2018 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship Final
- Galway 2-17 Limerick 3-15 (75:44)
- Marty Morrissey: ‘What a recovery… Galway! What about this for character from the All-Ireland champions of 2017. A pass that should have been Limerick’s goes astray.’
- Michael Duignan: ‘That ball should’ve been gone 90 yards up the field… what a championship! I thought we’d seen it all. It looked like Limerick were home and hosed… we’ve said it all year, nine points is a dangerous lead in hurling this summer and look at what Galway have done… back from the dead.’
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BREDA QUAID HAD been contemplating the worst as Joe Canning’s lastditch attempt started falling short. What if a Galway hurl flicked the ball into the net? How would this Limerick team deal with the heartbreak?
As she stood gratefully hugging her son Nickie by the sideline only moments later, that sense of dread had not entirely subsided. It never really does when you are the parent of a goalkeeper.
‘Those last couple of minutes in a game,’ Breda explains, ‘when you know that if a goal goes in they’ll be beaten, I find them very, very hard.’
In an All-Ireland final, they become almost intolerable. Then again, you might think she had grown used to it at this stage. Breda has spent no small portion of her life keeping a close eye on the Limerick goalkeeper.
Thirty-eight years before Nickie become an All-Ireland winner in Croke Park, she attended a final there between Limerick and Galway as Tommy Quaid’s special guest. She was still Breda Grace then, but that would change soon enough.
Until Tommy’s inter-county retirement in 1993, there were only ever a handful of Limerick games played that she did not attend. Hurling had been a passion that pre-dated Tommy to her upbringing in Kilkenny and she found that life being married to the Limerick ’keeper had its perks.
‘When I met Tommy, the conversation came so easy to us with hurling to talk about,’ she remembers. ‘It was brilliant then getting to go to all of these matches across the country.’
The partner’s perspective didn’t quite prepare her for what the parent experiences however.
‘They are one hundred percent more nervous than we are,’ Shane Dowling reckons. ‘My mother would’ve watched very few games when I was playing. She would go to the stadium alright, but she had to take out her phone because she got so nervous.’
Gearóid Hegarty’s parents occupy two opposing positions when Limerick are playing.
‘Gearóid is just another player as far as I’m concerned,’ Ger Hegarty explains, his long inter-county career with Limerick reason for the detached outlook.
‘His mother would find it more difficult though because she only sees one fella playing… her child.’
When it comes to playing in an All-Ireland final, the intensity and nerves are ratcheted up further still.
‘It is a big difference being a sister-fan and a mother-fan,’ Valerie Lynch explained to OTB Sports the morning after the 2018 final, the experience of watching her brother Ciaran Carey play no real preparation for watching her son Cian.
‘Saturday was the worst, longest day of my life waiting for it. Cian’s going around cool as a breeze focused and we don’t know our heads from our elbows.’
Breda never found Limerick’s losses easy to deal with when it was her husband playing, ‘but he was a separate person,’ she stresses. ‘I know Nickie is his own man too, but when it is your child out there this rearing thing within just kicks in.’
As that late, late Canning shot dropped short in front of Nickie’s goal, she may as well have been standing down there beside him.
The nervousness hasn’t anything to do with her faith in Nickie’s capabilities, of course. She trusts him implicitly and knows more than anyone, bar perhaps Nickie himself, how hard he has worked to prepare for every eventuality. Trouble is, she knows how hard his father Tommy had worked too.
His time as Limerick’s goalkeeper had been spread across three decades; such was his stranglehold on the position. Even the most dominant goalkeeper remains prone to the unexpected occurring though.
In 1987, Limerick appeared to have Cork beaten in a Munster Championship semi-final before Kieran Kingston sent the game to a replay with a late point. The following day in Semple Stadium, Cork’s John Fenton scored a goal of improbable genius that hastened Limerick’s championship exit.
‘A brilliant goal,’ Breda admits, stunned as everyone else watching on in Thurles by the distance and speed of Fenton’s shot, ‘but it was a freak, you know. That’s what can happen.’
Supporters do not tend to be quite so forgiving, however, and Breda has had to listen on from her seat as barbs were thrown at Limerick ’keepers.
It was Tommy’s cousin Joe Quaid who occupied the Limerick goal in the 1994 All-Ireland final. A noted shot-stopper, whatever confusion occurred on the goal-line as Offaly’s Johnny Dooley lined up his late free ultimately fell back on Joe to explain.
‘All I could picture was someone getting a touch to it, back of the net, game over,’ he told Kieran Shannon, physically unable to watch Joe Canning’s free descend on Nickie’s goal 24 years later.
He knows, as Breda does, that an eternity of damage can be done in those last few minutes.
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- This extract is from ‘Limerick, A Biography In Nine Lives’ by Arthur James O’Dea. More details available here.
