Patience of a saint not required for Thomond pilgrimage

WITH apologies to Deputy Paul Gogarty (Dublin Mid West), may I say, quite simply, this.

The sports editor asked me to immerse myself totally in the ultimate sports sacrifice: driving from Cork to Limerick for a Friday night Heineken Cup game, and no sooner had I mentioned this assignment than I was beset with tales of horror and loathing.

Expect the worst, I was told. It’ll be bumper to bumper from Charleville to Buttevant. Nose to tip from Mallow onwards. You’ll face the terrifying dilemma of whether or not to turn off at Dooradoyle, I was told, and finally, at the end, when you seem safe... the Dock Road. Such was the shuddering and quivering at the mention of the Dock Road on a Friday night Heineken Cup game that I was wondering if it was a part of Mordor that JRR Tolkien left out of The Lord of the Rings.

A friend confided that sometimes he had nightmares about the Dock Road.

“That’s why I’d leave at two if I could,” he said.

“What time are you leaving, so?”

“Ah, eight o’clock start? On the road before four, I’d say. You?”

“I was thinking five-ish.”

Somebody should tell him laughing that loudly isn’t welcomed in polite society.

As it happens, I didn’t leave at five. I left my house at 5.10pm and had to put petrol in the car, which meant it was 5.40pm when I left Blackpool.

Sure enough, the traffic wasn’t long appearing. There was a tailback coming down into the fast and slow lanes before you get to Rathduff, which was a bit of a sickener. We were probably delayed five minutes there, but what did that matter? If this was the kind of hold-up a few miles from Cork city, the border with Limerick and all points beyond would probably look like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, though with fewer people eating their own horses.

Unfortunately for the purveyors of traffic horror-porn, that was the last delay I experienced.

I rolled through Mallow with plenty of traffic visible, but no real slowing down. Same for Buttevant. I came to Charleville and opted to duck around the GAA pitch and rolled out of the town at 6.40pm.

I braced for snarl-ups once I got past that big board telling drivers they’re on Limerick tarmac, but none arrived. There was an accident a few miles past Charleville but the traffic wasn’t held up. Limerick rolled by the window much as it always does, and for once on arrival in the city I took the right option rather than going halfway out the road to Dublin.

On Shannonside itself the traffic was flowing, with gardaí on most corners waving people through. Granted, there were plenty of cars nose to nose on the quayside but the boys in blue were keeping them moving well, and at that stage you really felt like saying to some of the drivers: you’re about a 15-minute walk from the stadium, do you expect to pull in between the goalposts altogether?

Your correspondent is proud to be able to say that he saw the top of Thomond Park two hours and seven minutes after walking out his front door in Cork, despite all the fearful predictions.

And by the way, that two hours seven minutes doesn’t account for the length of time it took to put €20 in the tank, nor the considerably longer time it took to decide in the service station between a Mars bar and a yellow Snack as the snack of choice.

Even allowing for people’s natural inclination to exaggerate, your correspondent was expecting a lot worse from last night’s drive.

Obviously everybody wants to try to outdo everybody else with a tale of derring-do and overcoming the odds to support their team, whether that’s sleeping in a submarine that goes from Holyhead to Wales via the North Pole or putting off their first child’s marriage to be at a Magners League game. Munster have wonderful supporters, many of whom make real sacrifices to follow their team.

But based on last night’s evidence, driving from Cork to Limerick for a Friday night game isn’t one of them.