Michael Moynihan: Mayo and Waterford would love to be disliked
Mayo’s Aidan O’Shea and Lee Keegan dejected after the All-Ireland final defeat. Picture: INPHO/James Crombie
You have a favourite team, don’t you?
Of course you do.
It’s us, it’s we, they’re all your fellow travellers and comrades in arms. We’re all in together and we rise and fall as one. People know you as one of the army: don’t talk to me when we’ve lost, I’ll slag you when we win, what are we doing now, how will we do next year, where are we going at all?
We were never better. We were never worse.
But what about the other teams, specifically another team you have a fondness for? Do you have one of those, too?
Of course you do.
There’s a curious logic to having a second team that you like. They’re never more successful than the team you really follow. Often you’re being a little condescending when you declare that secondary affiliation, one which is best expressed by the ultimate putdown, the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head.
‘I’d love to see them win it.’ There are good examples from the last couple of weekends. Go back to the hurling final and both Limerick and Waterford had a decent claim on being lovable teams.
Well, Limerick did up to a couple of years ago. Then they won an All-Ireland and ended a famine going back decades and . . . what? Now they’re not quite as lovable any more.
Go further. By winning an All-Ireland they begin the move down to the far end of the spectrum, to become unpopular, particularly by winning a second All-Ireland.
This trend followed a well-worn path after the All-Ireland final. On social media Limerick player Gearóid Hegarty was singled out as having escaped censure for fouling opponents, a pattern that has been recognisable for generations wherein a player on a successful team emerges as the embodiment of that team’s supposed faults.
(In former decades, of course, immediate recourse was unavailable to those players. Hegarty’s abrupt rejection of the charge on social media may not still the criticism, but it was refreshing to see.) Waterford, by contrast, continue to endure a lengthy famine of their own. Consequently, they have a hold on the affections of neutrals everywhere in the hurling world. Affections that would last just as long as it’d take for Waterford to win an All-Ireland, in fact.
In football, the dramatis personae were even more stark.
When Wilt Chamberlain said many years ago that no-one roots for Goliath, the Dublin footballers were an example he could have proffered instead of a Philistine war hero from millennia ago. It may come as a shock to Dublin friends of this column, but the boys in blue are not the popular choice of non-Dubliners, which is as neutral a description of their standing as I can offer.
That standing i mbéal an phobail is neatly balanced out by that of their opponents last Saturday. The long and winding psychodrama of Mayo and Sam Maguire is a safety valve for all other counties (apart from Dublin. And Mayo themselves, obviously).
The litany of heartbreak and pain endured by Mayo in the last couple of decades in particular has been a therapeutic experience for counties which haven’t had to deal with it themselves. Last Saturday’s loss, with its early goal, the dread in those closing minutes, underlines that point.
This area branches into rich subsidiary areas of study. Take the reasoning behind that fondness for a team which doesn’t win: what does that say about your attitude to sport?
And this leads to another intriguing mode of thought, where a siege mentality is embraced and celebrated by supporters, but they also feel free to be offended by the outside antipathy which generates that siege mentality.
There are even more nooks and crannies to explore here. Teams are generally disliked because of success, which comes within the rules of the game, but not for dirty play, which is outside the rules, and so on. All of which is to say, in one sense, that you’d love to see Waterford and Mayo win it. And graduate to being disliked.
I can tell you what I’m not going to miss about 2020.
Not so much the masks and the hand-washing, for the simple reason that those are activities likely to survive deep into 2021, no matter what sport you follow.
I’m not referring to the sheer weariness with the caveats and warnings, the lack of certainty about whether sports events are taking place in the first place and the difficulties of planning for such events.
What I’m not going to miss, specifically, is one accommodation we’ve had to make.
Take all those weird sports-oriented Zoom calls with everyone — and I mean everyone — angling their camera to capture every nose hair.
Has anyone cottoned to that yet? The fact that if you have the laptop/phone sitting on the table in front of you at that elevation your face is seen in the least flattering light possible?
Nobody needs Gordon Willis to drop around to the sitting-room to light the production properly, but I’ve seen some online contributors loom over the screen as though they were examining the scene of a crime. And display nostril thickets where you could hide a body.
Great to see a few familiar faces last week in the Christy Ring documentary, and some unfamiliar ones.
Liz Howard’s presence on the screen was a timely reminder of an era when first came on the scene, and Howard was one of the early contributors.
Given the necessity now for gender balance, the TV show deserves credit for being ahead of the curve 40 years ago with a female analyst. You could argue that less noise is made of that breakthrough than should be the case.
For instance, in 1979 Howard suggested that Dublin’s Jimmy Keaveney was harshly sent off in a championship game against Offaly, and newspaper headlines duly followed.
Howard appeared at a Leinster Council disciplinary meeting to speak on Keaveney’s behalf.
To give The Sunday Game credit, there are now plenty of female contributors covering both codes, but as the person who blazed the initial trail perhaps Howard hasn’t gotten her due over the years.
Hail and farewell to John Le Carre, who passed away last week. The master of the spy novel had a long-standing interest in Ireland, and west Cork in particular - his grandmother was born near Reenascreena.
I haven’t read all his books but I enjoyed Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, as millions of others have. Le Carre was probably lucky in the adaptations of his work - the terrific TV series of T. T. S. S. in the early eighties starred Alec Guinness, stunning as George Smiley. When the book was made into a single stand-alone movie in 2011 that TV series cast a serious shadow, but the movie and its stellar cast worked well in their own right.
For something a little different, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost In The Throat has been dazzling reviewers and winning prizes for the last few weeks with its blend of meditation on female bodies with the famous old Irish poem, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. Well worth your time.
