Cyril bids farewell to Santy fantasy

IT WAS the day Cyril Farrell stopped believing in Santy.

I sat down to The Sunday Game with a smug new column on my notebook: Santy Watch. Cyril Farrell has been raving about Santy (aka Setanta Ó hAilpín) all season.

He got the world exclusive on Ó hAilpín's nickname and he revealed all on the day of the Clare massacre.

Children the country over have put down a summer of torment as Cyril a respected school principal has been telling Ger Canning: "Santy will punish you, Ger."

So there I was, all psyched up to count all the Santy moments, when what does Cyril do? He decides there has been enough of this Santy lark and reverts back to the handle of Setanta for the great corner-forward.

Not once did we get a "that's Santy for you, Ger", or a "you can't leave Santy alone like that, Ger".

Maybe Cyril can't believe in a Santy who appears three times in the one year, and might do so again one more time before Christmas.

Tomás Mulcahy was inclined to go back to his youth, too, after watching Cork warm up with the help of some training cones. "The nearest we got was maybe an ice-cream cone after the game," lamented Mulcahy. Michael Lyster and Ger Loughnane laughed heartily, but I'm certain the smile didn't reach Muller's eyes.

Given what we heard last winter about the Cork County Board's attitude to luxuries like polo shirts and soup, maybe he feared he would be

receiving a bill for unpaid 99s, and an Orange Kadet (remember them?)

before the week is out.

Legend has it that Loughnane has also stopped believing in Santy or is it the other way around? He was upbeat yesterday about Wexford before the game and at half-time he went into overdrive.

"They are playing now in the first-half like they played in the second-half against Offaly. Really fluent hurling, but hurling with a plan," he said.

"They have a great plan here, and their plan is to expose Cork's weaknesses. Now Cork's weakness, as we said beforehand, is in the Cork full-back line. They have the full-back line absolutely demolished."

Loughnane has yet to produce as compelling a passage of Sunday Game analysis as he did when Clare manager on the night of the 1997 All-Ireland Final, when he cut loose on Eamon Cregan.

Yesterday, however, he revealed some of the rough love that characterised his epoch as Clare manager Mickey O'Connell hasn't hit a ball how Mickey O'Connell is still on the field absolutely beats me," he said at half-time.

Afterwards, both men agreed it was an epic. Not men, but giants, making their own importance, as Patrick Kavanagh might have said.

(This is getting spooky. Isn't it true that Kavanagh, no more than Mulcahy, had his own bit of trouble with ice-creams. He was playing in goal for Iniskeen footballers, and a soft goal went by him as he was leaning against the post slurping on an ice-cream. I think it was a Loop-the-loop. Honest. That's how it was told to me anyway.)

"When the modern generation refer to an epic game, they will think back to this one," said Loughnane.

"Heroes all," he continued, including, we presume, Mickey O'Connell, who got a post-match reprieve for an improved second-half.

And then it was over, and all god-fearing Hurling Men turned off their televisions for fear they would be contaminated by the big-ball from Castlebar.

There was no pre-match analysis from the studio, and no explanation for the absence. At half-time, the reason became obvious: RTÉ were attempting the audacious reunion of Pat Spillane and Colm O'Rourke in the same studio for the first time in what seems like aeons.

Just as key members of the Royal Family will not travel on the same plane, Spillane and O'Rourke have been mysteriously kept apart in the RTÉ studios this year. So if Pat is on at night, Colm will be there during the day, and vice-versa.

It seemed to me that Lyster, Spillane and O'Rourke, along with commentators Darragh Moloney and Martin Carney all passed the Galway/Donegal game under the impression that "any minute now, Galway will stick a goal and three or four points and we'll all be done with it".

It wasn't to be, and the best team Connacht has produced in 30 years finally came a-cropper on the very patch of green on which they announced their arrival in 1998.