Michael Moynihan: Dressing rooms are back. Good.

General View of one of the redeveloped Pairc Ui Chaoimh dressing rooms

Dressing romms are back in the GAA, and not before time. The move restores equilibrium to everyone involved after months of uncertainty.

The dressing room means a lot to the manager, who has to make sure he never loses the dressing room, after all.

One way of doing so is to create a siege mentality, and nothing is better than something pinned up on the wall of the dressing-room. After a win he tells everybody that he couldn’t wait to get the team into the dressing room at half-time; after a defeat he tells everybody it’s a very quiet dressing room in there.

After a defeat, in fact, the manager could be forgiven for ushering older players out of the dressing room as fast as possible, because it’s a given that he’ll be asked if there were any announcements in the dressing room.

This is why dressing room aficionados like to keep an eye out for veterans being pushed out the door while still wearing a towel and applying the Lynx (Body Spray)(Gold), just in case they’re thinking of calling it a day while still in the dressing-room itself.

The dressing room also means a lot to players, obviously enough, from the earliest point in their inter-county careers.

How often is the first trip to the county dressing-room a set-piece in memoirs and biographies? The young Turk tiptoes in to share a space with his heroes who turn out to be decent skins who welcome him to the top level.

Or not: My favourite story in this regard came from a player who nestled in a corner of the county dressing-room for his first training session, only to see — before he left the dressing room to train — his gear bag being passed along the line of (older) players until it was flicked out the door.

Players love the dressing room because it’s a safe space where they can listen to their own music, to rev themselves up, where they can load up on Jaffa Cakes and jelly babies to get a welcome sugar boost before going out, where they don’t have to face up to the burden hanging over them until the last possible second... when fully considered the inter-county dressing-room is practically the same thing as a teenage girl’s bedroom. If there were a poster or two of Harry Styles it’d be difficult to tell them apart.

And the media love a dressing room.

There was a time when dressing room access was not a concept restricted to the dreamworld of NBA beat writers: Have a trawl on YouTube and you can find memorable clips from All-Ireland senior finals in the 70s, with the inimitable Mick Dunne buttonholing the likes of Christy Ring and Mick O’Dwyer minutes after victory, fighting for space in a small dressing-room packed with priests, determined smokers, half-naked GA players and, invariably, a couple of random kids who have wandered in on the hunt for a souvenir jersey or two.

Finally, the dressing room was sorely missed as a source of stories and putdowns: Nipping to cars in ones and twos is hardly the kind of experience to generate the content that all of us have experienced.

My favourite was the club man who had stepped behind the line but — as often happens — clearly felt he might have done so a year or two too soon, and made a great deal of noise about his availability.

Eventually the manager cracked and asked if he could make the first round of the championship, despite not having trained or played a single league match.

I don’t know, said our man, but his polite show of initial reluctance was undercut immediately.

“Don’t worry, I don’t want you to play at all,” said the manager. “I just want you to add a little atmosphere to the dressing room.”

Art and the hurler

Wednesday, and news of another manager, though not someone likely to pull people into the dressing room to add atmosphere.

The appointment of Henry Shefflin as manager of the Galway senior hurling team caught everyone by surprise.

If it was an attempt to wrest control of the GAA narrative from Proposal B and its attendant discussions then it succeeded beyond measure. A Galway acquaintance of mine was quickly in touch to tell me that it was 200.9 kilometres from Ballyhale to Lough George, a drive of two hours and 38 minutes. Time for plenty of podcasts, obviously.

One of the more interesting messages of congratulations for Shefflin came from the National Gallery of Ireland. When I worked in Dublin this was a regular port of call for coffee but I left long before the painting of Henry Shefflin was unveiled in 2017. The National Gallery tweeted an image of the portrait — by Tipperary man Gerry Davis— and I couldn’t help looking for clues and hints in the work, something that might have tipped us off about Shefflin’s new posting. Is that a glimpse of Galway maroon in the pocket square of the jacket? Is the belt maroon or is that just the effect of the light?

Thursday: RTÉ showed Alex and Joel Verner’s sumptuous The Man Who Painted Ireland, a documentary on the life and work of Jack B Yeats.

One of the first of Yeats’s pictures to be seen? The Hurley Player from his Cuala Press days. In the painting the hurler looks to have white and blue horizontal stripes: Is it a hint at Dublin GAA’s new ‘Argentina’ change top?

I’ve learned from the Shefflin experience: Every painting will now be searched for portents.

One of your summer purchases

Farewell today to one Tom Morey, who passed away recently at the age of 86. If you have never heard of Tom, don’t fret. His contribution to the world of sport doesn’t carry his own name.

Fifty years ago he sat in his back garden and cut a length of hard foam about four feet long and then took it to the beach.

“He initially named it S.N.A.K.E. for all the body parts (side, navel, arm, knee, elbow) that touch the board when someone lies on it,” wrote the New York Times in its obituary. “But he settled on “boogie,” for the “wiggle and jiggle” that he associated with swing music.”

Hence the boogie board. Rest in peace, Tom Morey.

Coal and crane

It’s a long time since I read Paul Auster and I didn’t realise he had a new book out. It’s a nonfiction book at that, a life of Stephen Crane, and though Crane mightn’t be that big a deal here, the author might be enough to push me towards Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane.

A more familiar face, Jeremy Paxman, has a new book which is also tempting me. Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain stretches from the great days of coal mines as the engines of local communities to how those communities were hollowed out by the closure of the mines.

A close-run thing, choosing between the two.

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