Fans just can't get enough of timeless summer carnival

Championship is here at last. PAUL FITZPATRICK looks at why we’re so fascinated by the great annual summer sporting festival of craic, with some football thrown in.

 

Here comes everything. Here comes nothing at all.

Sunday is championship, large and in charge, and it brings to mind important places, times, days we remember all our lives.

Last year, 1.3 million people had their wrists stamped and entered the carnival, football and hurling. No other sporting competition affects the nation like it. It grabs some in a headlock and won’t let go; others brush shoulders with it, are vaguely aware of its presence in the room. But everyone has some interaction.

But why? We need to talk about the championship...

 

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Armagh are coming on Sunday – you might have heard. What comes to mind when you think of us against them? If you’re of a certain vintage, it could be the late ‘50s. For others, maybe it’s 1978 and Texas & Co routing the All-Ireland finalists of the previous year.

It was nearly 30 years before they met again, in 2004, and that’s the one burned in my memory.

Back then, the shop at the back of the stand at St Tiernach’s Park ran out of drinks at half-time. I was on the hill, in the corner. I was 20. There was a 21st the night before, a late one and the head was fuzzy; a can of something would have been nice.

I still see McConville’s point at the end, yards away from where we stood, programme shielding our eyes from the sun. He came up on the right and clipped it over and that was her. But Cavan were clapped off that day and that’s a rare thing.

And you know what song was buzzing in my brain, what song reminds me of Clones that summer every time I hear it, when Cavan stretched Armagh out on the rack, like villains, only for the champions to wriggle off like 15 James Bonds at the last second and knock us out with a raised eyebrow and a killer one-liner?

Depeche Mode, I Just Can’t Get Enough. It’s still ringing in my ears.

“We slip and slide as we fall in love but we just can’t seem to get enough...”

 

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We’re all friends here, right? Cavan followers, yes? Well, let’s talk plainly. Why do we do it to ourselves? In almost half a century, just once have the cards fallen our way. We’ve squandered good hands, wrung a couple of tricks out of bad ones but only once – once in 50 years! - have we made the pot ours.

Only a certain type of optimist will back only 50/1 shots. So what is it? It’s this: The sport of the chase is what brings us back each time. If it happens and we do it, Hallelujah. If it doesn’t, well, nobody died.

Politicians talk about recovery but there probably won’t be one in rural Ireland, where the only future we ever really had was built on cheap credit. If the economy ‘rights itself’, we’ll be a lot worse off then we imagine. So, championship is a diversion from real life, a Hollywood movie played out with your friends and neighbours and old classmates and cousin’s boyfriend in the lead roles, sprinkling stardust on the mundane.

 

* * * *

 

What does it mean to you? Everyone takes from it what they want and need.

It’s the player’s mother too nervous to attend, saying a novena that everything goes alright.

It’s the local radio commentators losing it, frantic, howling, roaring, scowling.

It’s pain in the rain and fun in the sun, a nose broken in a challenge match as young men scrap for places on the team and a career launched when a fresh-faced kid makes his name. 

It’s a hundred thousand threads woven together and stitched into the fabric of Irish life.

It’s the sizzle of the burger vans, the nasal hollering of the day-tripping Dubs selling hats-scarves-rosettes-and-a-headbands, the pint after the game.

It’s the post mortems when you lose, clinical as a mortician’s scalpel and cutting twice as deep.

It’s the celebrations when you win, the feeling that our people are as good as anyone else’s.

It’s the pensioner with the Yankee drawl who packs their royal blue and white baseball cap and taxis to JFK with a reason to fly home again and the 20-somethings from Adelaide to Abu Dhabi, rising at dawn, donning their jersey and turning the dial to the game.

It’s the pressmen, carrying Dictaphones on their hips like a six-gun and turning it on someone – anyone – with a story to tell about the big match.

It’s the child with the face paint and the wide eyes, their own future shaped by what’s unfolding before them – and they don’t even know it.

 

* * * *

 

There’s a scene in HBO’s The Wire, where a wizened cop visits a con in jail and attempts to convince him to steer his teenage son away from the mean streets of Baltimore.

“Our kind … shit,” says the cop, reaching for some common ground. “Man, we both know we’re gonna go to our grave forever knowing what block Bentalou dead-ends at or who got the liquor licence over at the Underground or what corner Tater Man got shot on back in ‘88.”

They’re the same gifts championship bestows on the fanatic. Useless information.

We remember a league game where a row broke out and Jason going for goal in ‘01 and missing by inches when maybe a point might have done and Kildare summoning a late goal in Newbridge and McCabe’s free in 2004 that we thought had won it only for Murtagh to steal a draw...

We recall the line-outs – “no, Cahill was injured that day” – and the scorers – “was it not Carolan who scored that free?” - and the hits and the misses and we debate them and dissect them. That’s the context; whatever happens on Sunday will happen but remember – these men are straight out of the same townlands and streets and schools and families as what went before, carrying the old colours, writing new stories but with a hundred years of history behind them.

 

* * * *

 

Joe Brolly says footballers are indentured slaves; they are, but their master is the game, just as it is ours.

If the GPA had a theme tune, it would be a slow, mourning Blues number. Woe, they wail, is the inter-county player.

But tell that to the Cavanmen who were cheered off the field after winning promotion against Galway a few weeks back.

Tell it to Mossy Corr, who’s going on 32 and playing the best football of his career. Tell it to Padraig Faulkner, who picked up an Ulster award for his performances in his rookie year. Tell it to the captain, Gearoid McKiernan, media shy but a born leader. Tell it to Killian Clarke, the effervescent full-back with the pink boots and the beaming smile.

A friend of mine is considering writing a book on Ulster football in the early ‘90s. The stories, the characters. Dig deep enough, you know, and there’s a book in every football team.

Look at Seanie Johnston’s tale, or Ray Galligan’s – a forward on the inter-county scrapheap re-invented in goals, poacher turned gamekeeper who is 25/1 now for an All-Star. Or Terry Hyland’s – from club footballer to Over 40s manager, while still in his 30s, to club trainer to county, Crowe Park to Croke Park and a lot of ground covered in between.

Like every other team in the country, and two outside of it, all the training, all the nights in and ice baths and sacrifices we don’t see, have been for this one afternoon with the sun on their backs and the band pounding on the big drum.

It’s not easy to train every day of the week but these are young men, living their dream. Forget slavery. Championship is emancipation and once that ball is thrown in, we’re free as a bird.

 

* * * *

 

So, all the work is done now and the die is cast. The result is inevitable; the months of graft and preparation decide which teams win these games, the few days of fine-tuning can only influence how much they win by.

A few things will certainly happen. There’ll be suffocating tension and thousands will rise together as one. There’ll be wisecracks and vitriol and everything in between. We know all this, the good and the bad, and we keep coming back for another go.

That’s the addict’s curse – and the prize for winning this is another sweet hit and, maybe, a series of them.

The championship structure is crazy but, then again, so are the supporters, the players, everyone invested in this mad little world.

We know it’s broken but the appetite isn’t there to fix it. Maybe we’re afraid it will lose its magic.

For now, we watch the clock and count down the days. A few miles up the road, Kieran McGeeney is plotting an invasion. Here at home, Hyland and his war cabinet are moving their troops into position, too.

Everyone else is making plans for the big day – where they’ll meet, who’s picking up the tickets, who’s buying the first round. And the weathermen say there’s a heatwave coming.

For football people, this is what it’s all about. It’s getting hotter, it’s a burning love – and we just can’t seem to get enough...