Tommy Martin: After the Jim McGuinness apparition, championship is a vision of something heavenly
Jim McGuinness: Spotted taking drills with the Galway senior footballers last week
There was a time in Ireland when people saw visions of the Virgin Mary. Now, it’s sightings of Jim McGuinness that have us rubbing our eyes in disbelief.
An apparition of McGuinness appeared to the Galway senior footballers at the weekend. The vision was captured on camera-phone and Galway manager Padraic Joyce admitted he had indeed been making regular novenas to the Glenties guru, though it’s not clear if McGuinness revealed his own version of the secrets of Fatima — how to beat the Dubs.
This follows unverified visitations to various panels in recent years, news of which is often breathlessly circulated on social media. Famously, a sighting was reported at a Mayo training session before one of their valiant All-Ireland tussles with Dublin.
Evidence was inconclusive. David Brady reported a shining light around McHale Park; Martin Carney described a ghostly presence with a blue whistle. Official sources in the Mayo camp denied all, but had they won there were plans for a shrine and connecting international airport.
Donegal supporters may regard these sightings as an upgrade from the traditional Marian apparitions. After all, they might say, why settle for the mother of God when you can have the man himself?
Nonetheless, the contemporary GAA fan has much in common with the seers of heavenly spectres.
Both are devout in their belief and both seek divine intervention in times of need. And if a soul is truly comforted, whether through the thumbing of rosary beads or frenetic hand-passing drills, who are we to question whether someone has seen what they claim to have seen?
As it happens, most GAA supporters might be offering up prayers in the current climate. Judging by the mood of many players and managers as the inter-county season resumes, a miracle might be needed for it all to pass off as planned.
Kerry boss Peter Keane set the tone at a sponsor’s event ahead of the big dance getting under way.
“We’re hanging here by a thread I think anyway,” said Keane, sounding like Corporal Fraser from Dad’s Army.
“I’m not talking about Kerry, but every team. We’re all hanging by a thread.”
Keane spoke about the fear that comes with answering the phone, not knowing whether your panel is about to be decimated by positive tests. Several Ulster managers have already had this experience, as the second wave of the virus lets rip, most notably Ryan McMenamin of Fermanagh.
Ricey has cut a forlorn figure in the last week, plaintively detailing the effects of Covid on his squad like a man whose house has just disappeared into a sinkhole. Ten of his players tested positive while a further seven were self-isolating, throwing preparations for crucial league games against Clare and Laois into chaos.
“We’re in no shape to play... even if you look at the Ulster Championship, we do want to play it but you’re looking at the level of preparation,” McMenamin said last week.
This is a question we might all be asking over the next few months. With Covid numbers rising exponentially, it seems unlikely that the inter-county season will not suffer collateral damage. The prospect of teams going into big championship games without large chunks of their panels is very real.
We might need to lower expectations if we are bothered about what sort of spectacle we are going to get.
Keane pointed out that GAA squads don’t live in a bubble, living and working as they do in the wider community. Not that bubbles are all that either. Look at the Republic of Ireland squad, hermetically sealed in a professional environment, which might as well have been an Italian après-ski resort for all the good it did them.
At first glance, the Irish soccer team’s Covid problems seemed to be a case of the same old FAI exploding clown car. But looking at the scores of positive tests affecting high profile international soccer squads, Cristiano Ronaldo among them, it’s clear that when this thing gets going, it doesn’t care for professional sport’s pretensions to exceptionalism.
It treats the Bernabeu and Brewster Park just the same.
All this should mean lots of voices questioning the whole purpose of what the GAA and the women’s associations are about to launch into. You’d expect a fair degree of outrage about bunches of young men and women traversing the country and mixing with other cohorts, then returning from whence they came.
They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should, and all that.
And yet, while nobody is saying it is going to be a picnic, and the words of Keane and McMenamin hardly suggest a gung-ho spirit about the whole thing, everyone accepts it has to happen. Even Dr Tony Holohan — the nation’s moral compass, who returned from his leave of absence with a swipe of Old Testament wrath at how things had slipped — accepted that inter-county GAA along with the other big time sports had to be allowed to go ahead, even in the event of the dreaded Level 5.
This is not just because, as John Fogarty pointed out earlier this week, historically the All-Ireland is always played, come hell, highwater, dungeon, fire, or sword.
It’s because for so many people the GAA championships serve the same purpose as spiritual apparitions once did for the hopelessly devout, especially now. The games themselves, in their full inter-county glory, are a vision of something heavenly, a glimpse of the divine amid the earthly toil of our current lives.
As Ricey suggests, we can’t expect the same cavalcade of colour that normally lights up our summers. The ‘spectacle’ might be a bit iffy at times, but after seven long months, GAA believers will fall to their knees and count their blessings.
Thanks be to Jim for that.
