts on goal by Paul Doolin and Richie Foran that both struck the woodwork, entitled them to spoil the Tolka Park party.

SHELBOURNE: Williams; Heary, Scully, McCarthy, Hutchison; D Baker, Doolin (Crawford, 71 mins), Fenlon (Byrne, 83), R Baker; Foran, S Geoghegan (Keddy, 55).

CORK CITY: Devine; Carey, Coughlan, Daly, Horgan; Caulfield (O'Brien, 71), Buckley (Herrick, 51), Flanagan, Cahill; Morley, Hartigan.

Referee: D O'Hanlon (Waterford).