Having a Dickins of a time in Tipp
Slightly. Maybe. But rolling into Thurles for a Munster championship game in the middle of June and you expect sunshine. That’s non-negotiable, surely.
Clouds and rain above were uncanny and slightly disconcerting, like having a green sky overhead, or bright blue grass underfoot. We’d have written a letter to complain, but what would be the forwarding address? It was a handy challenge to search the memory for previous sodden Munster championship outings: doubtless a couple of the Limerick selectors could have recalled a wet, wet day in 1994, back home in the Gaelic Grounds, when one of them, Pat Heffernan, goaled with one of the great overhead flicks.
Across the corridor in Semple Stadium yesterday a couple of the Waterford veterans could probably have reached back to a more recent showery outing — nine years ago they had a narrow, damp win in Thurles over Cork, and a subsequent Munster final victory over Tipperary in a soaking-wet Páirc Uí Chaoimh.
Only four years ago they played out a high-scoring classic in the Munster final, a game decided by a Dan Shanahan hat-trick.
All things considered, maybe we should have expected precipitation.
The drive through Thurles took less time than usual, and we were wondering where the crowd was until we got into Semple Stadium itself: at a rough estimate there must have been several thousand people besieging two small hot food outlets under the Kinnane Stand.
The chips on offer must have been pretty class, though the most remarkable sight yesterday off the field was a tableau destined to go down in history as the definition of optimism: a stall selling Tipperary-branded GAA merchandise to a crowd composed almost entirely of Waterford and Limerick people.
Dickens was a deliberate choice above, by the way. During some late nights recently this column has been leafing through Peter Ackroyd’s biography of the great man and though the sporting tie-ins are less than obvious, the company of the great London writer, at one remove, has been welcome.
He helps elsewhere, too.
Take the famous never-ending legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, also in the novel referred above. Until yesterday’s apparent cessation of hostilities between some inter-county managers and the state broadcaster, it looked as though an equally ludicrous tangle was to stretch on and on.
An element of surprise among observers at the managers’ attitude seemed naive, to say the least. The relationship between such managers and the media can often be Byzantine, with head-scratching contradiction a constant companion.
The most obvious example is the frequently fluted refrain that the manager pays no attention to the media whatsoever.
This melody usually gets its accompanying chorus following victory, when the manager says he and his men were delighted to prove the pundits wrong.
But if the manager is paying no attention ... well, never mind.
Maybe they soak up the opinions through the pores. Like anthrax.
There are other, more glaring, examples of some bainisteoirs exceeding their pay grade somewhat.
A classic case occurred some years ago when the manager of a team in an All-Ireland senior final told one media outlet who, specifically, he wanted them to send to Croke Park to cover said game.
(In the interests of absolute accuracy, the third person singular pronoun used above refers to the team manager, not people in the company addressed.)
None of that bother yesterday in Thurles, where Donal O’Grady of Limerick and Davy Fitzgerald of Waterford are accomplished media performers (O’Grady asked assembled reporters what took them so long when his post-game chat was convened).
To that end it was no harm to hear that the boycott was over, though it was never really pursued with the kind of absolutism the Land League would have sought.
It clears the way for some more serious issues to be debated, such as the appearance of just over 15,000 people at a game between Limerick and Waterford, two counties with large urban centres of population to draw from.
Before we leave Dickens to one side, you have to hope that lines like those on Jo the crossing-sweeper aren’t about to be used about the Munster championship.
“... Dead. And dying thus around us every day.”
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: mikemoynihanex
