Croker’s gain is Tbilisi’s loss
For now, we must press on with the old ones. Every hurling match is still the greatest ever.
“It started off like a chess match, but it turned into a full-blown game of battleship.” I’m not sure which of the lads on Radio One said it afterwards. I had it on in the ear, up in the Cusack, still looking out onto the field long after the whistle.
You could almost picture whoever it was sitting in rubble and debris; the studio walls disintegrating under the pandemonium of the marvellous commentary that had just fed through from Marty and Donal Óg.
So shaken, he could only come up with the most inadequate metaphor of all time.
You couldn’t quite picture Cody and O’Shea sitting there, cooly calling coordinates. Unless you imagined somebody chucking board, ships and pegs up in the air every five seconds.
There were a lot of people looking out onto the field in those moments afterwards last Sunday, many of them with a proprietary air that made Bull McCabe seem ambivalent about ownership.
The vacuum of a draw, I suppose. The usual emotional extremes suppressed. Instead, others bubbling to the surface. Pride. Identity. A little hubris, no doubt.
No one even grousing yet, except a young fella nearby in blue and gold, U8 again next year, I’d say, insisting he’d have stuck the one Bonner hit at Murphy, at least if it was on his good side.
Even his instinct was to identify with it. In those short moments, before normal life resumed, and we could all start being cynical about how a whistle as early as last year’s was late will reap another bonanza, I figured that’s what people were doing; connecting themselves in some small way. Maybe it was just me.
Rattled by this temporary, uncomfortable inability to summon cynicism, I thought, instead, of the man who pulled in outside the homeplace, one evening, a long time ago, and saluted the young lad pucking around in the yard.
He probably knew, straight away, from the rooting he saw, to expect disappointment, but the young lad was a good size, at least, and you needed 15, so he enquired after the father and wondered would he bring the lad up to the field. I wondered did the same man — who might never be finished pulling in outside Ryans’ houses around our neck of the woods — visit young Gearóid’s place another evening and get better rewarded.
I wondered how many of those gazing out onto Croke Park now, was the father or mother or teacher or neighbour or mentor who first brought one of those players up to a field.
Or what stitch in this ornate tapestry could they claim? To most, sitting there, gazing out, looked connection enough.
No wonder, with all that basking going on, around the place, that Cody wouldn’t let them talk, after it.
Happy enough to let the Tipp lads wander out and shoot the breeze where an enormous sense of well-being was choking Croker’s underground arteries.
And nothing won. He’d rather have exposed his lads to toxic waste.
“I have no real phenomenal feelings,” he said. A man quickly disconnecting himself from the preposterous notion that anything good could have happened on a day he was spared only by a machine.
A good few others soon disconnected from phenomenal feelings too, in a nearby boozer screening the match in Tbilisi.
Sammy Goldwyn would have grown restless, as the easy clichés tumbled.
The global game will survive unkind comparisons between a tense European qualifier and hurling’s showpiece, but for a match that produced an emotional high, there wasn’t much basking afterwards.
In an extraordinarily tender portrait of John “The Baptist” Delaney — the man who cleansed the FAI of its sins — in the Sunday Independent, Barry Egan wrote: “For the romantics among us, Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane’s dream team, partly put together by Delaney, supplied the hope that the Ireland soccer team could lead their people on an almost existential quest to save the soul of the nation during recession.”
Grand ambition. Incidentally, the same piece produced a Denis O’Brien metaphor for football that adequately described much of what went on in Tbilisi. “It is a game of chess and you don’t need to be playing draughts.”
After checkmate, Martin O’Neill didn’t think Tony O’Donoghue was happy enough. By proxy, he was addressing us all and it sounded presumptuous. Complacent even. A professional sport leaning on instead of leading its people. Forget romance. It wants us to fake it.
If Irish football is to retain its grip on the nation’s soul; it will have to do a lot more to reconnect us, before telling us how to react.
We must begin to wonder, now, if Arsene Wenger can ever truly realign himself with the soul of Premier League football. You will remember, when we left Arsene, a couple of weeks ago, he was being roundly criticised for deserting his post on deadline day, for flying to Rome on some peace figary, while there were car windows to be rolled down and baying mobs waving inflatable ladies to be kept in the loop.
He was back, this week, with mealy-mouthed excuses about meeting the Pope instead of Jim White.
“I am a Catholic, so it was an experience, and one I accepted a long time ago, and on top of that it was a game for peace and multi-religion understanding,” protested Arsene.
“I thought today where we are a bit in front of an international religious war, it was a very important game,” he ventured, no mention of whether there were three points at stake.
We’ve always known, deep down, that discipline, when it comes to professional sports organisations, is chiefly a matter of PR. Of protecting the image. Of Cannot Be Seen To Condone.
Otherwise, all sporting bodies would do a lot less to discourage the stuff we really want to see on the pitch; brawls and melees.
In a lot of cases, sports organisations give the impression they’d rather not get involved in discipline at all for off-field transgressions.
The NFL certainly did when handing Ray Rice a two-match slap on the wrist for brutally beating his fiancée.
Now the world has watched the video, the ban is indefinite and Rice appears finished. Too big an image problem to condone.
Of course he holds a grudge, but it was a nice line on his old Madrid sparring partner: “Mourinho is a character tailored to these noisy and empty times.”
It might prolong our romantic interest, but the bloated Euros don’t look like setting too many pulses racing.
