An Irishman's Diary

As I write this, a post-Ulster Final debate is raging on one of the internet's better GAA sites, under the heading: "Are Monaghan a dirty team or are Tyrone soft?"

Like the game itself, the debate is proving to be a tight affair, with the thesis that Tyrone players do go down a bit easily - and that this is a lamentable feature of the modern game - just ahead by two points (wind assisted).

But there's nothing new under the sun, and there is definitely nothing new in Gaelic football.

Here is Patrick Kavanagh, former goalkeeper for Inniskeen Grattans, describing a game from his heyday in the 1930s - probably against the hated local rivals, Donaghmoyne Fontenoys: "The team we were playing was a disgusting class of a team, who used every form of psychological warfare. For instance, when one of them was knocked down, he rolled on the ground and bawled like a bull a-gelding."

Not that the Grattans were strangers to cynical behaviour. Here is Kavanagh again, describing a useful tactic when a contest had swung decisively in favour of the opposition. "We never finished a game if towards the end we were a-batin'," he admits. "We always found an excuse to rise a row and get the field invaded."

Of course, a good lawyer might question the poet's credibility as a witness; for, just to prove there is nothing new, his GAA career was overshadowed by an illegal payments controversy. This even led to his sacking as club secretary and team captain. But then, the crime was compounded by the fact that he was also treasurer, so he was both the maker and recipient of the payments.

Here is a summary of his testimony, not that it saved him: "There was no means of checking up on my cash, which gave rise to a lot of ill-founded suspicion. I remember I kept the money in an attaché case under my bed. It is possible I visited it every so often for the price of a packet of cigarettes, but nothing serious." Kavanagh's brief memoir of his football career is in a book called A Poet's Country, edited by Antoinette Quinn. It carries the heading of "Gut yer man" - a then standard piece of advice given to GAA players by supporters during a game. And although he was well aware of the passions stirred by football, Kavanagh used the essay to explain why he hadn't written about it more often.

He concluded that, for all its drama, sport was too superficial to treat at any length. "The emotion is a momentary puff of gas, not an experience," he argued, calling James Joyce as a prosecution witness. The only sports event to feature in Ulysses - "that compendium of commonplace emotions and goings on" - is the Ascot Gold Cup, Kavanagh noted: "So sport can't have been very vital, for Joyce had a mind like a sponge." Wherever he is now, I hope the poet appreciated the joke on Sunday, when sport was vital enough to force the postponement of National Patrick Kavanagh Day, at least in Inniskeen.

Kavanagh Day is a recent addition to the calendar, inspired by the canal bank poems, particularly the line about "the tremendous silence of mid-July". Unfortunately for the organisers, this year's event clashed with a rare Ulster Final appearance by Monaghan. So the silence was indeed tremendous around the poet's home village on Sunday, because everybody was in Clones. The commemoration has now been rescheduled for August 5th, a day when - barring replays - there will be no big football matches on.

Whatever about the joke, Kavanagh would definitely have appreciated the psychological warfare in Clones, which extended on and off the field. It is normal for players to introduce themselves before the throw-in in such a way as to unsettle opponents. But at the North Monaghan venue, the mobile phone companies always get in on the act too, issuing welcome messages to supporters designed to put them off their game.

Thus it was that, after an absence of three years, Clones again resounded with that distinctive sound of thousands of mobile phones beeping to tell their owners that they were now in the UK but could access their messages just like at home.

The gamesman- ship was probably more deliberate on the field, it's true. But since the game is over, I'm not going to offer an opinion on whether players did go down too easily, lest any pro-Monaghan prejudice influence me. In fairness to Tyrone, it's possible that the law of gravity is just stronger in the Republic, or something.

The main thing is that the game was a fitting return home for the Ulster Final. There had been wild talk beforehand of Clones creating a carnival atmosphere to mark the occasion, with music and street theatre and God knows what. And although, in the event, the town pulled back from any such madness, the game more than compensated as a spectacle.

I'm not saying it was champagne football from start to finish. But by Ulster standards, it was a celebration of the human spirit, with gutting at a minimum.

When Tyrone led by eight points at one stage, a massacre looked likely. Then came the comeback, as Monaghan goal chances started appearing like the number 10 bus. All the gamesmanship was forgotten in those frenetic closing minutes. Indeed, such was the excitement among the home supporters, it somehow never occurred to any of us to invade the pitch and get the game called off.

[  fmcnally@irish-times.ie ]