Tommy Martin: An absence of energy was the defining experience of sport in 2020 

Limerick captain Declan Hannon lifts the Liam MacCarthy Cup in an empty Croke Park. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

A passage from Jim McGuinness’s autobiography Until Victory Always sits unaccompanied on the back cover of the book’s original hardback edition.

McGuinness is walking the Croke Park pitch with his brother Mark after playing there for Donegal in 1998. The crowd is long gone and seagulls are their only company in the stadium.

“We looked up the pitch towards Hill 16 and then we both stopped at the same instant,” the quote reads. 

“We were there all alone but you could feel this energy; that there had been a big crowd of people present and that something had happened and even though the day was over, that energy was still kind of moving around, trapped in the stadium. I think that is why we both stopped, because we could feel that.”

Perhaps the publishers chose these words to play up the image of McGuinness as a mystical figure, attuned to auras and energy flows; a guru in a tracksuit.

Or maybe he was on to something.

The common experience of sport in 2020 was an absence. For a long period, this was a literal thing, in that sport simply vanished. Then there was a physical absence: when sport returned, most of us simply weren’t there. There was the absence of noise, save for that harvested by television companies from the ghosts of crowds past, the sound of silence something shameful to be covered up.

But gone too was what McGuinness and his brother felt that day. Maybe it is new age hokum or perhaps there is some basis in molecular science for what changes in the ether on the day of a sporting occasion; but the absence of that energy, for want of a better word, was the defining experience of sport in 2020.

The sport continued without it, when it was allowed to. Sometimes it thrived in its absence. Those who won could hardly claim to have missed it. But you could still feel it: the absence.

As Limerick powered to their All-Ireland hurling title, striding away from Waterford in the closing stretch, you thought of the last time. It was different in 2018 when Galway almost clawed them back into their 45-year nightmare. The final whistle brought relief, joy, and incredulity — almost too much to process.

Then the opening guitar chord of ‘Dreams’ by The Cranberries rang out of the Croke Park speakers and suddenly the energy shifted. Dolores O’Riordan was only seven months dead. A feeling washed over the stadium beyond mere happiness. 

It was deep and primal, some strange mix of grief and glory, an emotional torrent powered by decades of longing and loss. It must have haunted the stadium for weeks.

It was hard not to think of those Limerick people this year. There would have been no similar outpouring had they been there; this time it was a coronation, not a catharsis. But imagine how they would have greeted their team’s imperious display, each point ushered over the bar with great waves of pride and appreciation, then a final, embracing ovation. In their absence it all seemed cold and procedural.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed and the energies of the great sporting occasion are mined far from the pitch. The hurling final gave us one of the most affecting of the many pieces about this year of absence, written by Paul Rouse in these pages.

Headlined ‘The 40 things I’ll miss on All-Ireland Hurling final day,’ Rouse detailed that enduring timetable, from the burning of sausages on the frying pan to the grave subplot of tickets, the walk to the stadium ‘past the smell of frying onions’ and the sound of buskers, the small matter of the match, which makes way for the real business of the long night, with its pints and craic and surreal encounters and wistful conclusion over chips.

As a historian, Rouse — someone who literally wrote the book about sport in Ireland — knows that the seeming ephemera of the big day represents its actual fabric. As history unwinds, the games themselves fade and our gaze focuses on the people on the sidelines, why they were there and what they were doing.

The Sweet Science, AJ Liebling’s fabled account of the 1950s New York boxing scene, has endured as one of the classic sports books less because of his lyrical reportage on great fights and fighters than its vivid social portrait of the hoodlums and hangers-on that surrounded them.

In this, Liebling was himself inspired by Pierce Egan, who documented the world of bareknuckle boxing in 19th century England in volumes entitled Boxiana. Egan’s phrase “the sweet science of bruising” gave Liebling his title and the later writer draws on his predecessor for parallels in the styles and personalities of boxers across the centuries. But it is Egan’s tales of the colourful tapestry of Regency sporting life that influence Liebling heaviest.

Boxiana recounts how ‘foot-toddlers’ would set out days in advance of the fight, followed by milling coves and flash coves (fighters and fixers); dashing to the scene in their fast traps would be members of the ‘Fancy’ (aristocratic patrons of the scandalous scene), all hoping to get their bets down in time and avoid the temptations of Cyprians and blue ruin (prostitutes and gin).

It’s not quite Up For The Match.

These are the strange energies that have always swirled around sporting occasions. Princes and paupers, merchants, artisans, vagabonds, and clergy: the amphitheatre has always been the great microcosm of society, stratified into its classes and factions.

The stadium is a city in itself, teeming with the base and the glorious, from the kid flipping the burgers to the hero on the field, the drunken fanatics and the political entourage, the business boxes and the busy scribes, the lewd and the lofty, foot-toddlers and the Fancy; fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters, friends and foes, all their passions and all their pains drawn together on that day and through the living and the dead across the centuries and millennia before them.

Absent, but not gone.