Michael Moynihan: All-Ireland Championship gets the memory machine in action

Waterford’s Shane McNulty and Tony Kelly of Clare contest possession. Picture: INPHO/Morgan Treacy

You know how the weekend went. Of course you do.

What we do here and online intersects with some version of Christopher Hitchens’ dismissal of sportswriting (“Matches ... previously played?”), so you’re probably aware of how the hurling games last Saturday panned out.

Those results weren’t available when I picked up the phone last week to chat to Johnny Callinan; if the pandemic wasn’t keeping us all within 5K of home — or some of us, anyway — that would have been an enjoyable spin to Ennis and an even more enjoyable sitdown.

Like all of us, though, he was knocking plenty of enjoyment out of the championship.

“I’m based here in the office,” said Callinan. “And when I stroll up through Ennis — a fairly empty Ennis — there are few enough people to meet. Anyone you meet, you meet for coffee — which I never drank in my life, but anyway — rather than a pint.

“But I got three calls the other day from different fellas of my own generation, great followers, and they were all delighted — ‘wasn’t it great?’ — and so on. One of them was just out of hospital and the win (against Wexford) lifted him. Absolutely it did.

“And it lifted me, too, it certainly did. If I’m any barometer it lifted my spirits and a few more with me.”

I have to confess I’ve changed my own tune on the championship and the necessity for the championship over the last few months.

Going back to the early spring, when we were first grappling with the eerie need to create vast amounts of banana bread, an inter-county championship seemed low on the list of priorities, and a remote possibility at best. Don’t forget this was a time when the Tokyo Olympics was being put on the long finger; the Olympic Games, with its vast, self-contained bureaucracy, its gravitational pull like a slightly less intimidating Death Star.

If the Olympics couldn’t be run off in 2020, what chance was there of inter-county games happening?

A big chance, as it turned out. Credit is due to those who’ve worked to turn that opportunity into a reality.

Is that reality the same experience as a Munster hurling final in Thurles on a searing summer’s day, or whatever manifestation of Gaelic games is nearest your own heart? No, it is not.

Is it the next-best thing. Yes, it certainly is.

There have been a couple of missteps and a few disgruntled participants, but the efficiency and effectiveness have to be saluted. I almost said ‘relative’ efficiency and effectiveness, but that’s unfair — by any objective measure that modifier has to be removed: the e. and e. have been hugely impressive.

Depending on your own county’s performance/departure/chances, you may be deferring a decision on how successful the championship has been, or your mind may have been made up weeks ago. This is a slightly different measurement of the competition but by one count at least it has been an overwhelming success.

The thing about turning that opportunity into reality is that it gives people the chance to recycle that reality into another currency altogether, one we all trade in.

Johnny Callinan summed that up for me, too.

“To be honest, I’d have met plenty of people before this championship started and they’d have been saying, ‘how can you have a championship with no crowds at it and no atmosphere?’ and all of that.

“My response was always the same. I said, ‘wait a second, these lads are not going to be around forever. These players won’t be here in a couple of years’ time.

“Tony Kelly, Joe Canning, TJ Reid and Richie Hogan, Patrick Horgan — any game we see them play in, we have a chance to see those great players do something great, and to create another memory’.

“That’s something we wouldn’t have if we had said a few months ago, ‘ah look, we won’t bother with a championship this year, we’ll leave it off’.”

A point well made. And even if your own crowd exited stage left over the weekend, you have those memories, don’t you?

Video nasties everywhere

Dear God, is this where we are now, getting bent out of shape about videos being shown to sportspeople?

I don’t know if I can really bring you up to speed with the fake outrage — the fauxtrage, as I like to call it — stewing about something or other Stephen Kenny showed his Republic of Ireland team before they played England a while back.

The offence-taking military-industrial complex may well have moved on by the time you’re reading this, after all, and set up its circus tent somewhere else.

In its wake it leaves all sorts of obvious points to be made, the most glaring being the comparison to the references to Bloody Sunday ahead of Ireland-England at Croke Park in 2007; at that stage it seemed that emergency legislation had been passed surreptitiously, stipulating that anything published ahead of that game had to refer to the emotional baggage of 1920.

Why is it suddenly problematic, then, to refer to (deep breath) the troubled history of Ireland and England?

I was surprised to hear about this video business because — and I say this with a straight face — I thought professional sportspeople didn’t need to be geed up by a video. While this is a point sports psychologists will no doubt drone on about for years to come, I concede I thought such athletes were capable of motivating themselves for a high-profile game.

An old full-back says goodbye

Condolences to the Buckley family of Ballyvolane on the loss last week of Paddy, late of CIE and Delanys.

I got to know Paddy in the ‘80s, long after his pomp as ‘PB’, a dynamic full-back who dominated the square in Gaelic football fields all over Cork during the ‘50s; even then, 30 years on, he carried himself like a man who didn’t believe full-forwards deserved an even break.

Paddy worked for CIE, and I can recall standing on the platform in Heuston at one point decades ago — slightly dazed after landing in from Cork, considering which way to go, when I got a nudge from behind.

“Moynihan, don’t be stuck,” said PB.

Many readers will recall his son Johnny starring for the Cork hurlers with distinction for years — to him, Ann (Rose), Pat, Anthony, Lorraine (O’Connell) and Fergus, my commiserations.

Obama’s book is no Everest. Or is it?

A couple of recommendations this week, though I don’t know if I can say Barack Obama’s book, A Promised Land, is really a recommendation — it’s over 700 pages long.

If you have the appetite for that, I understand that it is the first volume of a two-book series.

But still, a literate inhabitant of the White House and all that.

Something more manageable? Ed Caesar talked to this column a few years back about his book Two Hours: The Quest To Run The Impossible Marathon, and now he’s come back with another. In The Moth and the Mountain: A True Story of Love, War and Everest Caesar tells the story of Maurice Wilson, who tried to climb Mount Everest in 1933.

This in spite of the fact that Wilson “had hardly climbed anything more challenging than a flight of stairs”, in Caesar’s words.

I’m not really going out on a limb when I say this is probably going to be more entertaining than a detailed account of the Iowa Caucus of 2008.

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