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After Carrie Dolan’s free put Galway in front for the last time, the 2025 All-Ireland final turned into a mosh pit. For the next 84 seconds the game was off its chain. There were 17 tackles or body hits or fouls that went unpenalised. Eight players hit the ground, a couple from exhaustion. Nobody blinked or balked. The referee’s whistle went silent. “I’m not sure how many potential frees I could have counted in that last minute of play,” said Elaine Aylward in the RTÉ commentary, as the ball ducked under the ropes and over the sideline. From the bloodstream of this rivalry, it was a laboratory sample. Since before the turn of the decade, Cork and Galway have wired into each other. The two best teams in the championship were also designed for combat just when camogie had changed its mind about that. Opened it. “The physicality that both teams bring is just another level,” says Niamh Kilkenny, the former Galway captain. “They don’t hold back.” READ MORE Their feelings for each other have been fired by closeness. Neither could see beyond the other. Seven of the last nine All-Ireland finals have been won by either Cork or Galway; five of the last seven National League finals have gone the same way. Kilkenny have dropped in and out, but nobody has gotten between them. “Both teams rise to each other,” says Imelda Hobbins, who captained Galway to beat Cork in the 1996 All-Ireland final and is an analyst on Galway Bay FM now. That wasn’t always the case, though. Until 1996, Galway had never beaten Cork at Croke Park. Earlier that season, when they met in the league final, Cork had won by 15 points. It wasn’t a peer-to-peer relationship. They didn’t think about each other in the same way. One was looking up, the other was looking down. That was never said. They both knew. “Up along, there was always something with Cork,” says Hobbins. “We used to always fear the red jersey. Mentally, that was always there. We would perform well against them but there were a lot of games where it came down to the wire and we just wouldn’t be able to get over the line. Cork always seemed to have that edge on us. A lot of it just came from Cork beating us so much in the past. “Even when we won in 96 and beat Cork in the final, they came along and beat us again in 97 and 98.” The players changed, the pattern continued. In 2013, Galway won an All-Ireland without meeting Cork, but for nine seasons on either side of that they failed to beat them in a knockout match. “We couldn’t get the better of them,” says Kilkenny. “You were always looking at them and thinking, ‘How can we get those extra percentages?’. For this generation of Galway players, the 2019 All-Ireland semi-final was their point of no return. Eoghan Cormican in the Irish Examiner described the game as “physical, unflinching and in-your-face”. Until then, Galway had no reputation for winning games that went down a dark alley. “That was the breakthrough win for the team under Cathal Murray (in his first full year as Galway manager),” says Caitriona Cormican, who was coming towards the end of her intercounty career. “That set the platform for everything that came afterwards. It was the way we wanted to play. Everything just clicked that day. “Cork were going for three-in-a-row that year and the calibre of players they had playing that day – they were household names. For a lot of years, we weren’t winning those games. We were coming up just short. It was always ‘nearly’. Nobody expected us to win. It was huge, psychologically.” There had been shafts of light. Cormican remembers a league game against Cork early in 2018 when Galway only scored 1-3 and were “absolutely hammered”, but a year later Cork travelled to Gort in the league and were held to a draw. “I remember afterwards we celebrated like we had won. Everyone was just delighted. It felt like a really significant result. “When we played them in Limerick [in the All-Ireland semi-final] they got a goal early and it was kind of like, ‘Here we go again’. But I think that goal nearly ignited something in us. From then on, we threw off the shackles and just went for it. I remember how the team changed. We went after every ball, chasing down corner backs, chasing down full backs. It was just brilliant.” It was Galway’s first win over Cork in a knockout championship match since 2010. Two years later they met in the final and Galway won again. By then, they hadn’t beaten Cork in an All-Ireland since Hobbins was captain, 25 years earlier. “It was a really big game for Galway, to prove that we had deserved the win in 2019 and we had earned it,” says Cormican. It was an earthquake in their relationship. Over a three-year period, Galway went unbeaten against Cork in league and championship, a run that stretched to eight matches. Laura Treacy, the former Cork defender, played in most of them. “It was massive. You probably came away from some of those games thinking, ‘We probably could have won and how have we lost it?’. But they’re such a great team to hang in there and that’s why they’re so dangerous. “It’s not that we were being hammered by Galway, but they were just really well organised, really well structured and they knew how to finish out really tight games. They never seem to go out and annihilate teams but Cathal Murray is extremely good at finding ways to throw other teams.” For the last three years, the meeting of Cork and Galway has been the championship’s defining match, one way or another. “It’s a pity to be saying it,” says Hobbins about a championship that lacks depth, “but they are the two best teams in it.” Each of those matches has been decided by one score. Along the way there were bound to be incidents and accidents. When Cork won by three points in 2024, the goal that decided the game was thrown into the net by Katrina Mackey. When Murray pleaded his objections to one of the match officials, he was told that it was going to be a penalty in any case. “But you still have to score a penalty,” Murray said, with justification. The goal stood. A year later, the Cork centrefielder Hannah Looney was sent off on a straight red just before half-time for making head-high contact with a Galway player, off the ball but right in front of the linesman. Cork were five points down at the time but clung to the cliff’s edge for the second half and drew level with a goal in stoppage time. The foul that led to the winning free, though, was described as “a dive” by the Cork manager Ger Manley, even though television replays showed a shoulder charge that missed its target. The Cork manager also had a gripe about an unpunished shove on the Cork goalie Amy Lee that led to a first-half point and concluded, without merit, that the referee’s performance had been “shocking”. Over the years, the temperature was bound to rise. Last year’s final was tropical. Of the four senior All-Irelands last year, men and women, it was by far the best. In the first half alone, Galway’s ferocious tackling caused 25 turnovers. Cork tried to march the ball out from the back and were met with force. This was the kind of physicality that Galway had cultivated since Murray first took over. Cork’s response led to an arm’s race. They pushed each other onto a different plane. “Camogie is progressing a lot in the physical stakes,” says Kilkenny, who retired after the 2024 final, “but Cork are the most physical team that you will meet.” Between them, that feeling is mutual. “Coming out of those Cork games, you knew you’d come out of a battle,” says Cormican. “The 2019 semi-final and the 2021 final were the most intense games I’d ever played in. You felt like you didn’t have a second to breathe. The tackles were going in and there was huge intensity up and down the field. But you want to show your power, you want to show your athleticism. The games are being allowed to flow now and nobody is getting hurt. Everyone is able for it. “The Cork-Galway games, though, take on a life of their own. I remember Cork got a goal in that 21 final and I never really remember crowds, but I remember the roar they got for that goal. Thankfully, we didn’t panic.” That has been their hallmark. Last year, Galway stopped Cork winning three-in-a-row for the first time since the early 1970s; they made the same block in 2019. “Last year,” says Hobbins, “was one of the sweetest of all.” This year, Galway are going for back-to-back titles for the first time in their history; Cork have already stopped them doing that once before. All of that, though, is just mood music. In both squads there has been significant turnover from last year, between retirements and players migrating to Aussie rules and others going travelling. But there is no change in the terms of engagement. At the beginning of June, they met in Athenry in the opening game of the group stages and Cork won handsomely, 0-18 to 1-8. “We were bullied all over the field,” said Carrie Dolan afterwards. You can imagine how that sits with them.