Familiar start to summer of Sam

ALL THE necessary ingredients are in place. Take your early-summer eyesore of a championship opener, season well with the usual hypocrisy about foul play, some hand-wringing by officialdom, and roast the whole thing down with the usual backlash against the media.

It’s like 2008 all over again. And 2007. And so on.

There’s a television commercial signalling the start of the championship which opens with: “Thurles 1884: how did we get here?”

To which one can only reply: “Celtic Park 2009: how do we always end up here?”

Reduce this spat to its component parts. On one hand you have the participants, Derry and Monaghan.

From the North.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a northern GAA supporter in possession of a good grudge is never in need of a reasonable cause for that gripe. The sensitivity of our northern brethren to criticism of any kind is so well established as to be a fact of modern life. This thin-skinned condition is one that flies in the face of all empirical evidence, principally the fact that many teams from Ulster play an effective but not especially attractive brand of football.

As a result, any criticism of specifics – say, to take a not-very-random example, the possibility that a player got a slap from a spectator at an intercounty game – quickly gets subsumed into a list of generalised complaints about northern GAA teams.

Touchy, touchy, touchy.

Inevitably a flying elbow is delivered in the direction of pundits for daring to suggest that a low-scoring, foul-ridden game in the Ulster SFC is not an aesthetic achievement on a par with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Derry’s Damian Cassidy was referring to The Sunday Game panellists during the week when he said: “I can’t help but feel there is a rampant level of hypocrisy about this (criticism). You are talking about pundits who when they played could have been cited very handily themselves.”

(Er . . . Joe Brolly? He brought air-kissing into Gaelic football, but violence? Pat Spillane? In fact, to stretch this parenthesis a little further, why is Damian saying players could be ‘cited’? Is the International Rugby Board now assigning commissioners to GAA games?)

As for the enjoyment factor . . . Damian’s opposite number Seamus McEneaney has valiantly offered a list of games Monaghan have been involved in which could be described as entertaining, but that’s not really the spirit.

McEneaney would be far better off issuing a terse retort about going to the circus for entertainment rather than defending the fun factor offered by his side, otherwise he’s offering observers a stick to beat him with.

The next time Monaghan play, for instance, he can expect post-game questions to focus not on the result, but on how much spectators laughed and cried at the roller-coaster of entertainment Tommy Freeman and Rory Woods provided over the 70 minutes.

Well, maybe not.

AS FOR officialdom, it was odd to see GAA President Christy Cooney not only refuse to comment on the specific game but insist he wouldn’t be commenting in future on such incidents . . . while also hoping not to see anything similar for the rest of the championship.

Shouldn’t it be one thing or the other? At a time when every GAA supporter in the country – every sports supporter, come to that – is stroking his or her chin before deciding to drop a couple of hundred euro heading to a championship game, wouldn’t a fiery sermon from the pulpit put players and managers on notice before they decide to armwrestle their way through the championship?

What else is the President of the GAA there for?

* contact: [e-mail]. twitter: MikeMoynihanEx