A tale of plebs, points and tomahawks
In fact, he may even have borrowed Éamon de Valera’s heart and spends quality time every day looking into it in his tastefully furnished south Dublin home. Because, he announces airily, “if the plebs had their way it’d be a Dublin-Mayo final”.
For once the panel are stunned into silence. Michael has performed the signal feat of shutting up even Pat Spillane. Plebs? Plebs?
“You’ve been living in Dublin too long,” Pat eventually recovers to splutter. As it happens, Joe Brolly was in Mayo the previous night and is able to tell us precisely what the man on the Claremorris omnibus was thinking. Well, maybe not totally precisely. “I think the general consensus was that they wanted Kerry. From what I can remember...”
From what he can remember? Quite. “I drank 10 pints,” he adds by way of illustration (this, Joe, is what’s known as TMI. Too Much Information. Don’t try it again, please). Yes, 10 pints. And Colm O’Rourke was labouring under the illusion that he used to hang around with really hard men in Mick Lyons, Liam Harnan and the rest of ’em?
The general consensus in the studio is that An Claisico, as RTÉ have billed it, will be won by Dublin. Too young, too pacy, too incisive. Just as long as they don’t keep squandering all those goal chances they create. Joe estimates they’ve wasted 20 such opportunities this summer. Which is a lot. Even more than the number of pints he sank in Mayo last night.
And the match starts and goal chances are flying around like snuff at a wake. Kerry, who are playing football written by Mozart and conducted by a red-haired Von Karajan, take their two. Dublin, the presence of whose number 11 ensures that Kilkenny ended up appearing in Croke Park this September after all, miss their two, in line with Joe’s warning.
But then Diarmuid Connolly is short with an intended point and Paul Mannion is there on the edge of the square to fist the ball home and prompt Kevin McStay into introducing a new word to the GAA vernacular. “He tomahawks the ball into the net!”
Huh? We all know the capital city is full of some pretty dodgy characters — joyriders, glue sniffers, lawyers, bankers, Bertie Ahern etc — but this is a new one. So many cowboys, and now it appears to be home to at least one Indian. We do live in an increasingly multicultural society, I suppose.
After 19 minutes Kerry lead by 3-3 to 1-6. Darragh Maloney, alongside Kevin in the commentary box, is in rhapsodies. “It’s just a shoot-out!” It certainly is, and how clever of Jim Gavin to pack an Indian and his, ahem, tomahawk.
At half-time the panel are in ecstasies too, and not from 10 pints or any other such chemically induced highs either. No, it’s from the points and the goals and the sheer panache of it all. “An absolute privilege to be here,” breathes Joe. “It has restored my faith in gaelic football,” asserts Pat.
And the teams go at it hell for leather again in the second half and the scores are level with a minute left, and just when we’re about to dust off the old line about a draw being a fair result and neither side deserving to lose, the Indians hit an unanswered 2-1. Incredibly, Kerry have lost by seven points. How the hell did that happen? “The youthful energy of Dublin overwhelmed Kerry in the end,” Colm sums up.
Joe gets all Danny Blanchflower and declares that the game “is about glory”. After the extravaganza he’s just been treated to he can hardly go and have another rant of Sean Cavanaghesque proportions, so for the second Sunday in a row viewers get an unexploded Brolly. How disappointing. Still, he can’t let resist having a poke at Kerry for their “cynical fouling” tactics in the second half.
This very nearly pushes Pat, who’s trying hard to be magnanimous, over the edge of Slea Head.
“Stop being negative,” he snipes. Hello, Mr Pot. Meet Mr Brolly.
