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Morning sports brief: ‘Glorious insanity’ takes over as O’Loughlins and St Thomas’ advance

The All-Ireland club semi-finals provided some winter thrills; the provinces mixed the good with the bad; Liverpool and Manchester United settled on just the bad

St Thomas’ Darragh Burke and Conor Cooney celebrate after their All-Ireland club semi-final win over Ballygunner. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho

Mary Hannigan's face
Mary Hannigan
Mon Dec 18 2023 - 11:54

Cripes, where do you start after a weekend like that? While most of us were busy fine-tuning our plum puddings, other folk were out there winning and reaching All Ireland club finals and the like. Malachy Clerkin rounds up the action for us, which included hurling semi-finals that proved to be “two of the most thrilling games of 2023″ – St Thomas’s penalty shoot-out victory over Ballygunner and O’Loughlin Gaels’ defeat of Cushendall in “a frenzied tango in Navan”. “Glorious insanity, the lot of it,” writes Malachy.

And in camogie, Kilkenny’s Dicksboro scuppered the three-in-a-row hopes of Galway’s Sarsfields by winning their first senior title at Croke Park, but the women of Kilkerrin-Clonberne achieved that very feat when they were crowned All-Ireland football champions for the third year in a row with a 0-18 to 1-9 win over Ballymacarbry.

In rugby, there were Champions Cup wins for Leinster over Sale and Ulster over Racing 92, but Munster suffered yet more late, late horrors in their trip to Exeter, while Connacht were downed by Saracens.

“We are the world’s specialists at leaving ourselves a tough job and making things hard for ourselves,” said Tadhg Beirne of the manner in which Munster let slip a 24-13 lead going in to the final quarter of their game.

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Manchester United most certainly aren’t where they want to be, but, writes Ken Early, despite “giving perhaps the worst performance of any visiting side at Anfield this season”, they at least came away with a draw, thanks largely to Liverpool being “a directionless mess littered with mistakes”. The game, says Ken, resembled “a boxing match when the favourite peppers the opponent’s guard with pitter-patter punches without ever threatening to do any real damage”.

In his Tipping Point column, Denis Walsh pays tribute to the late Mossy Mullins for his contribution to the game of hurling in the form of the modern sliotar, one that has facilitated the rise of an intricate, short-passing game.

And in racing, Brian O’Connor looks ahead to the Leopardstown Christmas festival, the famously quick-drying chase course probably in need of watering despite almost 1,000 mms of rain falling on it this year.

TV Watch: The darts World Championships at the Ally Pally is warming up, tune in this evening on Sky Sports Arena (7pm-11pm). And Wayne Rooney’s Birmingham City play Jamie Vardy’s Leicester City tonight (Sky Sports Football, 8.0) in what has, inevitably, been dubbed the Wagatha Christie sequel.