Standing in their boots
Not even close. My highlight came in Croke Park in August, featuring the same two teams who’ve featured every year since I started offering an annual highlight. No matter, the company is good: when the great photographer Louis MacMonagle was taken to task by this newspaper long ago for supplying too many snaps of Christy Ring, he solemnly replied that every picture showed Ring getting a score but promised that he’d speak to the Cloyne man and sort it out.
Cork and Waterford fought out a heart-stopper in last August’s All-Ireland hurling semi-final, a game still undecided when Tony Browne won the ball late on in midfield. Ben O’Connor arrived to contest, and the referee blew for a Waterford free. Cork were a point up, injury time had almost run out, so if Ken McGrath could put it between the posts there’d certainly be a replay.
That’s the accountancy taken care of, the version of King Lear that reduces the yarn to a man falling out with his daughters. The scene in Croke Park was elemental, with mist beyond the stadium dissolving any distraction from what was on the field; as Ted Hughes once imagined in a poem about a football game in Yorkshire, the humped world sank foundering.
Look at the scene again: ex-Cork manager John Allen liked to say hurling was the great un-scripted drama, and nothing bears that out like the players’ behaviour when this late free is awarded.
Each plays their role: there’s a drift of players up-field towards the Cork goal at the Hill 16 end, because that’s where the game will be resolved, the correct place to stand, but there’s also a quiet drama to it, as though they were spear-carriers in a Shakespearean drama moving to allocated stations onstage. Despite an hour and 10 minutes of physical exertion, all carry themselves well. Part of that is the conscious wish not to look tired in front of an opponent, of course, but part is the dignity an inter-county player carries around like a cloak. A county man: there are standards.
And nobody embodies that more than the two main characters in this end game.
Ken McGrath stands over the free and looks up-field. It’s within his range, just about. For near a decade McGrath has been a warrior king for Waterford, and if he was the one to drive them one step nearer an All-Ireland you’d call it something close to justice. Thousands of times he’s done this, lift a ball and strike it cleanly a hundred yards, but to do it now, and here . . . what’s going through his mind?
Eighty yards away Donal Óg Cusack is on the Cork goal-line. You don’t have to be close to know he’s barking at his defenders, that he’s noting where the Waterford forwards are lurking, that his mind is whirring with implication. A baseball star once referred to himself as the straw that stirs the drink; he might have been talking about the Cloyne man.
McGrath’s strike is good, and his body position on contact suggests the right balance between power and accuracy. After the quarter-final he described his penalty as a right smack. Well, this also looks a right smack, and it’s an equaliser all the way.
Until Cusack saves it. The Cork ‘keeper breaks every rule in the book by bringing down a ball that’s going well over the bar, returning it to general play in front of him.
To do it now, and here . . . what’s going through his mind?
Young goalies say a prayer every night for John Sheedy, the Tipperary goalie who did the same in the ‘84 Munster Final only for Seanie O’Leary to cover Knocknagow with darkness after his poacher’s goal.
That doesn’t happen this time. Cusack deflects the ball along the end line, there’s an epilogue of rooting and foostering in the corner and Cork smuggle it away, and the game is over.
Hughes again on his footballers:
“Winds from fiery holes in heaven piled the hills darkening around them.” The wind that evening carried the roar of thousands, and at the time I thought the groan from the Waterford fans was like the unbandaging of a great giant in agony, and the sound is audible yet, mingled with the relief roared from twenty thousand Cork throats.
It was as if that noise would roll out of Dublin and down the coast to the southeast, and ring around places like Ardmore and Abbeyside before drifting along to Youghal and Garryvoe, and I had an image of McGrath a day or two later, at traffic lights on Gracedieu, catching the echo on the wind, and Cusack maybe hearing its last notes some evening as he stepped onto Chapel Lane.
Nonsense, of course.
When work brought me into the orbit of both men over the next few weeks, rather than quiz them on noises they might have been hearing it occurred instead to ask them what was in their minds those few seconds before the free was taken. Tell us what it was like; put us right into your boots. I didn’t, in the end. It wasn’t the pain such a question would raise — McGrath was man enough to face the press in the catacombs under Croke Park 20 minutes after the game. It wasn’t a challenge to description — Cusack’s articulacy would certainly have been up to that task.
I didn’t ask simply because the moment has its own life now. It exists on its merits.
Ascribe your own significance to each little gesture — McGrath’s last sighting look upfield, Cusack bouncing up and down on the goal-line — and put yourself in those positions, halfway out the field or underneath the crossbar.
Ask yourself if you could face that responsibility and do as well. With nothing at stake. With everything at stake.
With a highlight like that — with men like that — how could you not love hurling?
Munster IHC Final: Bishopstown (Cork) v Clooney-Quin (Clare), Gaelic Grounds, Limerick, 2pm, (J O’Mahony, Limerick).
Kilworth (Cork) v Knockshegowna (Tipperary), Bruff, 2pm, (M O’Connor, Limerick).
Munster IFC semi-final: Mullinahone (Tipperary) v Ardfert (Kerry), Cloneen, 2pm (R Hickey, Clare).
Portroe (Tipperary) v Adrigole (Cork), Toomevara, 2pm, (M McGann, Clare)
* All venues will be inspected tomorrow and changes of venue, if necessary, will be notified on Friday. The Intermediate & Junior Football Finals are fixed for Saturday, December 23.
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