Fairytales are heartless. They suck you in and spit you out. Waterford’s journey to the All-Ireland final, their first in 78 years, had been the story of the camogie summer, but the dreamy make believe came to a withering end. Cork won their 29th title by 19 points, 5-13 to 0-9, the biggest winning margin in a senior final in 64 years.
Cork were dominant from the beginning, and utterly ruthless in their finishing, but the game was blown to smithereens just after half-time when the Cork captain Amy O’Connor scored three goals in 119 seconds, surely the fastest hat-trick in the history of senior finals, women’s or men’s. O’Connor finished the game with a staggering tally of 3-7, scoring with every shot she directed at the target.
“It’s a very proud day for me obviously and for my club,” said O’Connor. “I come from a very small club, a junior club on the northside of the city [St Vincents]. We haven’t had too much success at club level, so it’s nice to be able to do something like this to represent the club and the area.
“I didn’t realise I scored a hat-trick until someone said it to me after the match – which is probably a good thing because we were so focused on the next ball, the next pass, whatever it might be. And that might sound so cliched but that’s the way we drove it for the last three or four months.”
It was a day of sweet redemption for Cork. They had lost the last two All-Ireland finals, and the last two National League finals to boot. Earlier in the year they stumbled into a four-game losing streak, including a defeat to Waterford in the Munster championship, and to Galway in the opening game of the round-robin series. By mid-June their season was at a crossroads.
“We went through a bad patch in the middle of the year and I suppose everyone wrote us off,” said Matthew Twomey, the Cork manager. “In our own way we used that as a spur. After we got beaten by Galway in Athenry we just had a real long chat with ourselves. We went into the Down game under pressure, the Clare game under pressure, every game we’ve been under ferocious pressure.
“Even today we were under fierce pressure coming up here. These players are just incredible. The more their backs were to the wall the better they got. What they got today they totally deserve, they were immense. We were saying it since January that some team could get a hammering off us.”
That prophecy finally came true. The game was hanging by a thread as a contest when Cork struck for their first goal, five minutes before half-time: Sorcha McCartan finished Katrina Mackey’s pass to the net, unmarked on the edge of the square. That put Cork 1-7 to 0-1 in front, a nine-point advantage they held until the break.
Any remote chance of a Waterford comeback probably perished in first-half injury time when they walked away empty-handed from a penalty. Annie Fitzgerald was brought down and Beth Carton stood up to the shot; she hit it with pace but it flew inches wide of the top corner.
Carton had been magnificent on Waterford’s run to the final and her performance on Sunday was an ornament on the final. Of Waterford’s total of nine points she accounted for seven, including the score of the match midway through the second half. Slaloming through the middle third, bouncing the ball off the ground and back up on to her stick, she launched a sweet shot on the run from 55 metres.
She hit that point on her right-hand side, and struck all of her long-range frees on that side as well. But for short-range frees Carton switches to her left, and she took the penalty on her backhand side. To be able to generate as much power as she did on the penalty with her non-dominant hand was another illustration of her luminous talent.
Waterford, though, could never settle into the game, or find any rhythm. Vikki Falconer, the leader of their defence, was injured in the first couple of minutes and carried off on a stretcher, irreplaceable essentially. As the half wore on her loss mounted up. The Cork full-forward line tormented them and finished the game with 4-10.
Midway through the first half, when the game was still alive, Lorraine Bray couldn’t apply the finishing touch to a Niamh Rockett cross, just four or five yards from the Cork goal. Who knows how a score like that might have changed the mood? Waterford needed something to settle their nerves and make them feel like they belonged. That comfort never came.
It was Cork’s first All-Ireland since 2018, and in that time the panel has gone through revolutions. Of the 32 players in the current Cork squad, 20 of them were winning their first medal. In the quarter-final and semi-final they eliminated the teams that had beaten them in the last two finals, exorcising those ghosts. By the end, they were undisputed champions.
