Irish cricket set for golden age after Indian summer
Multi-million euro, 10-year deal? With a gargantuan Indian multi-national conglomerate? Goes by the name of Shapoorji Pallonji? Owned by Irish billionaire Pallonji Mistry? No?
If none of that rings a bell then it may be because, like so many thousands of people right now, events to come in Croke Park this next two weekends have more or less colonised your thoughts. That’s understandable. Heaven knows it wouldn’t be the first time the GAA has managed to steal cricket’s thunder.
As we have come to appreciate more in recent years, thanks to some superb journalistic digging by a number of people such as Ger Siggins and Michael O’Dwyer, cricket was well on the way to cementing a relationship with Ireland that hurling and football would eventually enjoy after the advent of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884.
The GAA’s own website makes mention of the turnaround in fortunes by remarking that: “While concentrating largely on athletics in these formative years [of the association], there is no doubt that football was re-energised and popularised while hurling was saved from almost extinction at the expense of cricket.”
The tomes written by Siggins, O’Dwyer and others shed light on what we see as being the most quintessential of English pastimes and on the popularity of the game in what most of us would now consider unlikely hotbeds such as Kilkenny, Tipperary, Westmeath and Wexford. But then cricket really is at least partly of Irish origin after all.
Or so some say.
Andrew Laing, writing in the very early part of the last century, claimed the earliest recordings of a sport resembling cricket are in 11th century Irish annals where Cúchulain is described as “defending the hole”. Whatever about that, Eoghan Corry pointed out in The GAA Book of Lists back in 2005 that the GAA’s founding father, Michael Cusack, once wrote that “the game best suited to the Irish character was cricket”.
By the 1880s there were almost 90 clubs operating between Kilkenny and Tipperary alone, with farmers and labourers as likely to take to the crease as landlords or British Army officers but, as we all know, the sport spiralled into decline as an atmosphere of feverish nationalism boiled over in the early 20th century and the ban on ‘foreign’ games truly took hold.
You could say that the island simply wasn’t big enough for the both of them. Or maybe open-minded enough. That has clearly changed. Cricket has been knocking it out of the park on and off the field this last 10 years with our representative sides dominating the associate level at all age grades and the senior men’s side faring so well at the one-day and T20 forms as to make the prospect of full Test status a goal by 2019.
Blue-chip sponsorships with the likes of Bank of Ireland, RSA, Toyota and now Shapoorji Pallonji have paralleled that renaissance with bat and ball and, when you sit back and absorb exactly what has happened in recent years, there is a credible case for claiming that its performance is the most impressive and uplifting sporting story of the past decade on this island.
The GAA has grown commercially, rugby has rocketed in popularity and profitability, golf is enjoying its golden age thanks to a slew of Major titles won by Irishmen and our amateur boxers have been punching well above the country’s weight since the 2008 Olympic Games.
Yet, all those sports were sowing seeds on grounds significantly more fertile than the soil on which cricket has reaped its harvests, a point referenced earlier this week by Cricket Ireland chief executive Warren Deutrom, who spoke at the announcement of Shapoorji Pallonji’s backing about the desire to expand beyond the sport’s strongholds of Dublin and Belfast.
Their actions speak even louder than such words.
Cricket Ireland has targeted a playing population of 50,000 people, launched initiatives in schools and clubs, undertaken an inter-provincial competition and launched academies regional and national in the knowledge that victories such as those at the World Cups in 2007 and 2011 against Pakistan and England will only be replicated if the requisite attention is paid to the stars of tomorrow.
The plan is no less than to make cricket Ireland’s fourth most popular major sport.
Watch this space. If you haven’t been already.
Email: brendan.obrien@examiner.ieTwitter: @Rackob
