IN WHAT is one of the managerial stories of the year, Jason Ryan, bearing at 31 the apparent burdens of youth and a background in Waterford football, yesterday led Wexford's footballers to the their first Leinster final since a few months before the Hungarian uprising.
The defeat of a Laois team, bearing as credentials Leinster medals at all sorts of grades, was comprehensive and deserved. Ryan lined up some of his selectors to share the moment outside of the dressingrooms and admitted he had believed the original offer last winter to manage the team to be a hoax.
After four semi-final defeats had Wexford's time simply come? "You could say that, but from one year to the next it doesn't really work that way. Meath would have said that coming in against Wexford - having lost four times in a row you would have said that it was Meath's turn, but you can't predict what's going to happen."
He praised his forwards for their efforts in overcoming a swirling wind that led to a significant wides' count of 13, including eight for former footballer of the year Matty Forde.
"All of the forwards were great," said Ryan. "We'll hope that they try and get the weather right for Leinster final day and that it will be nice calm conditions and if Matty has that many chances he'd take more of them, but I'm just delighted with the scores that we did get. We got enough scores to win the game and that's all you care about."
Selector Pat Barden detailed the preparations that had gone into creating the attacking momentum.
"We worked a good bit on forward movement and trying to get the link between midfield and the full forward line. For a while there today we weren't able to do that for some reason or other, but in the end when we pulled our half forward line back a bit I thought it worked better and we had a plenty of movement inside."
For Laois manager Liam Kearns it was a miserable day and he didn't try to palliate that fact.
"We had problems for most of the game, five subs in and the fifth in with 15 minutes to go - you know you're in trouble. I think we took off four of the forwards. We've played with a target man all year and the reality was we didn't have a fit target man to play so our forward line was smaller than we wanted.
"But the story's not about Laois today; it's about Wexford. They had us in trouble in a lot of places and deserved to win.
"So many of our big players under-performed, but in fairness to them they were coming back after injury.
"Brendan Quigley has been out, Michael Tierney has been out, Pádraig Clancy has been out and when big players don't perform you're in trouble."
Eric Bradley, combative and grafting between centrefield and centre forward, reflected happily, but calmly, on a year that has so far propelled Wexford football to landmark prominence.
"We're still unbeaten this year. We'll turn up training Tuesday night and we'll still be focused. We're looking forward to it, whether it's Westmeath or Dublin, and we've nothing to lose so we're going to go in full steam ahead.
"The hard work's paid off and we're going to bring that into the Leinster final."
