Shocking scenes in Kerry
We will wait, for instance, in various shades of patience, until Jack Grealish, perhaps in a moment of quiet reflection lying in the middle of the road, decides if he is an Irishman or an Englishman.
In recent weeks, we have seen one of the great male Olympic champions begin the process of becoming a woman. And in various shades of tolerance, we have gotten on with our day.
At the same time, nothing could adequately prepare us for what we saw this week. One of the shock metamorphoses of our time, happening in front of our eyes and ears.
This trumped Kent to Superman, Wayne to Batman. Perhaps it was closest to Banner becoming the Hulk.
In truly shocking scenes, Tomás Ó Sé mutated definitively from Kerryman to pundit, and nobody knows if there’s an antidote to change him back.
In case you missed it, and you couldn’t have, because nearly every paper in the country had it, knowing the near-unprecedented nature of this event; Ó Sé, in the month of June, more or less wrote off Cork. He used words like “rudderless” and “disarray” and phrases such as “they will lie down”.
As usual, in the modern age of statistics and metrics, we were able to quickly assess the scale and import of these remarks. Former Cork star Colman Corrigan duly supplied the verdict: “Worth a couple of points to Cork.”
To fully understand the audacity that has been shown here, we must take into account that most Kerry people, even those who have nothing at all to do with football, have, at some point in their lives, woken up sweating in the middle of the night fretting that something they did or said that day might be worth a couple of points to Cork.
Ahead of Munster finals in Killarney, this anxiety is deepened, and last week you could hear them tuning up for the big effort to come with a dry-run masterclass in plamásing of Tipp.
The talk was all of banana skins and stiff tests and understrength teams and ‘getting out of Thurles’.
The Tipperary Star could have interviewed every man and woman in the Kingdom without turning up something worth a couple of points to Tipp.
So we are dealing here with an extraordinary deviation from standard practice. So extraordinary, in fact, that we must realise who we are dealing with and instinctively smell a rat.
These are the people, we must remember, who told us, just last September, that they’d go on away out and play their own oul game and not get too hung up on systems.
Just what kind of double-bluff is this?
On one hand you might speculate Tomás is genuinely donating a couple of points to Cork, to try and make a game of it, to tune them for bigger challenges to come.
But we must quickly dismiss that idea, because, behind all the plamásing, there is nothing the Kerry lads enjoy more than beating the daylights out of Cork.
No, I suspect what we are seeing here, not for the first time, is an Ó Sé sacrificing himself for his county.
This is the solo run of a man who has seen his people’s yerra stocks dangerously deplete.
When was the last time you heard Cork described as the ‘second best team in the country’ or ‘the big threat this year’? Was last year’s Munster final washout ever adequately explained away in time-honoured fashion?
“Yerra, we were lucky enough to get those eight unanswered points at the right time.” “Ah, if he had given a 45 that time, sure it could have been a different story altogether.”
No, Ó Sé has clearly seen a county take its eye off the ball, sleep too soundly in their beds and he has selflessly donned his pundit costume to focus them.
Expect a resumption of normal service in the coming fortnight.
It will take the form of alarming medical bulletins, as all manner of ailments surface in the camp. Groin strains, gout, twisted blood; you name it, the Kerry panel will have a desperate dose of it.
Then the rumour mill will begin to whir. “Your man won’t tog again this year. Did you hear he hit such-and-such a desperate box in Portugal?” The leaking of these memos will doubtless be attributed to mystery interlopers up trees, but we will all know what’s going on.
Next, Cork’s fragile self-esteem will need tending. The phrase ‘it just shows the pick they have if they can leave out Fintan Goold’ will be recited in every Kerry primary school.
In every pub near Rathmore and Glenflesk, it will be conceded that Colm O’Neill and Brian Hurley would have walked onto any of those great Kerry teams.
Every aspect of Cork life will be lauded. The Dixies were better than the Beatles; Inchydoney is nearly nicer than Banna; it’s hard to bate “those apple tarts in the English Market”.
By the time June is out, the Corkonian’s natural sense of enormous well-being should have swelled sufficiently. From there, an early goal from Gooch might be enough to finish the job. The job Tomás selflessly restarted.
Wallowing in a little Italia ‘90 nostalgia with George Hamilton, soon turned to a wallow in Know Your Sport nostalgia. And inevitably a debate as to why the greatest of all TV sports quizzes — alright, after Bullseye — isn’t still on air.
Especially, as George put it: “when you look at what some TV stations do with programmes. They flog dead horses until they get up again.”
Without wanting to criticise his bosses, George admitted to feeling there was no great appetite for Know Your Sport to continue setting an impressive pace near the top of RTÉ’s ratings.
George felt it could still have been running now, even without himself and Jimmy Magee, catering for the anoraks and nerds, a bit like the way Question of Sport plugs on, catering for the banter enthusiasts.
But George got the impression that sport — outside the obvious obligations and draw of live sport — just wasn’t regarded as “sexy enough” for primetime television.
You’d get that impression, over the years, alright, on the RTÉ. There was the dabble with On Home Ground, a serious leap of faith in the circumstances, but you always suspected not everyone’s hearts were in it.
Even the analysis shows that proved popular, such as Breaking Ball, always seem to be culled in case they got too popular.
Maybe the charge of the Second Captains highlights a slight change in attitude. All the same, you suspect the lads should be wary of suits appraising them in the Montrose corridors, wondering if they are quite sexy enough.
Watching Brazil-Peru, so soon after Ireland- Scotland, it would have been hard enough to convince alien life these were examples of the same sport.
The nation didn’t quite hold its breath, but it spoofed its way onto the bandwagon long enough to say things like ‘I’ve seen penalty corners given for less”.
Will not tire of telling us, during the women’s World Cup, that “England have a man over’.
Last week’s big call came back to haunt him when the inquest began and the little guy on the street was discussed and there was nobody there to blame personal stereos and third-level education.
