Glen Rovers’ success bridges nations and generations
He pointed out, for instance, that refugees tend to be on the move in the first place searching for a better life - why else, he pointed out, would they leave the places where they were born and raised?
The chat soon rolled back then to the game, and the length of time since the Glen had lost won, 26 years, and how special a victory would be.
The Glen won that county final. Pat had gone back to his post in Zambia at that stage, but I texted him on the whistle and his response was swift, saying that he’d listened to the commentary on the internet out in Lusaka and they’d had their own celebration.
In this scenario the Glen’s victory stands in for county final wins all over the country, for games which end in long shadows and wintry sunshine, with the young and the elderly alike walking across heavy fields to embrace their heroes.
That can be emotional. The little girl in Páirc Uí Rinn yesterday week who asked why her nana was crying was told to look at all the other nanas and grandads who were crying as well: a gap of 26 years between titles means that a lot of those who tilled the soil in the barren years aren’t around to see the crop come in.
In every corner of the country, when a lengthy famine ends, one of the first sentences you hear as the cup is presented begins with someone’s name, with a variant of ‘they would have loved today’ close behind.
hat caught my eye about the Glen’s victory, though, was the Blackpool club’s traditional method of transport back to their base - walking the Sean Óg Murphy Cup over the Christy Ring Bridge to the north side of the city, a symbolic return home.
The noisy procession across the river brought plenty of the residents in the apartments in that part of the city to their windows to witness what is know by the young folk on social media as “scenes”.
And this is where it all intersects. The popular view is that many of the people living in those apartments are newly arrived in this country, people who were born in places like Vilnius and Warsaw, Lagos and, maybe, Lusaka.
You’ll recall that last Sunday week was also Ireland-France and Ireland-Poland, so there was plenty on offer across the sporting spectrum, but if you live along the Lee across the Cork Opera House, those events didn’t intrude through your double-glazing the way the Glen homecoming did.
It would be a fine experiment to climb into one of H. G. Well’s time machines and flick forward twenty years or so, to hear an interview from a future Glen captain namechecking that evening in 2015 when, as a small child, he looked out his bedroom window, saw a crowd and a cup, and wondered what it would be like to be part of that. Or a captain of the Irish rugby team, or the holding midfielder on the international soccer team.
Emotion and inspiration. As Browning never said, or else what’s a heaven for?
Gatland deserves an Irish debt of gratitude
Fair to say there wasn’t much love on show for Warren Gatland when Wales lost on Saturday night in the Rugby World Cup.
Cast your mind back: the Welsh hanging on grimly, with a patched-up team, the vast South Africans pressing hard, and then the last-gasp winning try for the men in dark green. When I say there wasn’t much love, that was mostly from the supporters in lighter green.
Gatland has been transformed in recent years into quite the ogre, and there’s no doubt he can shoulder quite a lot of the blame himself for a succession of graceless attacks (input ‘Warren Gatland criticises’ into Google and the results come thick and fast).
It’s easy to forget that Gatland was the man in charge of Ireland when the team began to turn the tide and win some games, in particular in France. The sense of expectation that Ireland would beat France in this year’s World Cup has its origins way back in Gatland’s reign. A little respect mightn’t go astray.
Gatland deserves an Irish debt of gratitude
Fair to say there wasn’t much love on show for Warren Gatland when Wales lost on Saturday night in the Rugby World Cup.
Kasparov remains the king of chess
A face from the past popped up over the weekend when I read a lengthy interview with Garry Kasparov, who has transformed himself from a chess superstar into a political leader opposing Vladimir Putin in his native Russia, and suffered all the expected consequences.
Kasparov is still a chess player, however. In the interview there was an offhand reference to the fact that he still plays, usually against a couple of dozen players at a time. He’s played a few thousand games since 2001 and has yet to lose.
Quality. I can’t say I’ve ever been a huge chess fan but for many years at home we had a book about the great chess players - Morphy, Botvinnik, Alekhine - which remains a model of compressed biography and judicious evaluation.If only I could remember its title for purposes of searching on Amazon...
Slouching towards Joan is recommended
One book that I may have to pick up - and thankfully the title is to hand - is a biography of Joan Didion, The Last Love Song, by Tracy Daugherty.
You probably know Didion through The Year of Magical Thinking, a short book she wrote about the sudden passing of her husband, but even at that point she had almost 40 years of mesmerising non-fiction behind her - Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are two of the big hits, but Where I Was From is a good place to start.
I don’t know if there’s an Irish version of Joan Didion, but the original is well worth checking out. Seeing as I finished that Gore Vidal book, Tracy Daugherty looks like she has one guaranteed sale here.
