Chasing hoop dreams down a Dublin rabbit hole

The Croquet Championship of Ireland is a competitive affair, but there's always room for a pint between hoops, writes MICHAEL PARSONS.

‘FANCY covering the Croquet Championship of Ireland?” The plum assignment conjured up images of an agreeable afternoon sipping Dubonnet Negroni and nibbling cucumber sandwiches at the home of the earl of Rosse at Birr Castle, or posing as Sebastian Flyte on the duke of Devonshire’s manicured lawns at schloss Lismore. No such luck.

“Carrickmines,” the boss responded airily to a request for directions. Gadzooks. The south Dublin suburb may have the odd flash of elegant Edwardian but Glenamuck Road isn’t quite Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester.

It’s not the day’s first monocle-popping surprise. The strewth-ish revelation that this gentle pastime originated in Ireland is as astonishing as being told that Peig Sayers invented the tiara or that a dressed Pimm’s was once Tipperary hurlers’ tipple of choice.

Now the moaning crone of An Blascaod Mór never adorned her person with anything more decorative than a scapular, and the Premier county’s finest drink the warm blood of a heifer before hunting the sliotar, but croquet was first played in the “big houses” of north Leinster during the 1830s before eventually crossing the Irish Sea.

The game became a Victorian sensation and spread to all corners of the British empire. Everyone played, from Alice in Wonderland, who used a flamingo as her mallet, to a viceroy of India who reputedly had his fashioned from solid ivory. The arrival of upstart lawn tennis gradually eroded the game’s popularity and, although croquet reached its zenith when admitted briefly as an Olympic sport at the Paris Games in 1900, it gradually fell into decline.

Croquet has been described as ground billiards or polo without the ponies. Here’s the science bit for anoraks. The game essentially involves players striking coloured plastic balls with a wooden mallet though U-shaped metal hoops (which resemble mini-goalposts) embedded in a lawn.

At the Carrickmines Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club yesterday, players gathered for day one of the centenary championship games. Unlike the Lewis Carroll version (“‘Get to your places!’ shouted the queen in a voice of thunder, and people began running about in all directions, tumbling up against each other”), the scene was a picture of serenity. Men and a few women dressed in pristine whites gently pottered about and discussed proceedings in accents as clipped as the grass. Rocket, a photogenic “Glenamuck terrier”, and the club’s mascot, snoozed in the noon heat. We could have been on the set of Midsomer Murders.

Croquet captain Padraig Thornton, a genial 73-year-old Dalkey resident with an Onassis tan, said “two Bacardi and cokes is the perfect injection before a game”. Su Stenhouse (57), a molecular geneticist from Glasgow, had just finished a late morning game, and sank a pint of Guinness while enjoying a cigarette. “All my friends think I’m crazy to play croquet,” she remarked, “but when I tell them you can drink and smoke at the same time they get the picture.”

Nathaniel Healy (59), who recently retired as a partner in a law firm, began playing 20 years ago and established a club in Newcastle, Co Wicklow, where “the men were looking for something that involved drink and not their wives”. But not all the players were older and decadent.

The jeunesse dorée included David McGrath (27), a Westminster Road resident who enjoys croquet’s combination of “tactical and strategic skills”, and “sports-mad” Kieran Murphy (19) from Wicklow, a “competitive person” who “loved it from the first game”.

The groundsman and reigning Irish singles champion, Simon Williams (46), said that “around 200 people” play at clubs affiliated to the Croquet Association of Ireland although “thousands play garden croquet at home”. There are three clubs in Dublin (at Carrickmines, Herbert Park and Trinity College) and others in counties Cork, Meath and Wicklow. A century ago, there were 200 clubs in Dublin alone.

The Championship of Ireland continues until Saturday evening, when trophies will be presented following the annual dinner. There are 14 players competing for the Duff Mathews trophy – 11 from Ireland and three English visitors, including Stephen Mulliner (55) from Haslemere, Surrey, who is currently the world-number-one seed.

A number of players recalled, with a sigh, the “good old days” when The Irish Times would regularly publish the results.

After a few hours of larking about, the club house looked inviting. Was there honey still for tea? But crikey! Stands the Foxrock church clock at ten-to-three? With a deadline looming, it was time to step back through the looking glass.

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