Soccer/ FAI Cup Final: "It was Kipling who spoke of, 'waiting and not being tired by waiting'," beamed Drogheda United's chairman Vincent Hoey not long after his club had ended its 43-year wait for a major honour by beating Cork City 2-0 in yesterday's Carlsberg-sponsored FAI Cup. "Well, we waited all right," he continued, "and I think we showed today that we hadn't been tired by it."

Hoey has been around for most of those 43 years, so the difficulty he was experiencing as he sought to contain his joy was entirely understandable.

He was also, however, better placed than most to appreciate what the City players and officials had been going through since the referee, Ian Stokes, had signalled the end of both the game and dreams of a double, and that knowledge prompted him to go almost immediately to their dressing-room, where he offered a mixture of commiserations and empathy.

"I told them," he recounted, "that I knew how they felt, because I had grown used to losing over the years. I understood exactly what they were going through.

"Maybe," he added, "it's all the losing we did during that time that makes the winning feel so good now."

Hoey was not the only one enjoying himself. All around him there were smiling faces as United's technical staff and players savoured a victory few felt they would be good enough to secure.

On the day, however, they rose not only to the occasion but to the particular challenges presented by the difficult conditions and poor playing surface that seemed to hamper the league champions' hopes of asserting their superiority.

But in too many areas of the pitch, City had simply failed to produce the goods. At one end they conceded two fairly soft goals, while at the other they could not even force one half-decent save from Drogheda goalkeeper Dan Connor.

In midfield they came nowhere close to achieving the expected dominance and, critically, they failed to convert early superiority into something of more tangible value. For that as much as anything they wound up paying the price, and perhaps the only comfort they can draw from the whole experience this morning is that they lost with a good deal of class.

"The fact is that we have no excuses," conceded George O'Callaghan, without any hesitation. "Drogheda were the better side on the day and we simply didn't deserve anything from it. Too many of us have had an off day and it's cost us.

"We're bitterly disappointed," he continued, "and not just because we didn't manage to win the double. It's a blow too that we had such a great opportunity to show what a good side we are in front of a very big crowd and we weren't capable of doing it. It's a massive disappointment."

One by one the other Cork players echoed those sentiments as they filed out of Lansdowne Road and waited to begin the long journey home. One of the few who had performed at anything approaching his best on the day, Joe Gamble, attempted to convey the depths of disappointment he and his team-mates were experiencing.

"Just now," he said, "it feels as if we've won nothing this year. Hopefully tomorrow it will feel a little bit different, but I'm not so sure.

"Beyond that," he added, "all we can do is ensure that we embark on next year with the same level of ambition that we had this time. We have to look to win everything, and maybe the fact that we missed out on the double this time might help to spur us on."

Goalscorers Gavin Whelan and Declan O'Brien had the added satisfaction of knowing that their contributions will have helped to strengthen their hands as they sit down with Paul Doolin over the coming days to hammer out new contracts.

Whelan seems certain to stay, but O'Brien has been linked with other clubs, although having further enhanced his already legendary popularity around Drogheda both by captaining the side to victory yesterday and scoring the second goal it is a little difficult to see quite how he could depart now.

The experience of winning with the club was, he said yesterday, "absolutely euphoric", a feeling he believed might persist for a while around the town where, he predicted, it would be "party time for the next few days".

"It's still sinking in, to be honest," he observed. "There have been some very bleak days at the club over the last few years, but since Paul came in and got the full backing of the board I started to believe that we could make the breakthrough, and today it's come."

Doolin insisted that he "wasn't going to say anything foolish . . . I've heard people saying they were going to dominate, but I'm not going to carried away. We hope to take the next step forward now, to get in a few players that will improve us again and to move on.

"Today isn't the end of anything, hopefully it's the start. It's taken a lot of hard work to come this far, but it's paid off, and hopefully if we all put in the effort again then we can use this as a basis from which to push on and really challenge the top teams. We showed today, I think, that we're not as far from that as some people seemed to think."