AMY O’CONNOR admitted it was a sweet feeling to enter the zone on All-Ireland camogie final day and find the scores came so easily.
The Cork captain hit a stunning hat-trick of goals to help secure a 29th senior camogie title for her county and a first since 2018.
From 10 scoring opportunities, the experienced attacker plundered a remarkable 3-7, a haul that comprised three goals from play between the 33rd and 35th minutes, four points from frees, one from a ’45 and and two more points from play.
O’Connor said the real irony of her landmark performance was that she could hardly convert a free in training just yesterday.
“I actually went practising frees yesterday, I don’t think one went over the bar,” smiled O’Connor. “I thought they were going to kill me! I suppose you do have days where everything you hit goes over and it’s nice to have those days because they don’t come around too often. Yeah, I suppose when you hit the sliotar, it’s a different feeling on the bas of the hurley, so it was nice to get one of those days today.”
The St Vincents attacker, also a talented soccer player, spoke of her pride at performing to such a level on the biggest day in the camogie calendar.
“A very proud day for me obviously,” she said. “I come from quite a small junior club on the northside of the city. We haven’t had too much success at club level.
“So it is nice to be able to do something like this and to represent the club and the area. I didn’t realise I had scored a hat-trick until someone said it after the match, which is probably a good thing because we were just so focused on the next ball, the next pass, whatever it might be.
“That might sound cliched but that’s the way we drove it for the last three, four months. It was a building process, everything was a process. We played a certain way. We were adaptable the whole time and our focus was always on the next thing, the next thing.
“So I didn’t really think too much about it in the game, what I’d scored. It’s obviously nice. It is probably something that you wouldn’t dream of really.”
It was a rude awakening for Waterford regarding life at the very top level of the game. They’d beaten Cork in the Munster championship but found it an altogether different experience facing their neighbours on All-Ireland final day.
O’Connor was surprised that people presumed Cork were struggling mid-way through the season when they lost to Galway three times and Waterford also.
“To be honest, while people were saying we went through a bad patch, there was only once or twice that we actually played poorly,” she said. “We actually performed quite well throughout that bad patch. I think the most important thing was that we stuck together as a group.”
After coming up a point short of Kilkenny in a dramatic finale last year, it was redemption of sorts for Cork manager Matthew Twomey and his players.
“Myself and Laura Tracey were sitting here last year after losing it and I suppose we were drained and we couldn’t see how we would get over the line,” said Twomey. “When we came back this year, we decided a focus obviously was to win the All-Ireland. We went through a bad patch in the middle of the year and I suppose a lot of people wrote us off.
“In our own way, we used that as a spur. After we got beaten by Galway in Athenry, we had a real long chat with ourselves. We were going into the Down game under pressure, the Clare game under pressure and every game really we have been under ferocious pressure. Even today we were under fierce pressure coming up.
“These players are just incredible, the more their backs are to the wall, the better they got. What we got today, they totally deserve. They have just been immense.”
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