The more things change ... thank God

AS someone who likes to get to games early, I surpassed even myself this week.

With the throw-in for Cork-Clare scheduled for 2pm Sunday in Thurles, I was determined not to miss anything in the build-up.

Thus I found myself in Semple Stadium . . . last Tuesday.

It was for work, don’t worry (there was a press call for a Tipperary GAA-Lucozade Sport tie-in) and I’ve come home since, so you can hang onto the food parcels.

Even for someone addicted to Liberty Square in summer, the guts of a week is a tad too long to build up to a game — despite the nice lady in the Hayes Hotel carvery offering me mash or chips with my rice and savoury chicken.

But it’s still nice sometimes to take a stroll around somewhere like Semple Stadium when it’s empty.

For one thing, recent changes at the ground are a little more visible without thousands milling around to ‘spile an effect’, as Myles na Gopaleen used to say. The authorities in Tipperary haven’t over done the changes, thankfully.

Most people will pick up on the differences in the area of the Old Stand: better signage and some tasty primary-colour murals with hurlers and footballers in silhouette which brought an old urban myth to mind.

Jerry West of the Los Angeles Lakers was regarded as having the most stylish dribble in professional basketball during his 60’s heyday, and supposedly when the NBA decided on one official logo for the game, they settled on West in outline. Who served as the models in Semple, I wonder?

Towards the centre of the stand, by the programme — and sweet-shop, there’s a series of poster-size photographs of latterday players: Ken McGrath, Sean Óg Ó hAilpín, Andrew O’Shaughnessy, as well as footballers Maurice Fitzgerald and Declan Browne. You can’t miss it.

Away from the public gaze the dressing-rooms look a little snazzier — nice built-in units, each with two clothes-hangers for the team blazer — while eagle-eyed patrons on Sunday may pick up on the astroturf which is now laid across the hallways to the dressing-rooms and out to the pitch.

That hasn’t been changed, you’ll be glad to hear. It was being fine-tuned last Tuesday — a snip here, a quick run of the grass-cutter there — but looked lush and welcoming already.

Still, with the stands echoing and the terrace looking bare, a sneaking feeling, like the serpent in the garden, insinuated itself: was there the same appetite for this game?

Even perched in his eyrie of superiority, a hurling snob sometimes feels the chill hand of doubt. The narrowing field, the same old names — did adherents of rugby by with goals thrown in, or Gaelic football as it’s also known, have a point?

Granted, those worries didn’t last long — well, I was in Thurles; it’s like having doubts in St Peter’s Square. But for a little spiritual succour I didn’t have far to go. Falling into conversation with one of the lads at the press call, I asked if a neutral Tipperary man would be making the trip to Semple this weekend.

“Yeah, I’m planning on going this Sunday, I haven’t been to a game in the new Semple Stadium. Sometimes when you go to a game like that you see players doing things on the pitch, and you’d say to yourself . . .

“I remember I would have been at the 2003 Munster Final here and I was actually low coming away from it, I was thinking ‘how are those lads able to do those things?’

“I remember John Mullane gave an exhibition that day, he scored two or three top-corner goals. You’d be looking at him and wondering how you’d be able to do that yourself. But I’m going next Sunday anyway.”

The speaker? A youngster from Mullinahone called Eoin Kelly, a man who’s made a fair few hurlers feel low in his day. He’s in an action pose on one of those posters under the Old Stand, by the way: ball on the bas, flying through the unmistakable light of a championship summer.

See you all in the Square this Sunday.

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