Heat of battle will be cooled by clichéd claptrap
The first distressing fact is that almost all of the managers in both codes will mar many genuinely thrilling games by uttering streams of clichéd claptrap both before and afterwards.
The stars will do likewise when they get the chance. That never changes. The happier fact, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that the incredible Micheál O Muircheartaigh will polish and deliver at least two more verbal gems during the season to add to his priceless collection. Can he produce even better ones than the Fox chasing the Rabbitte or the one about Seán Óg not hailing from the heartland of hurling? He probably can and will and I look forward to those even as I shudder at the thought of the eternal clichéd torrents from many other. Lads it is past time for a change.
We live in the era of the sound-bite with teeth and style. We live in the time of the Tarbh Dearg that flies on wings but there is no evidence of that on GAA sidelines when the talking starts.
The great games have developed skills and powers and energies to match the era.
But the mouthpiece men of all the teams have not moved with the times. There will be managerial postmortems in the forthcoming Sundays which we all know off by heart in advance.
Not a word of the script has changed since the Forties. I’ve been told that wise old parish priests have a secret book of sermons for every Sunday and holy day which they can and do regurgitate down all the years.
I’d swear that GAA managers have a similar book. There is the Losing Speech and there is the Winning Speech. We deserve better at this stage than that.
“We have a great bunch of lads this year... we had a bad start and conceded those two early goals but I was delighted with the way they fought back... in the second half we came back at them with great courage and commitment altogether... we were playing a great team today and they put it up to us just as we expected they would... our forwards wasted a lot of chances and we’ll have to look at that... but all credit to them for coming good in the end... that last point was special... now we can look forward to the next match with more confidence... still a lot to be done... Hopefully we will have (Grizzled Veteran) fit again for the next round...”
And so on and so forth. Not good enough lads. Not up to the pace of the game.
I would love to hear some manager really tell the naked truth this summer. I would love to hear sentences like:
“We peeled them and ate them alive” and “we got stuck into them from the start” and even personalised stuff like “PJ never gave him a smell of the ball” or ” Anthony skinned him” or, more generally but equally accurately often enough, “they might have had the brains but we had the brawn”.
Cliches never catch the specifics of the game we have just witnessed. “We ran them into the ground” and “our hard man showed he was tougher than their hard man” and an occasional flash of colour: “Tony has a great engine but there was something astray with the transmission”.
As O Muircheartaigh has proven down the decades great clashes can be embellished forever by a single memorable descriptive sentence.
The truths get verbally lost too. No manager ever manages to see his own player’s foul stroke or kick or even head butt despite the fact that he is supposed to be watching every second of the play. We are unlikely to hear any manager this season admitting that Frank or Paul or Billy or Jack deserved to walk because of what he did.
We will hear: “I didn’t see the incident myself”. And we will hear that more than once for sure.
They will all, however, see every questionable act by every opponent from start to finish. And, amidst all the criticism of referees, they will all be adamant: “Yes, it was a clear penalty”. We will hear that many times too.
Since they are going to criticise the ref shouldn’t they express their views colourfully too? I await the occasion when an angry manager will say something powerful and original on this issue. Something maybe like: “Ref’s whistles are very contrary yokes to control properly. I think Joseph had a lot of trouble with his whistle today, especially when we were in their square!”.
We’d remember something like that for longer than we might remember the game.
And the star players who are likely to be interviewed after crucial games should polish up their act too. Would it not be mighty if some confident captain of a provincial title side came out and said “I’m now practicing how to lead the Hip Hip Hooray for the losers in Croke Park next September”.
We’d remember the likes of that too.
* Contact: cormac66@hotmail.com
