Clubbing together for common cause
On one level I didn’t want to overhear them say they were a couple of academics investigating Irish social attitudes; on another level I didn’t want to be seen hanging around outside the ladies’ loo. A fella could get a name.
My first concern looked unfounded from the start. Even total-immersion anthropologists don’t dress in head-to-toe branded sportswear, and the two ladies I’d seen — a mother and daughter, at a guess — were clad in Clare gear from top to toe.
They caught my eye, or rather my ear, not because they were vocal, though they were — there were more than 5,000 in attendance at Cork-Clare yesterday, but they were outshouted — and not because they were vitriolic, which they weren’t.
Normally I wouldn’t have noticed them at all, but because the assignment yesterday was a little different, I was able to pay more attention.
They were, however, very focused in their support. While they encouraged all the Clare players, there were one or two they cheered a little louder than the rest.
If it had been only one, I’d have guessed it was a brother or a boyfriend, but the fact that there were more than one suggested those getting the extra cheers were clubmates. Sitting alongside them was a chap about the same age as the older lady — father/husband? — who was a good deal quieter but did an amount of clenching with his water bottle at moments of high tension.
Elsewhere on the page I referred to the dilemma which faces GAA officialdom when it comes to allowing kids onto the field at half-time. This is a different sort of conundrum: the call on your loyalties when you want a clubmate to excel for the county. You want him to do well to the extent that you can’t help yourself and you end up nudging the people sitting alongside you and say, ‘he’s from my club’.
If he doesn’t do well, you can’t help yourself anyway and you end up roaring him on even more.
Clare won yesterday, of course. I kept an eye out and saw the two ladies heading out. Magnanimous. Patting a couple of Cork supporters on their way out. Not in a condescending way. They enjoyed their day and got their result. Their clubmen weren’t too bad either.
Before Katie Taylor started to pop up in Toyota advertising and before the women’s rugby team collected the Grand Slam, there was Sonia O’Sullivan.
It wasn’t that long ago, either. She won a silver medal in the Olympics in Sydney, just over a dozen years ago. In the decade or so before that, she was one of the best athletes in the world in her discipline. There was an evening in 1995 at the World Championships when she was the very best, and the proof was in the gold medal and the tricolour and the anthem.
On Saturday afternoon she was honoured by UCC, which named the running track in the Mardyke after the Cobh native. It wasn’t an ideal day for a dedication ceremony on Leeside — there were squalling showers and blustery winds — but that didn’t stop O’Sullivan from testing out the track. At 9am that morning she was out putting in the laps making sure that the facility which bears her name would be up to standard.
It’s no disrespect to Katie Taylor and the Irish women’s rugby team to say that O’Sullivan remains our greatest female sportswoman, and someone who would appear on any shortlist of our greatest athletes, full stop.
Her accomplishments provide an interesting counterpoint to the recent comments of another athlete, Jerry Kiernan, about the fitness or otherwise of GAA players. Kiernan sparked a debate on the relative standing of success in an indigenous sport which is negligible in its global appeal as against achievement in sports which are hugely popular across the globe.
By that reckoning, O’Sullivan’s achievements are staggering: Olympic medals. World championships. Add in the narrative arc and the story becomes irresistible: the innocence of her beginnings, the bitterness of her defeats by athletes who were subsequently indicted for drug use and the ultimate vindication, a podium finish in Sydney as the end of her career beckoned.
You can look around the country and see a relative dearth of commemoration when it comes to great sportspeople. Cork doesn’t do too badly, mind, having named a bridge and a tunnel after Christy Ring and Jack Lynch respectively.
What was encouraging about last Saturday’s ceremony was that it occurred with Sonia O’Sullivan young and healthy and still full of running. All too often in this country we wait until the person is gone before marking their achievements.
That’s what makes the notion that the person the Mardyke track is named after was able to run laps of that same track last Saturday morning all the more appealing.
Strange though it may be to those of you under a certain age, there was a time when pre-game warm-ups as we now understand them did not exist in the GAA, not even at inter-county level.
Players either sprinted or ambled out, took a few shots and had a stretch or two. Or not. There certainly wasn’t a structured approach, with pre-planned running and a set number of touches set for each player before the game began. Donal O’Grady, to be found elsewhere on these pages this morning, was one of the first managers to organise the warm-up from his days with Cork. Now the pre-game preparation is at the other end of the spectrum, with each county producing an elaborate choreography followed to the letter, filling every second in the countdown to throw-in, though. We may have seen a new refinement yesterday in the Gaelic Grounds, however.
Before the relegation play-off between Clare and Cork the Banner players stood back to back and swivelled their hurleys from left to right, clashing back to back over their shoulders.
They say you should plan for all eventualities, but flicking the ball over your shoulder?
The Gaelic Grounds was worth attending for one last reason yesterday. At half-time — and at full-time, before extra time — the field was almost filled by kids pucking the ball around.
A car had pulled up alongside me when I arrived in Limerick and the kids — in Cork jerseys — had piled out with hurleys. I had silently applauded their optimism, but clearly they were better informed about the relaxed attitude of the stewards around the perimeter. It’s a classic GAA dilemma. You want to make a game an accessible experience for people and allowing children to reenact the scores they’ve just seen helps with that.
But while conditions underfoot in the Gaelic Grounds were excellent yesterday, that’s not always the case around the country; once you penetrate into what Kavanagh called October-coloured weather — or county final time, as it’s known in the GAA — clubs and county boards are under huge pressure to keep pitches playable.
It can be easy to accuse the men tasked with keeping the sideline clear with a lack of humour, but not every pitch holds up like the Gaelic Grounds did yesterday. Remember this segment of the column; spare the maor when it gets muddy later on.
