Do Mayo fans hate Clare hurlers?

From the press-box
Daniel Carey

WE had resigned ourselves to extra-time after the whistle went to signal a Cork free. But we allowed ourselves a moment of hope when, seeing Luke Connolly line up the kick, the Cork journalist in the adjoining chair said: “This is as likely to go towards the corner flag as between the posts!” But the Nemo Rangers man slung it over, and we bedded down for 20 more minutes. Those Cork fellas ... you couldn’t be up to them.
The Gaelic Grounds is one of the few provincial grounds with TVs inside the press-box, and the closing stages of the Tipperary-Clare hurling match were on when we docked. A huge roar erupted in the stand outside as Tipperary registered a point, and we wondered (a) where the big screen was, and (b) what all the football fans had against Clare hurlers. A glance at the pitch revealed the real reason for the roar: Mayo had entered the field of play.
The Limerick press-box also has name-tags pasted to many of the desks, and I was rather surprised to see slots for Malachy Clerkin and Christy O’Connor ... surely there were in PΡirc Uí Chaoimh? A glance along the bench revealed the presence of Clerkin’s Irish Times colleague Ian O’Riordan, last seen cycling with Turlough O’Brien, Carlow football manager and author of Cycling South Leinster: Great Road Routes.
That’d settled it. The name-tags were clearly old. So, with the sound of ‘Stars In Your Eyes’ ringing in my ears, I thought: “Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be ... Christy O’Connor”.
Of course, my moment of confusion pales in comparison to a much more famous Limerick example of the genre. It’s a story that has gone down in Irish journalistic lore. Sam Allardyce, not yet famous, had just been appointed as manager of the local League of Ireland soccer club and paid a visit to the offices of the local newspaper.
Something got lost in translation, because Limerick Leader sports editor Cormac Liddy thought he was talking not to Big Sam but to John Alderdice, leader of the Northern Ireland Alliance Party. “Tell me,” he asked the future England manager, “are you ever going to sort out the Troubles up there?”
The Troubles may be over. But what Eamonn O’Molloy called Mayo’s ‘blend of heroic commitment and exasperating lapses’ is still very much with us. O’Molloy wrote those words for the Irish Post in 2014, after our last championship victory over Cork, and the subsequent semi-final draw against Kerry. But they could just as easily have been penned to describe Saturday’s epic. Does anyone else have déjà vu?