From realistic pessimism to hopeless optimism
An odd assortment milling around the lobby.
Old-money horsey types arriving in from the RDS – jodhpurs the preferred fashion statement – discussing various equine issues. Fetlocks and so forth.
Also present, a rake of Irish army officers fresh from the same venue, most of them drinking coffee (black) and very spare with the small talk, even amongst each other.
A third element also in evidence – the lean young men in dark blue tracksuits, most of them swinging hurleys as they headed out the main foyer doors.
Cork were based in their ancestral home in Dublin over the weekend, the Burlington, where the water in the taps is piped all the way up from Gougane Barra.
The chit-chat among the sofas in front of the reception desk ranged over yesterday’s game, naturally enough, and the mood among southern supporters was remarkably downbeat, unnaturally enough.
With a congenital default setting of bouncy optimism, it was strange to hear the Cork accents expressing so much gloom, but given the aura surrounding Kilkenny, maybe not too surprising.
But over the course of the evening it wasn’t a shock to hear some voices raised in hope, with the note of positivity directly reflecting the increasing notation on the room tab.
Not all of that faint blossom of confidence was watered by alcohol. Some of it just occurs spontaneously, a refusal to accept the hard inarguable evidence for the prosecution, a dogged belief that no matter what, your own crowd have some kind of chance.
That kind of last-gasp hoping isn’t confined to the GAA, either; after about five minutes of hearing ifs and you-never-knows and early-goals on Saturday night, your correspondent was reminded of a piece written many years ago by Joe Posnanski, noted American sportswriter.
One of Posnanski’s first big gigs was an assignment to the Super Bowl, but the posting came with a twist. The writer was sent to cover the underdogs for the preceding week, and as most observers of American football will be aware, the underdogs in the Super Bowl are usually reduced to Pedigree chum after about three minutes of the big game. And so Posnanski bedded down with the sacrificial lambs on Monday, ready to count down to their date with oblivion.
But then something odd happened. The longer he spent listening to the underdogs and their message of defiance, the more he invested in them and their hopes, however forlorn those were.
Their offence wasn’t the greatest, for instance, but if they managed an early touchdown what would happen? They were susceptible to the running attack, but what if they held out in the first quarter? They were seriously outgunned by the favourites, but they had a puncher’s chance, surely?
Right up to the kick-off Posnanski found himself thinking, well, it could happen, it’s sport, after all, and in any two-horse race there’s always...
You can guess the ending of course. Posnanski’s cannon fodder played their appointed role and were minced from start to finish.
The similarities with big GAA games are pretty obvious: by definition most inter-county supporters are embedded the way Posnanski was, nestling in the bosom of their own kind, where they fall prey to the burgeoning seeds of... well, confidence might be too strong a brew.
Seeds of a glimmer of hope, if we might mix our metaphors somewhat. The week of a big game the pendulum often swings from Monday-morning depression to Friday-evening possibility, and we saw it for ourselves on Saturday night.
You know how that story ended yesterday, of course.
What we want to know, though, is whether Joe Posnanski has any plans to decamp to Waterford or Tipperary for the last couple of weeks in August. And how positive he’ll be early in September.
* michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
