On Gaelic Games: A traditional hurling final in all senses: Cork and Kilkenny, the former strongly fancied but the latter strongly winning, played out their 21st All-Ireland on the first Sunday in September, the return to the old date for the first time in 10 years adding nostalgic value.
Inspired by this exposure to heritage placed in the modern setting of the new Croke Park, I have decided to borrow from the best of the past to interpret the present. So here is a guide to All-Ireland finals, a combination of likes and dislikes.
I Like - that mellow feeling that comes at the fall of both the season and the year. It makes it a bit nippy up at altitude in the press box, especially for those who regard it as something of a sell-out to add layers of clothing to simple shirtsleeves in Croke Park any time between the start of the championship and the advent of the International Rules.
But it also reminds us that the season is about to end and our travails with it. There's something satisfying about shepherding the championship to its close, a benign perspective made possible by not having the same passionate investment in the game that's being played out as the vast majority of the attendance.
I Like - the sense that history is being bagged and boxed in front of your eyes. It mightn't matter in that sort of context for a while yet but you know that this will be one of the matches that will live on in the memory with a vividness that overpowers nearly every other match from the years in question and that the programme with its primary-source notation and eternal data will be thumbed to a greater degree than its 2006 contemporaries.
Players putting in big performances will always be associated with the day and the year. Aidan Fogarty, for instance, joins that list of players - whose names curiously all seem to end with 'y' - who will always be indelibly linked to the day they made an unheralded scoring impact on an All-Ireland hurling final: Damien Quigley, Fergie Tuohy, Mark O'Leary, Niall McCarthy.
I Like - admiring the sweep of the new stadium. There may have been more of a historic vibe to the old ground with its 60 and 40-year-old stands and increasingly decrepit terraces but even they weren't authentic. A venue like Croke Park has to renew itself as the decades roll by and the new structure is better-looking and integrated in design terms.
It may be the trigger for at-times excessive self-congratulation on the part of the GAA but it's a bold statement and you know that in 50 years crowds - maybe, who knows, including myself (As Brendan Behan replied when asked what he would like people to be saying about him in 100 years: "Doesn't he look fantastic for his age") - will still be flocking to All-Ireland finals there.
I Don't Like - sitting there, getting agitated as the course of a match makes nonsense of my preview.
Reporters mightn't be there with hats and flags but they do have an undying loyalty to the preview. On Sunday I was on my own - less desirable - three-in-a-row for wrong All-Ireland hurling previews.
In common with many less-than-effective players I lose confidence in my judgment as soon as the ball is thrown in. Unlike Cork I landed the treble.
I Don't Like - visiting team hotels the following morning. Winning venues are studies in mayhem with managers and players understandably chary of being mobbed for the 14th hour running. They then lie low or go off to perform charitable works.
Mistime your arrival at the hotel and you can wait around interminably. Get it right and you're in and out in 30 minutes. I tend to get it wrong.
Losing hotels are naturally less manic and players are more in evidence, the enormity of the previous day sinking in with them. They could be forgiven for viewing the diffident gaggle of reporters with all the distaste of men who have just glimpsed rogues, who used to blackmail them during a previous life in Bangkok. Some do. Others take pity.
On Monday, Cork manager John Allen was so civil he sympathised with our having to stand around hotels waiting. Ronan Curran and Brian Corcoran answered what to them must have felt like meaningless questions courteously and intelligently.
One thing about Cork and Kilkenny is all of their responses are less extreme than those of counties less practised in big-day rituals. Victories are never as suffused with delirium and the sheer disbelief of winning. Defeats are never accompanied by the same almost tangible despair and damnation.
Brian Corcoran put it as well as anyone in his position when he said: " but at the end of the day it wouldn't be worth anything if it didn't hurt losing." For the most part, though, Cork and Kilkenny are like Sidney Greenstreet's Kasper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, never wasting too much time cursing their loss but regaining composure and resuming the search.
I Don't Like - ticket hysteria. Another good thing about Cork-Kilkenny finals is that there's comparatively less noise about how genuine fans are getting frozen out. If it's that bad how come the participating counties in every hurling final are playing before their first full house of the season at Croke Park? Or that the counties' supporters overwhelmingly constitute the crowd?
On a related point, Martin McGuinness said a few days ago that whereas he was unhappy with the GAA's decision not to allow Sinn Féin purchase tickets, he had been "inundated by GAA clubs all over the island of Ireland with offers of tickets".
Easy knowing he's from the North. No public representative south of the Dublin-Galway line would dare make that claim in public the week of an All-Ireland hurling final.
I Don't Like - the fear of replays. As a qualification to the above view on loyalty to the preview, it should be emphasised that such loyalty is superseded by a terrible anxiety about the prospect of having to 'build up' to another All-Ireland.
It's one of hurling's great mysteries that the All-Ireland final hasn't been drawn for 48 seasons now. Hurling is high scoring and unsuited to matches that end up level but there's been no shortage of drawn semi-finals or provincial finals over the intervening years. Like some doomsday clock, the threat of the next replayed hurling final has passed but moved closer.
smoran@irish-times.ie
