Tommy Martin: While Dublin are not good, the Dub may never have been happier

It is this glimpse into the true soul of the Dub that makes the current struggles so delicious.

Thu, 24 Feb, 2022 - 13:19

RING-ring-a-rosie, and all that.

The light declines on Dublin’s long summer and still no one who saw it can quite believe it. Uncharacteristic. Un-Dublin-like. People shake their heads as if it is not real, though they have seen enough last year and so far this spring to know it must be.

To see men in blue with the ball in their hands not knowing what they are supposed to do with it, as if their team-mate had just passed them a trombone. Hands thrown in the air in exasperation – the universal gesture of the individual stuck within a broken system. A wild boot swings and the ball sails sadly into Hill 16 where the Dubs stand stoically absorbing it all.

Ah, the Dubs. We took a herd of ten-year-olds from the club to Croke Park on Saturday, marching them through the drizzle like sadistic clerics. They don’t remember anything but Dublin football teams munching the bones of hapless country lads like greedy giants from a cautionary fairytale. It does a child no good not to see the giant fall into his pot at the end of the story.

They munched through bags of Wham bars and discussed Fortnite skins and gave the finger to the Mayo players, oblivious to ongoing moral development. The grown-up Dubs poked at the match programme, delivering their judgements on the new men in the Dublin ranks.

“Shoite…” “Shoite…” “Too small…but not bad.” “Too big, too slow…and shoite.”

As the game progressed they delivered caustic analysis, like opera critics who’ve been brought to a Declan Nerney concert. If anything, they reckoned the defeat to Mayo was a modest improvement, Dublin still open at the back and impotent in attack, just marginally less so.

Nor were their ‘jaysuses’ and ‘ahforfuckssakes’ coming from an angry place. How could they, after all? These supporters are still in the brandy and cigar phase of the past decade’s great feast. More than that, though, the
‘wudyagwonourrathats’ and ‘fuckinshoites’ felt natural and pleasing on the ear, as if they were speaking in their native tongue after a long time in a strange land.

And it struck me that while Dublin are not very good at the moment, it may be that the Dub has never been happier.

There are many reasons for this strange, dichotomous carry-on. Primarily, it is the ever-glossier sheen the current struggles throw on everything that happened since Stephen Cluxton stroked over that free to decide the 2011 All-Ireland final with the routine casualness of a man putting his bins out on a Wednesday night.

As the decade unfolded and Jim Gavin’s team reached their full majesty, the Dub wasn’t allowed to savour it in quite the way he might have wanted. He could barely raise a pint of porter in honour of three- or four- or five-in-a-row without some culchie pissing on his chips, giving out about money and structural advantages and pulling out spreadsheets with big numbers on them that said it was all a big swizz, like some sort of dodgy hedge fund deal that had left the rest of the country shirtless.

Though they howled down this talk, defending the honour of Jim and the boys and protesting that this was simply a special generation, or two, or three, secretly some small part of the Dub must have wondered if the culchies had a point. Now though, with barbarians not just at the gates, but with their feet up on the imperial mantlepiece, the Dub can truly, fully embrace what went before. It WAS a special team (or three), with a special manager, doing special things, again and again.

BEYOND mere vindication, it is this glimpse into the true soul of the Dub that makes the current struggles so delicious. Contrary to myth, the Dub is not swaggering and arrogant, full of his own self-importance. She is not cocksure like the Corkonian, nor boisterous like the Cockney, nor belligerent like the New Yorker. The Dub is wary and cynical and her wit is mordant and more concerned with the taking down of icons rather than their creation.

The city has thrown off plenty previous cloaks of ill-fitting grandeur. A great centre of parliamentary folderol, till the Act of Union took the parliament away. The city of great writers? Most of them were shooed off in their lifetimes by scolding bishops and stuffy elites. The sexy, swanky epicentre of the Celtic Tiger’s empty promises? That went well. Now it’s supposed to be some sort of cosmopolitan, liberal tech-topia, which would be fine if we could just find everyone a gaff and, by the way, how’s that Metro coming along?

An all-conquering GAA team was never going to last, particularly one of such flawless engineering. Jim Gavin’s side were more redolent of Copenhagen or Stockholm than the capital’s grubby, traffic-choked muddle.

“The poor oul Dubliner,” as Brendan Behan said, “if it was raining soup, he’d be out with the fork.”

Imperfection is hard-wired into Dublin life and it’s part of what those who live there love about it. You keep quiet about the good things and give out about the bad things. It’s a kip but it’s our kip, that kind of thing.

So, lording it over the country cousins was only ever a mess, a pose. The population of the city doubled in the second half of the 20th century. Scratch a Dub and you’ll find the ancestral imprint of a village in Cavan or Mayo or Donegal or some such place. The GAA has always been a way of connecting the Dub to bucolic folk memory of life beyond the city walls. A way of stopping them getting carried away with themselves.

For a brief moment in time the capital seemed unmoored from all that, but now that great team are safely gone, the wistful Dub is happy because he can get to truly enjoy them.

After all, what could be more Dublin than remembering the rare old times?