The Year in Sports

The businessmen who run Croke Park are not noted for their wit. A pity; should it be a thing that Dublin win a fourth All-Ireland title in a row, wouldn’t it be funny if the traditional post-match playing of Molly Malone were swapped for Linda Ronstadt’s rather super cover of the Everly Brothers’ classic When Will I Be Loved? It would seem to strike the correct note.

The apparent disdain in which the team is held isn’t easy to understand. Pilar Caffrey’s Dublin, with their notorious Blue Book, were difficult to love. But the Gilroy / Gavin generation are the real deal. They are legit in every way a GAA team can be legit, and yet still Ireland withholds its heart.

Part of this may be jealousy. It would be nice to think there’s more too it than that, but there probably isn’t. Would Kerry of the Golden Years be held in the same regard as they are had they not be rendered mortal by Offaly in 1982?

When Meath were in their dark pomp in the 1980s they were hated. Has time humanised them, or was it the loss to Down (not to take anything away from that fine Down team) in 1991 that had the same humanising effect on them as Offaly’s win had on Kerry?

Those greybeards who remember when snooker was a big deal may remember Steve Davis was never loved until he was past his prime; then he became the Grand Old Man of the Green Baize. Is Ireland waiting on Dublin to lose, to return to the mortal realm, before forgiving them for being so much better than the rest? And when is that to happen, exactly?

Reader, I’m damned if I know. Mayo are in pole position among the challengers for the crown, but the trauma of thinking about my own beloved county actually winning an All-Ireland and all that would imply would reduce your correspondent to writing with crayons on greaseproof paper behind high walls and under medical supervision, so let’s not go there just yet, while the season of brotherhood and goodwill is still with us.

The reality is that it is hard to make a case for anyone living with Dublin, to say nothing of beating them. Leinster is a wasteland and, no more than Mayo, Monaghan and Tyrone can only knock on the door for so long.

Kerry remain Kerry, of course, and the impact of the disgraceful Super 8s remains to be seen, but it’s very hard to imagine any team better suited to a Super 8 structure than the current Dublin setup. Tradition, legend, values – may I introduce you to the Almighty Dollar? God help us all.

Hurling

When historians get around to recording and passing judgement on these changing times, will the publication of Jackie Tyrell’s book be seen as the most significant event of 2017 in hurling? We’ve waited for over a decade for an insight into Kilkenny in the Cody era. Now we have it, does it take from the achievements of that great team? At what stage is a title not worth winning? At what stage can you say a team has gone too far, and it becomes necessary to remind people that sport isn’t life and death; sport is what we concern ourselves with when we need a break from life and death. It’s something to think about.

Rugby
As Gaelic Games slide further from shamatuerism to fully-blown professionalism, it’s interesting – and horrifying – to look at rugby, which has been professional for 22 years. What has survived, what has thrived, and what has gone by the wayside.

Who would have thought, for instance, that domestic French rugby would set the standard for the world game, and that this club standard would come at the expense of the French national team, once the personification of a way of looking at the world that is quintessentially French?

The current situation cannot last, but what will come in its place nobody knows. The fruits of the banal weekly brutality of the professional game is also a harvest that has yet to be gathered, and will not be nice when it is. Dónal Lenihan made this point very well in his very thoughtful and under-estimated autobiography, released last year.

The Lions Tour, once described by the late Frank Keating as a cross between a school tour and a medieval crusade, was one of those institutions marked for doom when the game went professional, but went from strength to strength instead. On the balance sheet, anyway; neither the heads nor the hearts of fans seem quite sure what to make of the Lions, just as they don’t quite know where club competitions, Six Nations Tournaments and World Cups fit in relative to each other. In the light of Seán O’Brien’s strident opinion of the second-most successful Lions tour of New Zealand in over 110 years, maybe even the players are struggling to keep up. Or it could be all those bumps to the head, of course.

Rugby fans in Ireland are at a particular disadvantage as Irish rugby journalists take the notion of fans-with-typewriters to new depths. What Martin O’Neill wouldn’t do for the coverage Joe Schmidt gets, even though Martin O’Neill has nothing like the talent available to Schmidt.

Certainly, Schmidt’s artisanal style of rugby has never got the abuse that O’Neill’s hearts-on-their-sleeves, lead-in-their-boots soccer team habitually get, even though Schmidt has a better selection. And that’s not even counting the chaps who make Michael Flatley of the Clan Flatley seem as Irish as the very Blarney Stone itself.

Laois Are Hurling Champions Too

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The hurlers of Kilkenny and Tipperary will face each other on the field on honour once more this weekend. There had been no draw in All-Ireland hurling finals since the late 1950s; the replay at five o’clock on Saturday will be the third in three years.

And no harm either. The GAA has priced the tickets sensibly, and the finals of recent years have been epics of skill and spirit. Tipperary and Kilkenny share a border of thirty-five miles, give or take, and every yard of it bristles with rivalry. All the more so in September, if the great prize is at stake.

Whoever wins the All-Ireland on Saturday will deserve it. There’s no argument about that. But Croke Park will contain more than partisans from each competing county. As with football final, Croke Park will contain men and women for whom the game is all, even though their chances of ever seeing their own team march behind the Artane Band as the evenings shorter and the weather gets colder are slim.

Consider the place of Laois in the world of hurling. Laois were the All-Ireland hurling champions of 1915, when they beat Cork on a wet day in October in the final.

The senior hurlers of the O’Moore County have won only one title since – the Delaney Cup in 1949, when they squeaked past Kilkenny in the Leinster Final, 3-8 to 3-6. Laois went on to beat Galway to return to the All-Ireland Final, where they faced Tipperary. Tipp slaughtered them, 3-11 to 0-3. Laois have won nothing since.

But for those long and fallow years, Laois haven’t given up. Giving up is not what GAA people do. Laois soldier on.

If you are old enough, you certainly remember the Cork footballers beating Mayo 5-15 to 0-10 in 1993, and the memory still stings. The Cork hurlers played Laois three years ago in the preliminary round of the hurling qualifiers. Cork won by 10-20 to 1-13. How can you possibly go on after that? And yet go on Laois do, year after year, summer after summer.

Séamus “Cheddar” Plunkett is the current Laois hurling manager. Keith Duggan interviewed him in the Irish Times in March, and asked him if he ever wished he had been born “over there,” on the other side of the border. Plunkett’s answer is the answer of every GAA person worth his or her salt: “I don’t actually want to be from there. I know where I’m from!”

And so he does. Séamus Plunkett played on the Laois team that made it to the 1984 Centenary Cup Final. Pat Critchley was a midfielder on that team. Critchley would go on to win Laois’s only hurling All-Star the following year, and now Critchley is the manager of the Laois minors.

But Critchley and Plunkett’s personal connection exists outside hurling. Friends since childhood, they went on an adventure in the late 1980s that was every young person’s dream, at one stage or another.

In the late 1980s, Pat Critchley and Séamus Plunkett’s brother, Ollie, were in a band. The band was formed as the Drowning Fish, and then later came to prominence – of a kind – as The Mere Mortals.

They played at Féile, the big outdoor concert that succeeded Siamsa Cois Laoi and preceded the Electric Picnic, in 1990. The Mere Mortals charted in 1991 with a single called Travelling On after appearing on Barry Lang’s Beat Box, a music show that was on TV after Mass on Sunday morning, and their path to being the next U2 seemed certain.

Therefore, they hired Séamus Cheddar Plunkett to be their manager, because you always need a sensible one to mind the money. When Plunkett imposed a two-pint limit before every gig, the band knew they had hired the right man.

The video for Travelling On is on You Tube. It’s of its time, which is a nice way of saying that it’s awful. Paul Marron, the lead singer, looks like Bono did at Self-Aid, with an overcoat and great big woolly mullet. The song itself is built on one of those ning-ning-ning-ning guitar riffs that were the sound of Irish rock at the time. It’s brutal.

Pat Critchley’s role in the band was to play the accordion and the yellow maracas. This makes Travelling On and Where Do You Go To, My Lovely the only songs in the canon to use the accordion play rock and roll.

It’s easy to look back on an ‘eighties music video and laugh. But reader, those Mere Mortals probably had more fun in one weekend in Portarlington than any of us will have in our entire lives, because there were In A Band.

And there’s something about that aspect to Critchley and Plunkett, the Marx and Engels of the (hoped for) Laois hurling revolution, that speaks to the best of us. The Mere Mortals struggled to fulfill all their gigs because the lads had hurling matches to go to. For them, there was nothing greater than the game, nor anywhere greater than Laois.

In a feature on Today FM’s Championship Sunday during the summer, Pat Critchley reminisced on his childhood in Portlaoise, and how he always wanted to mark Billy Bohane at hurling training, even though Billy Bohane was an old man at the time.

Who’s Billy Bohane? He was a midfielder on the 1949 Laois team that Tipperary destroyed. A footnote in the national record, a hero to his own. As Patrick Kavanagh has told us, gods make their own importance.

So good luck and God bless the hurlers of Tipperary and Kilkenny, the best we have in the country. One of them will be crowned All-Ireland Champions for the 35th or 27th time, and be worthy of the title. But raise a glass on Saturday night to the likes of Laois and our own Mayo hurlers as well, counties who hurl away from the limelight but hurl on none the less. They know the ultimate truth. The GAA isn’t about winning. The GAA is about being. Long may it last.

By the Numbers - the Hurling All-Stars

Three hundred and fifty of the six hundred and thirty All-Stars awarded over the forty-two years of the institution have gone to the Big Three counties. Kilkenny have 163, Cork 103 and Tipperary have 82. Galway’s six for this year sees them bring their total to 79 all-time, three short of Tipperary but well clear of the rest of the field.

Offaly and Limerick, joined forever in the memory by the incredible 1994 final, are joined on the All-Star roll of honour too. The Faithful and the Shannonsiders have 44 each. Clare have 42, Wexford 30, Waterford – the only county in double digits on the list who haven’t won an All-Ireland since the All-Stars began – have 29 and then list falls away to Antrim and Dublin with five each and Down and Westmeath with one each.

Down’s sole winner was Gerard McGrattan, who lined out at right half-forward on the 1992 team, the year he made his inter-county debut. Down won Ulster that year and gave a good account of themselves against Cork in semi-final. Westmeath’s sole All-Star was David Kilcoyne, who lined out at right corner-forward on the 1986 All-Star team. David was one of five Kilcoynes to wear the maroon and white in the 1980s.

Looking at the graph of All-Stars over the years for Kilkenny, Cork, Tipperary and Galway, we can see that All-Stars come in spurts. Kilkenny have led always but it’s only in the Cody era that they’ve really torn away from the chasing pack.

Part of the reason behind that the separation can be put down to Cork’s decline. Cork have won two All-Stars since their most recent strike. There may be something in that. There may not.

It’s interesting also to note that Tipperary were not forgotten during the famine that lasted from 1971 to 1987 – the kept winning the odd All-Star here and there. Bobby Ryan and Tommy Butler won one each during the famine, Francis Loughnane, Pat McLoughney and Tadhg O’Connor won two and Nicky English won three in a row before Richie Stakelum made his famous declaration of Premiership über alles in Killarney in the magical summer of 1987.

The All-Star era also saw the rise of Galway after they were released from Munster. They are now neck and neck with Tipperary in the All-Star Roll of Honour, twinned around each other like some sort of perpetual Keady Affair.

Comparing hurling with football, it’s interesting to note that spread of awards around the counties is much the same in hurling as in football – a ratio of 6:3:6 between the All-Ireland winners, the All-Ireland runners-up and the rest. This is despite the fact that that only thirteen counties have won hurling All-Stars, while 27 football counties have been so honoured. So, even though Kerry dominate the football All-Stars just as Kilkenny dominate the Kerry, it’s easier to win an odd award in football than in hurling.

Of the 630 football All-Stars, 236 have won just one All-Star. There are just 151 once-off hurling All-Star winners – all the others are multiple winners. In hurling, once you’re in, you’re in.

As regards the years themselves, the worst years for the winners were 1971 and 1979, when Tipperary and Kilkenny got only four each. 1983, 2000 and 2008 were the best years, when Kilkenny scooped nine each time. 2000 and 2008 were also the worst years for the runners-up, with only one gong to bring home after getting stomped in the final.

The best years for the runners-up were 1973 and this year, when the runners-up seven and six All-Stars outstripped the winners’ tally of five. Limerick got six All-Stars as runners-up in 1994 too, but it’s highly unlikely that made them feel any better. All Mayo wept in silent empathy and brotherhood with the Shannonsiders in 1994 and 1996, having known what it was to fall short ourselves. Still though; there’s always next year.

Kilkenny Reaffirm Their Majesty

One of the many great features about hurling as a game is that the best team almost always win. There’s no way to circumvent the spirit of the game, the way you can pack defenses in soccer or kill the ball in rugby or upset Pat Spillane in football.

Hurling is like boxing in that there’s no-where to hide. The game is about fourteen man-on-man battles and if the majority of your team win their individual battles, you win the game. All else is noise.

This is why Kilkenny won their fifth Liam McCarthy Cup in six years yesterday. Because man for man they played better than Tipperary on the day.

As a Mayoman, your Spailpín Fánach knows enough about hurling to know that he knows nothing about hurling, but Kilkenny’s performance yesterday was breath-taking in its primal magnificence. Forget the many arts of the game; the All-Ireland was won in the fiery bellies of the Kilkennymen, who would broke no failure on the great stage.

The normally impassive Brian Cody was clearly delighted yesterday. How he must have nursed the hurt and disappointment from last year to bring it to its white hot focus yesterday. Richie Hogan said in the post-match interview that the team promised themselves they would never feel as low again as they felt last year, and they did not let themselves down.

Christy O’Connor wrote in the Sunday Times on Sunday morning that Kilkenny were royally annoyed not only that they lost last year, but that they weren’t given credit for winning the year before. They knew that the reputation of this Kilkenny generation, hailed as the best of all time before they lost to Tipperary last year, would slide further down history’s scale if they lost again to Tipperary.

O’Connor remarked particularly that they really didn’t care for younger Tipperary players lording it over their neighbours on the banks of Mooncoin, and they stored away that resentment to when it could be of the most use.

The first portent was the crowd. Kilkenny, who have been under the radar all year while the press lionized different players from different counties, came out to a much louder roar than Tipperary. The cats were awake, and had been sharpening their claws.

It’s so hard for sportsmen to catch up to the pitch of a game if they are behind at the start. Tipperary were not ready for the challenge that Kilkenny had to offer and, by the time they showed their own undoubted class, Kilkenny were already licking the cream from their whiskers and thinking of long winter nights of satisfaction and Smithwicks in Langton’s and likewise hostelries.

It’s all the more credit to Cody and the magnificent team he’s created, the perfect blend of skill and aggression. Shefflin is a genius of course, but when An Spailpín is boring his co-inmates in the nursing home as the sun sets, it’s Tommy Walsh that will remain the avatar of Brian Cody’s Kilkenny.

Walsh isn’t even that big, but he can’t be beaten by high or low balls. All are sucked into his possession to be redistributed where they will do the maximum damage to the opposition. In an alley fight between Walsh and a hood with a broken bottle, one could only feel sorry and pity for the bottle. The hood, of course, should have known better when he saw the distinctive red helmet. They are the tough cats that you meet in alleys or on the playing fields of Erin, and they are not easily beaten. More luck to them.

Tipp Back on Top

When Lar Corbett cut through the mists of a rainy Croke Park to blast home his first goal of the afternoon in Sunday’s All-Ireland hurling final, PJ Ryan must have felt like Roy Scheider in Jaws when the shark suddenly loomed up from the seas. Kilkenny, like the Amity’s Chief Brody, were going to need a bigger boat.

The most astonishing thing on a day of general astonishments was that despite every Tipperary blow finding its target and Kilkenny losing their talismanic Henry Shefflin after a quarter of an hour, Tipp only led by a point at half-time. It was reminiscent of last year’s final, where Tipperary got off to a flier but still somehow couldn’t find a chink in the black and amber amour and were put down in the end.

But there the comparison ended. In the second half came the deluge. Tipperary went into a seven point lead again and suddenly Kilkenny didn’t reel then back in as usual. Mortality claimed the cats for their own while the Hurling Gods remembered that Tipperary were the team that stood up to Kilkenny in a League final 2009 that not only meant nothing in itself but that put the bigger day of a Munster Championship game in a month’s time at Páirc Uí Chaoimh at risk.

It was all seen as less important than showing Kilkenny that Tipperary were not to be pushed around by God, by Man or by the Devil and eighteen months later Tipperary were rewarded for their pride and heroism on a day when it counted for nothing with victory on a day that counted for everything.

The 2010 All-Ireland hurling final was played in an extraordinary atmosphere, not least because of the intensity of the challenges on the field. Had it been football, there would have been three red cards at least. But because it’s hurling, men took and gave their belts.

How odd it was to see a Tipperary forward being returned his helmet after the punches had died down, and then both Noresider and Premierman turning around to face the ball, like nothing more violent had happened than bumping trolleys in Tesco.

When John Wayne was filming The Quiet Man, he was taken to a hurling match. They asked the Duke if he’d like to be out there with a hurl himself. Wayne said he wouldn’t like to be out there without one. Should the shades of John Wayne or Victor McLaglen have drifted over Dublin 7 on Sunday, they would have liked what they saw.

As did we all. The singing of the Galtee Mountain Boy at the end was, in its way, almost as magical as Joe McDonagh’s famous West’s Awake – can it be? – thirty-one years ago. The crowd’s accepted that the days of the pitch invasion were over, and just sat back to admire those gallant men who kept the flag flying high.

And even more remarkably, the atmosphere, so intense as to be almost frightening, was utterly good humoured among the supporters afterwards. They wouldn’t be eager to admit it, but the counties are of the one blood, really, and they know they’ll meet again soon. Kilkenny did not win their five-in-a-row, but they still played a Champions’ part in one of the great days ever in Irish sport.