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.

Champions League Format Me Hat - in Defence of the Irish Summer

There are three events that mark every Irish summer. They are, in reverse order, the climbing of the Reek, the saving of the hay and the well meaning but hopelessly naïve call for the GAA to scrap the Championship and replace it with a “Champions League” style competition.

Keith Barr and Mick O’Keeffe are the latest men to make this argument. You can read them yourselves, as there’s no need to break down the piece sentence by sentence here.

The reasons the Champions League style format is nonsense are many. Here are the two biggest.

Inter-county competition will always be unequal as long as there are unequal populations in the counties and unequal interest in the GAA within those counties. That is a fact of life. You might beat one of those realities, as Offaly have in their history and please God will do again, but you can’t beat both.

The only way to create an equal playing field is do away with the birth qualification for players, so that counties could pick from the same pool. The cost of that would be soul of the Association itself.

An Spailpín suspects that the single most important thing that drives the GAA is pride of place. A Mayo team that can only be filled by Mayomen is worth one hundred All-Irelands lost. A Championship team of ringers and mercenaries is worth less than nothing.

Pride of place is more important than the game for the majority of people, myself included. Inequality is the price of regional identity. It’s a price worth paying.

The second reason is given to us by Doctor Hannibal Lecter in the Silence of the Lambs. How we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? No. We begin by coveting what we see every day.

A Champions League style format doesn’t present us with things we see every day. It presents us with things we’ve never seen before. It seeks out things to covet, and ignores what we see every day, and think about every day, and look forward to every day.

A Champions League style format on the Barr/O’Keeffe model wipes out over one hundred years of history, and wishes us to pretend that a game between Mayo and Laois will have the same attraction as Mayo v Roscommon or Laois v Offaly.

Well, it doesn’t and it won’t, even though Laois played in Division 2 this year and the Ros Division 4. It might, of course, in the 125 years it’ll take the Champions League format to be as old as the current Championship, but it doesn’t seem sufficiently likely to bet the organisation’s future on it.

We don’t seek out things to covet. We covet what we know. Mayo playing Galway nearly every year isn’t boring. If Mayo playing Galway ever year is boring, then so is Christmas, so are the Galway Races, so is the Rose of Tralee and so is the US Masters. They are all infinite rhapsodies on a central theme. Always the same, always utterly different, every single time.

The Championship needs reform, of course. Even the Eifel Tower gets a soupçon of paint every now and again. An Spailpín’s own reform would be to return the Qualifiers to the Hell from whence they came. Nothing good can come of a system that supports the strong and punishes the weak. Failing that, deny a qualifier place for the current Champions, and see who takes their provincial championship seriously then.

But the chief thing An Spailpín would like to see is a little deeper analysis of what the GAA and the Championship actually are, rather than simplistic comparisons to what happens somewhere else.

Because there is nothing like the GAA Championship, anywhere. It’s doubly unique – a hugely popular amateur association that insists on loyalty of place being more important than exultation of talent.

Irish writers, poets and scientists should be pouring over this thing, and celebrating it for what it is – a unicorn, a magical mythical creature that somehow still exists in a base and materialistic world.

Instead, we get people wanting to burn the horn right off the unicorn to have it look like just another pony, and then wonder in a few years why nobody comes to see it any more.

Straining Against the Laois - Fishy Business in the Mayo Forward Line

Laois 1-13
Mayo 1-13

“What might have been” always has an electric effect on the Mayo supporter; it is generally best not to bring it up, as tears may quickly ensue. As such, the Laois county board were playing a dangerous game with their program for the game last night at Páirc Uí Mhordha, Portlaoise.

There was a thought-provoking picture of Kieran McDonald on the cover, as the status of Mayo’s Gile Mear remains unknown as the sod firms and spring advances. Even more heartbreaking though, the program had two lovely reports by Pat Delaney of matches past between the teams, one from 1980 and the other from 1973. Mayo won both games, thanks in no small part to the input of their full forward lines. In 1980, the inside line was Jimmy Burke, Jimmy Lyons and Joe McGrath – between them, they contributed 2-03 to Mayo’s total of 2-08. Not bad, but 1973 – my God, what a full-forward line wore green above the red that day. They were Ted Webb, Willie McGee and Jinkin' Joe Corcoran, legends all, and they contributed 2-04 to the Mayo total of 2-10.

Can you see where your Spailpín Fánach is going with this?

Last night, Mayo played with a two man inside line, with Austin O’Malley dropping deep, which is hardly the spot for him. The logic of this formation is hard to entirely understand – the only two-man inside line that really cut sides up that An Spailpín can bring to mind is Meath’s from 1999 to 2001, when Ollie Murphy and Graham Geraghty terrorised defences across Ireland. The thing about those two boys though is that they were able to win independent ball – An Spailpín has fallen hopelessly in love with that phrase since hearing Jack O’Connor use it one summer! – and having won it, they were able to use it.

Andy Moran and Conor Mortimer are who they are, and it is unrealistic to expect them to behave as Murphy and Geraghty. But it is a little worrying that they are currently expected to do these jobs for which they don’t seem entirely suited.

Rumours of discontent in the camp constantly emanate from Laois, but they didn’t look too bad at all from where An Spailpín was sitting last night. Padraig Clancy lorded midfield against an out of sorts James Gill and David Heaney, forcing O’Mahony to spring Ronan McGarrity from the bench after twenty minutes to calm things down a bit there. The Laois inside line looked particularly tasty, with the old bull Parkinson in one corner, the young bull Tierney (nine points, three from frees – can’t ask for more than that) in the other, and Brendan Quigley of Timahoe between them. Quigley was in midfield last year and played some Aussie Rules before that again, experience that allowed him to wreck no small amount of havoc in the Mayo defence. Quigley will take watching in the Leinster Championship this summer.

For Mayo, not as much to be hopeful about right now, to be honest. Aidan Kilcoyne made up for last week a little when he came on at half-time for Michael Mullins yesterday, but if the Mayo forwards were crustaceans they would be crabs – constantly scuttling sideways, eyes out on stalks and never making progress. The ideal denizens of the deep to name in the forwards would be a great big blue whale at full forward, two sharks playing off him in the corners, a dancing seahorse at 10, a leaping trout at 12 and a dirty great ugly brute of a pike at 11, pulling the strings and exerting his authority.

These are unlikely to manifest between now and June 22nd, of course, and Johnno and the travelling support must make do in the meantime. Minds now turn to Castlebar, and a game against Kerry on the day before St Patrick’s Day. It will be a glorious day out, and Mayo are not quite relegated yet. It looked like Laois and Mayo would descend hand in hand into Roinn a Dó next year at half-past eight last night, but now I’m not quite so sure. A result against Kerry would be heartening in more ways than one. However, having seen parts of their game against Derry on TG4 today, it’s hard to see it happening I’m afraid.

But what matter? Isn’t it only the League?





Technorati Tags: Ireland, sport, GAA, football, Mayo, Laois