Ciarán Murphy: The GAA will always find a way to mess with your plans

There is no real way to say this without sounding like an unconscionable bore, but . . . last Saturday afternoon, I was in Cancun International Airport.

At near enough the exact moment that Johnny Sexton was kicking off at the Aviva Stadium, I was making my way through security, peering amusedly at a trio of young Irish lads making their way, tail between their legs, through the little rat’s maze which now constitutes so much of modern-day air travel.

They were in tremendous physical condition, even if they looked like they might, perhaps, have been cruelly overserved the evening before, and I silently thought of what I’d have made of this rather energetic corner of Mexico if I was young, single and 22 or 23.

As I progressed along the queue, I spotted a few more Irish lads, some of them wearing a maroon and white t-shirt. In fact, the more I looked, the more I realised that they were all wearing some item of clothing bearing something close to a GAA insignia on them.

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Then in the medium distance, I saw a figure that looked a lot like John Heslin. In fact, it was John Heslin. It slowly dawned on me that yes, I was indeed watching from a respectful distance as the Tailteann Cup winners started their journey home from their team holiday.

In a stroke I went from judging a couple of potentially-devastating hangovers to being pleasantly surprised by how fresh the majority of them looked. I had just been informed that our stop-over in JFK was going to be rather shorter than I’d expected, so I left the boys from Westmeath to fend for themselves in the artfully-named Margaritaville, while I slowly panicked about missing our connecting flight.

But even their mere presence in the airport gave me a sense of security. Listen, if they’re on the same flight as us, I reassured my wife, there’s no way the flight back to Dublin will leave without them. These are the Tailteann Cup winners, for Christ’s sake – as long as we stick with them, we’ll be alright.

It turns out they had an alternative flight-plan for their return to Ireland, but when I picked up the paper on Monday morning and saw that a number of players from The Downs had come back from Cancun and played a starring role in their Leinster club championship win over Ardee on Sunday, curiosity got the better of me.

I texted one of their party to see if the lads had gone straight from the airport to Mullingar on Sunday morning – only to be informed, much to my disappointment, that the four Downs players had actually travelled back on Thursday. In the interests of full disclosure I revealed that I had spotted the entire party myself at the airport, to which I was told that Cancun was a hell of a spot, and ‘had I made it to Coco Bongo?’

Alas, even without googling it, I had a suspicion my Coco Bongo days are behind me, and subsequent online inquiries served only to confirm my thinking. I had to feel sorry for the four lads, Charlie Drumm, Jonathan Lynam, Trevor Martin and Kevin O’Sullivan, who had their holidays cut short, but then I wasn’t that sorry . . . because I was making my way home for a promotion playoff in AFL 4 of the Dublin senior league at 10.30am on Sunday myself.

I landed at 8.15am, was home by 9.10am, and was at the pitch at 9.30am, which amounted to just about the worst preparation for a football game I’d ever undergone.

Two hours of the sort of frantic, panic-inducing sleep you only ever get on a plane is not exactly optimal pre-match behaviour . . . and that’s leaving aside the midweek margaritas. I was only capable of 15 minutes, and those were our last 15 minutes of the year.

I’d only been gone a week, but I had managed to miss our last regulation league game (subsequently given as a walk-over), narrowly made our promotion playoff game by about half an hour, and missed two club socials – one for my club in Galway, and one for my club in Dublin.

I’d been out of the country for four days in total all year before last week, so it seemed pretty bloody unfair to miss out on quite so much in one seven-day period, particularly when my father, Tony, was being honoured last weekend with a lifetime achievement award for his 40-plus years of service to Milltown’s juvenile and adult sections.

The lads from The Downs might also have thought that one week away in November surely couldn’t clash with much, before their first county title in 17 years threw a happy spanner in the works.

It turns out that no matter how many county board schedules are sent out in January, no matter how certain you might be that your few days away will be harmless, the GAA will always find a way to mess with your plans. And I didn’t even get to see Coco Bongo.