COLM COYLE walked out of the Meath dressingroom still displaying that horrible, sinking feeling of losing a championship match he knows his team should have won. No one expected him to be calm and collected in this heat of the moment, and he didn't disappoint.
"Well I do think a lot of decisions went their way, to bring them back into the game. Fair play to Wexford for taking them, for pushing on ahead, and nicking it by a point. But I just wonder at the wisdom of the so-called CCCC, appointing a Laois referee for the game. And the winners of the game playing them. I would question that one."
He paused for a breath and we asked him about Joe Sheridan's disallowed goal: "Well he won the ball, and stood there looking at him (the referee). He didn't even blow the whistle. When it's in the back of the net then he blows it. I mean, does he make it up as he goes along? You explain that to me.
"But it's game over now. Wexford won. You've got to hand it to them for taking their opportunity, but it was handed to them. I mean there were lads down injured and he was playing on with the thing. What the hell are they are on about?
"Having said that, we were 10 points up, and should have shut out the game. But it's very hard when you're dealing with those circumstances. I mean there's a lot of things I'm annoyed about, but there's no freedom of speech, so I can't really comment.
"We had some injuries as well and that disrupted us. But we still had opportunities and didn't take them. That comes back to haunts you. It's a harsh lesson. I had enough of them in my day. But that's all we can do now. Get up and get on with it."
A few yards away, between all the shouting and roaring coming out of the Wexford dressingroom after this truly astonishing victory could be heard the words, "and no drink".
Jason Ryan has once again defied his youthful inexperience to manage a championship victory to rank with Wexford's best of recent years, but with that out of the way, it's onwards and upwards.
"I hope this shows that Wexford are a football team that are here to do something this year, and here to stay," he said. "We're on a little bit of a roll now, after winning the National League Division Three.
"They're still the only unbeaten team in Ireland, and they get a lot of confidence from that."
But what did he say at half-time? "I don't remember. They knew they didn't play well in the first half," he explained, and reels off a list of problems from Wexford's kick-outs to stray passes. "I mean everything that could go wrong did go wrong, so things had to improve.
"We brought on two subs, but could have brought on 15. The performances were so poor all over the field. There was no one person at fault. Every line, every position. Luckily, everyone upped their performance, and they're the ones who deserve the credit. They did it.
"And when you're on a run, things happen. Thankfully the scores kept coming for us. We didn't miss much in the second half, and that was a telling factor as well."
For Matty Forde, hitting the winning score in such dramatic circumstances seemed magical even by his own standards: "That's up there, I think, with the best, in the way we came back to win, from 10 points down. That takes fair going. You don't want to be leaving yourself in that situation too often but when you do win it has to be right up there with the best of them."
