I prefer the Rugby players in Munster to the GAA football players. When the Rugby players come home after a match you can be sure they will arrive in a flurry of style and charisma in their lovely sexy suits complete with a Munster Rugby tie pin. So as you can well imagine, I had high hopes for today when the Cork team arrived in Mallow. I was bitterly disappointed. They stepped off the train in, and I cringe as I type it, tracksuits. A serious let down. Not least considering they lost the All Ireland yesterday but in order to distract me from that upset I decided to focus on their clothes. HEHEHE I am Hellie, a girl so therefore I have different priorities! CLOTHES! CLOTHES! CLOTHES! HEHEHE!!
The brave team were eagerly awaited by a small group of supporters, the first 5 having arrived at half four.....they had a long wait til half six when the team turned up! But to be fair to the people of Cork we slowly turned up bit by bit until we had managed a, and I use this term loosely, a crowd of people. Well to be fair to Cork, Mallow is a small town with a small train station so to have a crowd of 200 ish was impressive to say the least. And for such a mediocre sized crowd they sure made a lot of noise when the team dared to step off the train to the platform and face their loyal supporters.
The speeches went well, the manager was obviously disappointed that his team didn’t win but you could see, hidden in the face of defeat was a sense of pride. A pride felt by a lot of Cork GAA patrons, the team were after all quite young and did really well to get to a final. And sure yeah of course as a county Cork would have loved to have seen them win and show Kerry where to go....But at the end of the day we knew we were facing into a tough match against a extremely experienced Kerry team. We did well and to see the fans congregate showed the team the pride is still there.
The Team left the platform to go to talk to the crowd. They spent ages there signing jerseys and talking to the young players in the gathering in Mallow. The managers, subs, players and anyone remotely connected to the team came out to talk to the fans. From the distance of the platform, where I was hidden away I could see the team captain Canty holding a tiny baby wearing a even smaller jersey. While the team were talking to fans I was lucky enough to get a word with a young player who expressed his slight distress that there weren’t more GAA followers in Mallow. I was delighted to tell him of the huge crowd awaiting them in Cork City Centre....we watched as the team boarded the train again and left for cork city and Kent station.
They may have lost the All Ireland Final but the Cork team won over a new fan tonight in me.
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