Larry Ryan: Finding meaning after the sporting apocalypse
No worlds left to conquer: New Zealand players Will Jordan, Aaron Smith and Jordie Barrett react after Ireland scored their second try during the Steinlager Series match between the New Zealand and Ireland at Sky Stadium in Wellington, New Zealand. Pic: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
How are you getting on, in this post-apocalyptic sporting world? I take a couple of weeks' holiday and everything changes utterly.
No doubt high-level talks were had this week about the need to persevere with sports pages at all now that the ultimate feat has been achieved. Now that there are no more worlds to conquer. Now that the apotheosis of valour and fortitude has been reached on New Zealand soil.
Understandably, not everyone sees the point of trucking on anymore with their own humble endeavours. An inter-county manager has stepped down nearly every day since. All week we thought it might even have quenched the fire in Cody.
We’re not bothering to show the world athletics. Since we know now that even the finest hours of Sonia and Coghlan fall well down the pecking order of achievement.
Henrik Stenson has bailed on us without a goldfish bought, responsibility for the pride of a continent obviously put in sharp perspective by this immortal blow struck by a hemisphere.
A lad from Halifax abandoned pre-season to join Love Island, which may or may not be related. And even the famous Kerry WhatsApp media committee seems to have disbanded in the middle of the All-Ireland build-up, throwing their customary narrative control into disarray.
Yerra what about it, we’re probably favourites alright, accepted Darragh Ó Sé, in the . Do up an oul poster for the post-match party with David Clifford celebrating, someone else advised, nobody will pass any remarks on that.
The rugby crowd themselves appear to have accepted it could be tough to motivate lads from here on in, with the Six Nations more or less relegated to Carabao Cup status. So they have swiftly organised a club world cup to freshen things up a small bit.
Nothing can ever be the same again. We have reached the summit, found Atlantis, found touch.
But, look, I suppose we should make some effort to push on with our other trivial concerns. Like the lad in War of the Worlds still fixing his van even as the aliens gathered all around.
It’s a tricky philosophical poser this one: for the sake of equality, should we want the England women to lose as much as we ordinarily would the men, at the Euros?
Shouldn’t we have been a bit more triggered when Football’s Coming Home rang around the Amex Stadium in the closing stages of their quarter-final win over Spain? And isn’t it about time we mustered a huge sense of foreboding ahead of Tuesday’s semi-final?
We’ll probably get there, in the end, thanks to Sweet Caroline and Jonathan Pearce. But for now, the sense remains that if football is ever to come home in our lifetimes, this might just be the best way.
Crucially, Phil Neville is no longer involved, which obviously would have made goodwill a non-starter. England prospering after taking on the expertise of a continental gaffer might be no harm, at this juncture.
But to appreciate how valuable England winning this thing could be, you only have to see what they have to put up with from their own people and the sizeable contingent whose remote control use has been incapacitated this month, insistent the spectacle is being ‘rammed down our throats’.
This week, RTÉ’s stuck a toe in the swamp of social media abuse around sport, with Ursula Jacob testifying to the extra special treatment women get, in this disreputable arena.
So far, Simon Jordan — famous for taking Crystal Palace into administration — and ‘Lord’ Sugar have emerged as figureheads for the online grief the England women must endure.
Jordan has been among those heroes belittling the standard, seizing on Wendie Renard’s penalty miss with glee. Easy to see why Germany’s Klara Buhl went off in tears after her missed sitter against Austria, knowing she’d soon be featuring in a book of evidence against her sport and gender.
Sugar was fuming when the BBC fielded an all-female punditry team one evening, since he has noticed so many ‘symbolic’ women popping up on men’s football. “To cover the broadcasters’ arses”, obviously, rather than to share their knowledge.
BBC commentator Robyn Cowen timed her volley nicely during England-Norway. “A lovely shot of one of our studio guests, Jonas Eidevall, one of our symbolic men.”
So when Ellen White or Beth Mead or Lucy Bronze sit in symbolically some day between Jamie Redknapp and Micah Richards, you couldn’t begrudge them being introduced as a European champion, as one of the women who brought football home.
There might even be some small knock-on respite for Ursula and co.
Isn’t Kerry’s accumulation of 38 All-Irelands all the more laudable since they have rarely been allowed to play one match at a time, which seems to be the preferred approach of all sportspeople?
Most Kerry matches, as we know, are simply part of a prolonged NCT — fixtures fulfilled purely as a means of ‘road testing’ Kerry for another game down the line, with Cork’s status as a designated test centre under constant review.
The interminable debate about Gaelic football ‘structures” will probably carry on until a format is found which allows Kerry to win every game by around four points, after a right good battle, that sets them up nicely for the next day.
All credit to them for keeping their heads right this year, with every game essentially billed as a training session for the semi-final with Dublin. So now that’s sorted, and the t-shirts are printed, we move onto a new phase: the All-Ireland final that will allow Kerry to win more All-Irelands once they get this one out of the way.
The floodgates should open, the dam will burst, Galway are the small blockage in the pipe of All-Irelands that should gush freely once this one is taken care of.
Ideally after a good test, with a view to handling the Dubs in next year’s final.
No doubt it will mean more to the man than any All-Ireland, that he spent half the week trending on Twitter.
After gaining more friends and plaudits in defeat last Sunday than he did in any victory, you hope he’s enjoying the havoc he unspooled in football final week.
If he does need any added persuasion to go again, surely the thought of all those sportswriters typing acres of unused tributes will swing it for him.
And only intensify his determination to win another so that they’ll all have to be rewritten.
Pat Spillane joked at some gig during the week that Joe Brolly’s exit from RTÉ might have bought him another couple of years. That the station couldn’t lose both its football provocateurs together.
Pat goes of his own accord now, another man seemingly sick of the social media swamp.
And he more or less closes the door and turns off the light on RTÉ’s great punditry age. Last in a celebrated line who regarded punditry as one part analysis, two or three parts performance art.
Like Dunphy and Giles and Brolly and Ger and Cyril, he’ll be missed.
