This article is from page 81 of the 2007-09-11 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 81 JPG
THE FINAL whistle comes in the ninth minute of injury time and Croke Park is an ocean of emotion. Clare bodies drop to the floor, shat- tered, exhausted. Derry are whoop- ing and ecstatic.
In the tunnel beneath the Hogan Stand, just as Claire Doherty, the Derry captain climbs the steps to ac- cept the trophy, a Derry man appears with two bottles of champagne. He’s bouncing up and down. “I told ye I’d get some bubbly if we won,” he says to Doherty as she ascends the stand.
Once the formalities have been done with on the field, Clare begin to file in one by one, nosing slowly for the comfort of the dressing room. Faces are winced. Eyes are watered and tears stream down the cheeks of the majority.
You scratch your head and wonder when the old stadium saw such a late goal to steal an All-Ireland final and the best reference point is Seamus Darby’s effort for Offaly against Kerry back in 1982, almost 25 years to the day.
A quarter of an hour after that de- vestating Derry goal, Clare captain
Deirdre Murphy walks towards the dressing room.
She’s just played 38 minutes of immaculate camogie and has been Clare’s rock for the entire second eee
She stops to take in some air and to run her thoughts over what has just happened but the sequence of things just don’t make sense.
Clare lead by two seven minutes into injury time. It looks like she’s going to bring All-Ireland silverware back home but 90 seconds later, eve- rything has changed.
“It’s so hard to explain,” she says.
“When the referee called for a throw- in and they didn’t get clean possession from it, I thought we were in a great position. But when the ball came out, they got it and got that goal.”
Her own goal nine minutes from the end had looked like the score that would catapult Clare to the win and their first All-Ireland junior title in 21 years.
At that stage, they led by three points and were in control all over the field. But Derry still had those couple of goals in reserve.
It’s the second that will be re-run in Clare minds though and in the
corridor of the Hogan Stand, those wounds were just being dealt with.
“Inside in the dressing room, we’re still trying to come to terms with it. But the bottom line is, everybody on the panel worked unbelievably hard to get here and did everything that could have been asked of them today.
“We’re proud of how we played, but the way it finished in the end 1s a huge disappointment for us. What can you say?”
Deirdre wanders off, back to the dressing room to the only people that can understand.