The Year in Sports

Dublin’s All-Ireland title, their third in five years, makes a strong case for Dublin’s status as Gaelic football’s team of the decade. Not least as there could still be more titles to come.

This is not to say that they are invincible. And if anyone wants to quibble with Dublin’s achievement he or she could point out to the poor quality of opposition Dublin have met in finals – Mayo in 2013, and Kerry’s extraordinary collapse. There is also the continuing embarrassment of Leinster football, an embarrassment that looks set to continue with a bizarre venue having been chosen for Dublin’s first Championship away game since Biddy Mulligan was a slip of a girl.

But these are pointless cavils. Dublin are the best team in the country because they have the best players. And those best players don’t look like they’re going anywhere just yet.

Who can challenge them? The stark division between haves and have-nots continues, as mortal counties are crushed between the twin rocks of the back-door system and that most exclusive club that is Division 1 of the National Football League.

Kieran Shannon of the Examiner has made the point this year that addressing the League structure would be far more helpful than codding ourselves that the Championship will – or can – be changed. The Croke Park grandees have paid this not one blind bit of heed, and seem determined to bring back the unloved B Championship. Sigh.

Of the potential challengers, Tyrone may have overtaken Donegal in the pecking order, but otherwise it’s as-you-were for the Big Four. The people of Mayo will wonder if Stephen Rochford is the long-awaited Messiah but the reality is that the team is now manager-independent, really. Unpleasant though it was, the putsch of the previous management team shows that this Mayo panel is now complete in every way.

Everything you read in the papers about Mayo being short a forward or being too loose at the back or not knowing what to with Aidan O’Shea is just paper-talk. Only some truly poxy luck has kept Mayo from winning an All-Ireland since the revival of the 1990s, and luck has to change sometime.

Christy O’Connor had a typically excellent piece in the Indo a few days about the Kilkenny Hurling Imperium, and how it continues even though the playing standard is not what it was. The kings will be kings until someone rises to challenge them, but who that someone might be is anybody’s case.

Your correspondent is a great fan of the Banner County but, although far from a hurling expert, I will eat every single hat I own if Clare win the All-Ireland. Although hailed in the media as a triumph, the inclusion of Dónal Óg Cusack in the Clare back-room team is a sure-fire recipe for disaster. Neither Dónal Óg nor Davy Fitz are noted for their ability to get along with regular people. How in God’s Holy Name they are meant to get on with each other is a Sixth Glorious Mystery. It’ll all end in tears before the hay is saved.

Speaking of tears, it is a generally odious thing to say I told you so, but this is the still the Season of Goodwill so I will chance my arm. This is from last year’s sports review piece in this space:

Reader, Ireland have never won a World Cup playoff game in the seven times the competition has been held, including two years, 1999 and 2007, when Ireland couldn’t even get out of their group. The Irish rugby public should think about crawling before thinking about walking.

And lo, it did come to pass. It was speculated here before the event that the Rugby World Cup would be a crashing bore, something that did not go down well with the public at the time. It wasn’t a crashing bore, but anyone who’s paying attention and is brave enough to be honest with him or herself can see that the game is changing massively, both in the way it’s played and the way it’s organised. The question, then, is whether the change is evolution or devolution.

Rugby has generally been the best of all sports in adjusting its rules to remain true to the spirit of the game as teams seek every edge, but it’s behind the times now. There are too many games decided by penalties at the breakdown which, when it comes to great sporting spectacles, make for rather Hobbesian viewing.

A sign of that evolution – or devolution – was in an offhand comment from Brian O’Driscoll while holding a mic for BT Sports during the recent Ulster v Toulouse game at Kingspan Ravenhill. O’Driscoll has a keen eye and praised Vincent Clerc for taking up a particular defensive position at one stage in the game, and that’s great. But nobody every paid in to watch Simon Geoghegan defend, or David Campese or, God save us, Doctor Sir AJF O’Reilly. If rugby isn’t about running with ball in hand it’s about nothing. Dangerous times for the ancient and glorious game.

Rugby has ruled the roost as the Nation’s Choice for the past number of years because people like winning. Martin O’Neill’s achievement in getting Ireland to the European Qualifiers may challenge rugby’s dominance. It was funny to note all the soccer journalists second-guess O’Neill all they way until the team actually qualified, by which time the u-turn was made in a cacophony of screeching brakes and stench of burning rubber.

As it was with the players, not least the much reviled Glen Whelan. It is worth closing, then, by noting that not everyone was derelict in his or her duty by Whelan when nobody was singing because nobody was winning. The great Keith Duggan wrote a marvellous piece in the Irish Times about Whelan, his role for Ireland and the nature of the professional soccer player back last June. Treat yourself friends, and check it out.

What We Can Learn from the Clare Hurlers

First published in the Western People on Monday.

And then, after the heartache of the All-Ireland Football Final, the sweet and soothing balm of the hurling. It’s normally the football that brings the curtain down on summer and announces the dread return of winter. For the past two years the hurling replays have allowed us that extra half-hour of playtime before it’s time for bath and bed. Having been left empty-handed at the end of the Big Show, a lot of people in the County Mayo were grateful for one last game that could be enjoyed, rather than endured.

Cormac MacConnell, that great Fermanagh writer from a great Fermanagh family, once wrote that he knew just enough about hurling to know that he knew exactly nothing about hurling. And so it goes for most Mayo people, if not the majority of the country. Hurling is a mysterious priesthood, a game for initiates for whom it is the one true belief, while those outside the cast can only peer through the window at the great and ancient game.

The nation’s attitude to hurling, lik the nation’s attitude to a lot of things, is a strange one. If all the people who like to remark that hurling is the greatest game in the world actually played it or promoted it, a camán would be as commonplace to every child in the country as his or her Xbox. But talk is cheap and hurling remains where it has always remained, among its strongholds.

And in the light of that domination, what a thing it was last Sunday week to see Clare rise roaring once more from the bottom of the table, to overturn doubters, dissenters and all to bring the Liam McCarthy Cup home to the Banner for only the fourth time ever. Clare, that most marvellous of counties. God help you there in County Clare, stuck between Kerry and Kiltimagh, as the old people used to say.

While Kilkenny, Cork and Tipperary hurl on the beautiful, rich land of the golden vale, the land in Clare is a lot like the land in the County Mayo – no less beautiful, but not at all as rich or fertile. And not only that, a feature of the Clare landscape is also the world famous Burren, about which a Cromwellian planter once remarked to his bitter disappointment that “there isn't tree to hang a man, water to drown a man nor soil to bury a man.”

But maybe there’s more to life than hanging, drowning and burying men. Music and hurling are far more worthwhile pursuits, as a typically impassioned Anthony Daly told an enthralled nation twenty years ago, when Clare last burst on the scene to carry the big pot away.

What a team those men were. What men that team was. The manager Ger Loughnane, who had drank enough bitter gall during his own playing days in the 1970s to know that any pain was worth not knowing defeat again. The imperious Lohans guarding Davy Fitzgerald’s goal. Daly and Seánie McMahon at half-back. If you imagine our own O’Sheas armed with sticks you get an idea of the Clare midfield of Ollie Baker and Colin Lynch. And upfront, the veteran Sparrow O’Loughlin and the firefly skills of Jamesie O’Connor on the wing.

There was no-one whom Clare feared in those days and, on the days when they were defeated, they died with their boots on.

Now, nearly twenty years later, under the management of Ger Loughnane’s own goalkeeper, Clare have done it again. Davy Fitzgerald isn’t the media’s idea of a polished performer. Not only is his heart on his sleeve, but his very guts are there, heaving for all to see. But behind that raw passion is a brain that is the hurling equivalent of the Rolls Royce motor car. There was a lot of debate about Clare’s tactics this year but, after all the talk, there is one thing that is sure. Clare won.

Clare of 2013 are an echo of Loughnane’s great teams of the 1990s, in that they are built from the back up. David McInerney, Brendan Bugler and Tony Kelly are worthy successors to Brian Lohan, Seánie Mac and Jamesie. The big difference between the teams of the nineties and the team of 2013 is the performance of young Shane O’Donnell in the final.

Only told he was starting an hour before the game began, O’Donnell scored three goals and three points to lead Clare past a valiant Cork, a Cork who would have reeled any other team in Ireland back. But not Clare, who were very much destiny’s children in 2013.

In a post-game interview with Shane O’Donnell broadcast on last Monday’s Morning Ireland, Clare’s latter-day Cúchulainn put it all in a nutshell. “Sure this is my first year on both panels, 21s and senior,” said O’Donnell. “I don't even have the all the baggage that the lads have from years gone by where they should have won things but they didn't. And it's a lot easier going out and playing when you don't have things in the back of your head like that.”

It’s a lot easier going out and playing when you don’t have things in the back of your head like that. In Mayo, we have more things in the back of our heads than that young man could dream of. He thinks the baggage of twenty years a lot. He should try sixty.

But this isn’t to have a pop at O’Donnell. The man is the toast of the nation in these hard times and if he’s not, he should be. This is just to say that, reader, someday that will be us.

Someday that will be a Mayoman talking about how the only thing that matters is the here and now. That days come one by one and you either seize them or let them go forever. That piseogs and curses aren’t worth a bale of wet straw compared to the courage, talent and the eternal optimism of youth. God speed the day and, while we await it, up the Banner and may they enjoy a warm and short winter.