Put a head on that: Croke Park headers and ageing stout

Writing about the late Eamonn Breslin – "the man who headed the ball" at Croke Park in 1964 – recently (Irishman's Diary, February 25th), I wondered that it had not happened more often in GAA games. As I've learned since, Breslin's goal was more unusual in being allowed stand than as an incident in itself. Even though there is no rule against heading in Gaelic football, referees in lesser matches have typically found grounds to disallow such scores, like the man in charge of an under-12s game involving my colleague Malachy Clerkin, who ruled a header out once under the catch-all clause: "No soccer sh*te".

But as I also know now, Breslin was not unique even in heading a goal at Croke Park in the 1960s. On the contrary, the feat was repeated there within months by another Dublin player, Brian MacDonald, who had been involved in the build-up to the original score.

Writing from exile in Mayo, MacDonald tells me his own header happened in the 1965 All-Ireland semi-final against Kerry. This time he was on the end of a move that led to a proverbial "schemozzle" in the square, with him on the ground and the ball on the goal line.

“I knew I couldn’t touch it with my hand, so I nudged the ball over the line [with my head],” he recalls. And again, the score stood, although MacDonald feared extra-judicial judgement from the defenders. “The umpire raised the green flag and I got out of there,” he writes. “It would not do to hang around the Kerry square for long.”

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Kerry went on to win and the goal was not officially credited to anyone. This and the confusion of its circumstances made it less famous than the Breslin one. “I don’t think many people knew it had been scored with the head but that is what happened,” he says, adding that I can check the matter “by looking at the front-page photograph in the [next day’s] Irish Times”.

I tried. But there is a mysterious lacuna in the Irish Times archive, spanning all of August 1965. It’s like a longer version of the gap in the Nixon Whitehouse tapes. Maybe agents of the GAA then – worried about the growing scandal of Dublin players heading the ball at Croke Park and perhaps inspiring other soccer-style developments, including elaborate goal celebrations, with mass hugging – orchestrated a cover-up.

By the way, in the original column, I suggested Dublin were All-Ireland champions when playing Laois in 1964. They had won the 1963 All-Ireland all right. But the league game against Laois was in November. Galway had just succeeded them to the All-Ireland title, en route to three in a row.

Head-the-ball

As also mentioned in that piece, Brendan Behan was at least partly responsible for introducing the phrase "head-the-ball" into English literature, via Borstal Boy. And I thought of him again last week, along with his fellow Dublin writer James Joyce, when reading about a new Irish stout, "aged for 365 days", with "12 per cent" alcohol by volume.

The nation’s brewers seem at last to be catching up with the drinkers in Joyce’s Ulysses who, when ordering pints, asked for “wine of the country”. Now that stout is being reviewed by this newspaper’s wine critic, maybe the phrase is due a comeback.

That seems less likely in the case of another expression used alongside it in Ulysses – “ditto Mac Anaspey”. It meant “same here” or “same again”. And its short-lived popularity in Dublin drinking slang circa 1904 is presumed to relate to the M’Anespie brothers (as usually spelt), a firm of stucco plasterers well known in the city at that time. There are competing theories about how it originated. In my favourite, it arose from a long, impassioned speech made by one of the stucco men in favour of Home Rule, after which the next speaker just said: “Ditto MacAnaspie” and sat down again.

The surname is unusual in Ireland, yet also quite old. There was a "MacEnaspicke" among the Gaels who fled to Spain after the Battle of Kinsale, for example. Today, and typically spelt "McAnespie", it is found mainly in Monaghan and Tyrone.

The name is also unusual in its meaning, from Mac an Easpaig, “son of the bishop”. Episcopal offspring are a concept not unknown in our times, of course, even among Catholics.  And going back to where we started – 1964 – there was a twist to the theme in Behan’s reported last words. In gratitude to a nursing nun who cared for him at the end, he is said to have imparted the blessing: “May all your sons be bishops.”