Michael Moynihan: A beginner’s guide to championship behaviour (2020 style)
A general view of the stadium after this week's Munster Hurling U20 clash between Tipp and Clare. The stadium, as well as every other ground, will remain empty for the duration of the Championship. Picture: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile
The hurling championship starts this weekend.
Seriously.
You are probably discombobulated enough between leaks and levels, so consider this a beginner’s guide to championship behaviour (2020 style).
You’ll be able to hear the advice from the sideline. This is a great opportunity to hear what the coaches and managers are telling players to do in the course of a game. Of course, you’ll have to turn the television all the way up, but think of the insights! Think of the tactics!
Your kid’s U12 team will now be able to benefit directly from your eavesdropping on All-Ireland winning managers every Sunday afternoon. What could possibly go wrong?
You’ll be able to hear the advice from the sideline. On occasion your correspondent has to loiter with intent near the sideline at an inter-county game and it is not a place for the faint-eared, to put it mildly.
When you hear people dismiss the notion of piped-in crowd noise, give a thought to the alternative, which can be a rapid education in language which is . . . industrial, put it that way. If the industry in question is the vast and varied production of effing and blinding.
The video receptors in the side of the cornea can pick out certain elements of the spectrum . . . look, the easy science-writing I’ll leave to Bill Bryson. It’s happening and there’s an end to it: they’re supposedly easier to see than their white equivalents, and none of us are getting any younger, am I right?
Look on the bright side. The yellow side, to be precise.
They’re yellow. Or a sharp day-glow version thereof (I haven’t been down to McDonnell’s for a paint sample in a while, so identifying precise shades may be tricky). That in itself is enough to offend some people.
As someone said to me recently, if a more visible ball is the biggest controversy to come out of this year’s championship we’ll be doing well. On the other hand, if a legal-minded county secretary wants to point out that there have been two different pieces of vital equipment used in the same season, who knows where that might lead?
This might be blasphemy, but do empty terraces level the playing field a little? After a provincial final a couple of years back one of the losing players admitted that he’d been taken aback by the volume of noise when the winners took the field before the game.
For a team like Dublin, in particular, one might think a largely partisan Croke Park, where they play most of their championship games, could be worth a couple of points to them at least. No longer.
Apart from the thought-experiment above, is there really anything but a negative side to this? The whole point of the championship is that there are teeming thousands in the venue who live and die with every ball that’s pucked, so their absence is fairly central to the experience we can expect.
It won’t be remotely the same, being able to hear the contact between or sliotar and hurley (or boot and ball), instead of the roar of appreciation which usually drowns it out.
For the latecomer to a championship match finding a parking spot is a tussle just below the midfield battle expected at 3.30 that afternoon. Many a game has been ruined because of the bad omen when one’s favourite secret spot is already taken.
By an iron law of physics the usurping car is always from ‘the other crowd’; by an equally iron law a replacement spot is always further away from the ground. Never closer.
The tyranny of choice. If there are only a couple of hundred people in attendance then there’s no shortage of room for your car, which can do strange things to those addicted to sliding the motor into a space with two and a half inches of clearance on either side.
It may even introduce a hideous new sub-genre to match parking: See How Close To The Stadium I Parked, No, See, Come Over Here, Look . ..
God be with the days when you had to set out three days before the game in order to - well, not beat the traffic, but be guaranteed you’d get to the game the same day, at least. The prospect of hours inching along a country road, nose to nose with other cars, towards the ultimate destination were only brightened by the occasional driver surrendering completely.
They’d just park the car crosswise on the verge and hoof it the rest of the way. Within five minutes half-a-dozen more adopted the same approach. Happy chaos ensued.
The lack of crowds robs us of one of the more innocent pleasures, gauging the likely attendance by the number of cars zooming along bedecked with county colours/drivers in county jerseys/teddy bears sprawled across the back window.
On the other hand it might put an end to the repeated sight of a queue of lads relieving themselves at the side of the motorway, in full view of those passing, so there’s a silver lining.
What pro?
Dublin isn't the place we have in mind here, because even on the day of an All-Ireland final, as has often been said, there are swathes of the capital oblivious to the experience.
But places like Thurles and Clones, Killarney and Roscommon are different - these are places that a championship game takes over in its entirety, more or less, with everything going on within a couple of miles oriented towards the big game itself.
The economic damage of the coronachampionship is the most serious consequence, but the loss of a sense of occasion is another blow: a truly metaphysical one.
Is it really a championship game if you can’t argue about it walking back down the town afterwards?
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