What did Aidan Nolan do?
Ran up to the ref after the final whistle and roared abuse in his face for blowing up early. Didn’t realise that we had got through apparently
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Thought he had done well after his introduction tbh…
Jack O’Connor has got to start ahead of Dunbar the next day.
Yeah I heard the same, didnt see it happening at the time and hadnt a clue he got a straight red until someone told me in the pub! I guess they could try appeal it but I’d say not much hope of it being overturned.
Wexford were through last night with a draw regardless of the outcome in Parnell Park. Odd carry on.
Minor final fixed for croker at 11.30 Sunday the 30th.
A joke
Ah I don’t think so.
The Joe Mc cup winners are entitled to their time.
The minor game has been switched from the sat and it’s not like too many wexford people even know it’s own.
Most day trippers are unaware of teams other than the senior hurlers.
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They aye entitled but some wx folk we I’ll be in the stadium for 6 hours… tough going
Huh?
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Do you not remember the treble headers of the 00’s?
Yes. They were brutal.
GAA | ENDA MCEVOY
june 20 2019, 12:01am, the times
A lucrative romance and the Fitz factor: when Wexford reach the final
enda mcevoy
Want to know what it’s like when the Wexford hurlers reach a Leinster final? Here’s an illustration.
Shortly after midday on the first Sunday of July two years ago car after car bearing purple and gold flags had inveigled themselves into the nooks and crannies along Richmond Road on Dublin’s northside. The tinfoil was being unwrapped from the sandwiches. The tops were coming off the bottles. A tailgate party, Wexican-style.
“God, this is very early for cars to be along here,” one local resident was heard to mutter. Very early in the normal course of events, perhaps, but this wasn’t the normal course of events. Wexford were in a Leinster final for the first time in nine years and the boys were back in town. There were so many of them back in town as to set a new attendance record — 60,032 — for the fixture.
Reliable attendance figures for Leinster hurling finals date back to 1950. Apt, that, because 1950 was the year this particular showpiece game, long the preserve of Kilkenny and Dublin with occasional cameos from Laois, ceased being a fixture and became An Event. There was one very good reason for this: Wexford.
They weren’t simply a team. They weren’t simply the most popular team of their era, or the most fondly remembered GAA team of all time, or even one of the few teams in any sport to succeed in transcending the confines of their code and crossing the whitewash to be embraced by the public. They were a band of brothers, a collection of unlikely heroes, a bunch of ordinary, painfully humble men who together constituted a cause.
Reviewing a new book called The Fellowship of the Ring in the autumn of 1954 CS Lewis compared it to “lightning from a clear sky”. The Wexford story was the hurling equivalent of JRR Tolkien’s epic tale except with stouter protagonists, sterner foes — these orcs were arrayed in red and white or blue and gold or black and amber — and bolder feats of arms. In a land without hope or heroes Nicky Rackard and his comrades were giants. Rackard himself, who wore tweed jackets and rode with the hunt, might have been an emissary from a space-age civilisation.
“The depression of the decade’s economy, the awfulness, the backwardness of agricultural production and management, the unemployment, the listlessness — all were sidetracked while the magic was being produced by 25 marvellous performers in an art hitherto believed foreign to them,” as Nicky Furlong put it in his delightful memoir The Greatest Hurling Decade – Wexford and the Epic Teams of the ‘50s .
To say Wexford were just what hurling had been crying out for is as accurate as it is clichéd. Of the 14 finals immediately prior to their All-Ireland triumph in 1955, the county’s first since 1910, eight had been won by Cork, a four in a row and a three in a row included, and four by Tipperary, a three in a row included. The game needed something new. From the south east it would get not merely something new but something unprecedented and unimaginable.
A Leinster title would look good on the CV of FitzgeraldJAMES CROMBIE/INPHO
Everything about them, these bold Shelmaliers with their long-barrelled hurleys from the sea, was bigger, brighter, different. Books were written about Rackard and his colleagues, a small cottage publishing industry springing up on foot of their deeds and still functioning half a century later as the survivors penned their stories. Above all they drew crowds like no team before or since. Their 1956 Leinster final meeting with Kilkenny attracted a record attendance of 52,077, a figure surpassed 12 months later when 52,272 spectators converged on Croke Park to see the counties collide again.
It took four decades for the latter figure to be beaten. Wexford were involved once more, needless to say, the 1996 All-Ireland champions defending their provincial crown the following season. This time 55,492 spectators paid in to see them defeat Kilkenny, with Billy Byrne kicking the match-winning goal. But even that figure was shattered two years ago. Attribute it to a combination of Wexford’s enduring romantic appeal and the Davy Fitzgerald factor.
The latter issue will be a subtext next Sunday week. A Leinster title would look good on Davy’s CV and don’t think he doesn’t know it. Granted, he won the All-Ireland with Clare in 2013 and he’ll always have that. He also — and most people seem to forget this — won the 2016 National League with them, the county’s first success in the competition since 1978. Silverware in another province, however, would mark a broadening of his palette and endow him with a new layer of depth and credibility. This group of Wexford players, moreover, do not constitute a golden generation like the one he was blessed with back home earlier in the decade. As an under-21 cohort they were beaten by Antrim in an All-Ireland semi-final before losing successive finals to Clare (by six points) and Limerick (16 points). Hence the potential additional worth of success against Kilkenny.
Regardless of the outcome the Leinster Council are already home and hosed as winners. A hurling final that attracts a crowd of 30,000 yields receipts of around €360,000 for them; for a crowd of 50,000 read €690,000; and for a crowd of 60,000, along the lines of 2017’s gathering, read €860,000. An enduring romance alright and a lucrative one. This is what it’s like when Wexford reach a Leinster final.
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Not to be missed
Aidan Nolan’s suspension held. He gets a two game ban for a repeat offence. I couldn’t think of when he last got sent off and found out it was that stupid fucking exhibition shite in Boston. So his red card in that means he has a second game to sit out.
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No way. Fucks sake.
Proper order for a repeat offender so