Feeding Gaelic football’s controvassy monster
With protracted analysis of a manager’s reluctance to smile at the final whistle and inject sufficient gaiety into his press conferences.
How quickly we become addicted to the stuff.
The summer probably gave us too much. The special sauce that made the Premier League great was slathered lavishly across the championship season.
And Gaelic football, in particular, found that sweet spot where the disputes and feuds and conspiracies were overshadowing the football. A state of affairs the suits at Barclays and Carling will recall fondly from better days at The Best League in the World.
This summer we had mind games and conspiracy theories and siege mentalities and media blackouts and drugs bans. Managers lashed out and hit back and compiled dossiers and talked about facts.
And we drew ever closer to the ideal world where every press briefing is a tense, passive-aggressive standoff.
Perhaps the only real disappointment was the lack of any post-match handshake conspóid — surely Mark Hughes will be AIB’s next transfer swoop, following the success of Jeff and Kammy’s loan arrival in a mildly patronising bantz role.
Elsewhere, as the conspóid rolled on, the taking of selfies was recognised as the key inhibitor of matchday performance, just as it was in the Premier League a couple of seasons ago.
And hurling contributed its rumour mill — the GAA’s scurrilous answer to the transfer window. There was also the new helmet interference fetish to enjoy. And Jackie Tyrrell rewrote Game of Thrones as a Nowlan Park training spin with the Savage Hunger cranked up to 11.
Eventually even The Gooch stepped up, a man who wouldn’t be renowned for his contributions to the conspóid. He has caused widespread consternation, shattering all known GAA protocol, by being straight up about his intentions to make a few bob rather than adopt the time-honoured ah-shure-you-know-yourself approach to how the few bob lands in his account.
With all that going on off the field, the pressure was lifted somewhat between the lines, but Gaelic football still delivered in the one area of conspóid where we feared it might have peaked — the art of fouling.
It has always been the bedrock of Gaelic football, the foul. Essentially a foul is committed roughly every second — a hand left in here, a jersey tugged there. Maybe one in 100 is penalised.
Over the years, a craft has evolved and its masters work in the margins of discretion, keeping their tugs and dunts and slaps and skelps to an acceptable level of lawlessness. To stay just the right side of the soft free.
We have seen tactical fouling and deliberate fouling and cynical fouling and maybe we thought we had seen it all, in this arena.
But the All-Ireland final brought fresh advances. The chucking of any old thing to hand at a freetaker was impromptu genius. But a better sign that the great innovators in this sphere will never rest came before the final whistle when a new sub-genre was born: synchronised fouling.
It has set off a tsunami of fretting about cheating and a win-at-all-costs mentality. But if we’re to eradicate those fundamentals, what kind of game would be left?
Jim Gavin’s po-face has provided the other conspóid fix in these difficult times as we try to come down slowly off those unnatural highs.
The Premier League controvassy specialists have always found their richest pickings at the manager’s press conference, though even those giants have yet to accuse a manager of contrived calmness.
With Mourinho happy and controvassy at a dangerous all-time low, this week in their desperation they turned on Klopp, a man who, incidentally, has sometimes been accused of smiling too much, of a contrived contentment.
“Angry Klopp storms out of ‘waste of time’ press conference”, they accused, after Liverpool’s pre-match obligations in Russia.
Having watched it all, Klopp was unfailingly polite throughout before he was eventually bemused by a Sky journalist asking him if he was in love with any of his players, like Mauricio Pochettino professes to be with Harry Kane.
He loves them all, Klopp confirmed, shaking his head at where things have come to. There was no anger and no storming, but the controvassy monster must be fed somehow.
Meanwhile, Rugby Country remains largely untroubled by controvassy or conspóid. A bizarro world where we truly are all in it together.
There is virtually nobody willing to wonder if hosting the World Cup mightn’t be such a great idea, with a few more pressing things to spend our money on.
We heard how disappointed Sean O’Brien was last week when it was reported that he’d been critical of Lions management, after he had been critical of Lions management. As though the transferring of his words to newsprint had breached some longstanding gentleman’s agreement.
While the smallest tweak to a GAA competition will be bitterly debated at enormous length, the rugby lads can press reset with a few weeks’ notice, bolt on a few strays from another hemisphere, and everyone just gets on with it, pretending this thing is a grand old traditional tournament. Another prestigious Holy Grail.
And perhaps Rugby Country’s immunity to conspóid was best captured in Ronan O’Gara’s poignant eulogy to his late friend Pat Geraghty, the former Munster media manager, which was published last week in this paper.
Brilliantly put together, the piece’s themes of friendship and loyalty and trust clearly struck a chord with many. It has proved one of the most widely read articles of the year on irishexaminer.com and has drawn much comment and praise.
It contained one extraordinary line.
“Once,” Ronan wrote, “the Munster players locked Geraghty in a cupboard at a Christmas night out in Langton’s in Kilkenny and threw it and him down the stairs.”
It’s impossible not to picture the scene. Who was it that thought, nah, locking the cupboard is top bantz but let’s crank this up a notch? Was there anyone who said ‘ah here, lads’?
Who opened the cupboard, after, to check how Pat was fixed? Was it left to Pat himself to make sure we never got wind of the episode?
The reaction since has been amusing, in so far as there hasn’t been any reaction.
Even the clickbaiters haven’t touched it. Not a single ‘You’ll never guess what Munster heroes did!’. Not even a cursory health and safety warning.
Rugby Country truly is a blissful place, a kind of utopia.
