SIDELINE CUT:In the GAA days of yore, a cruciate or hamstring injury could be cured with a dab of a wet sponge, while a melee degenerated into a shemozzle in the background

IT IS hard to pinpoint exactly when it happened but there can be little doubt that "cruciate" has replaced "melee" as the most popular word in the GAA lexicon. In a general effort to stamp out all fun and spontaneous passion – or what the chaps on The Sunday Game, veering dangerously close to DH Lawrence country, like to call "manliness" – the GAA has more or less made the "melee" extinct.

The ‘melee’ was a wonderful word because it made mass brawls sound as harmless as ice cream. Nobody was ever truly hurt in a melee; if so, the incident would be upgraded to a shemozzle and every now and then, when a fight of actual ferocity broke out and somebody got lamped, it merited the gravest tag: “unacceptable scenes.”

Injuries, though, played second fiddle to the melee. We are going back to the 1980s and 1990s here, when GAA injuries were limited to two types: head or hamstring.

The head injury was common: it was remarkable how many players would emerge from seemingly innocuous collisions spouting red geysers from brow and cheekbone. The solution was always brisk and led to several memorably flamboyant outcomes. When a man went down, the team doctor would launch himself across the field at full pelt, often zig-zagging like an army medic bravely sprinting through sniper fire across a patch of no man’s land in ’Nam to tend to a fallen soldier (the Northern doctors were, for some reason, particularly adept at this).

Always, the physio/doctor carried a bag that looked big enough to contain the entire catalogue of Elvis albums. And it might as well have done because everyone knew what the doctor would produce when he went rummaging in his bag for the piece of equipment that could cope with everything: a great big filthy sponge, as least as old as the Turin Shroud.

The doc would lean over the stricken player and hold his ear close to his mouth, as if to ascertain that he was still breathing. Often, it looked as if he might be whispering an act of contrition to the poor man. But lo and behold, he would then encourage the athlete to return to a sitting position by yanking him up by his shirt while producing a sponge doused in cold water which he would rub vigorously on the injury, like a mother determined to get at a stubborn blotch of strawberry jam.

It is rumoured that many of the interrogation techniques used in Guantanamo Bay were inspired by the injury treatments in the GAA championship. Needless to say, faced with the choice between being drowned by a cold water sponge or playing on with the injury, most players decided to struggle through the match, in various stages of concussion or perhaps suffering from broken arms, cracked ribs or muscles shorn in two.

Their performances were understandably affected, leading to the vocal frustration of the crowd and their eventual substitution, during which walk of shame they would often be treated to the following diagnosis from the crowd : “There’s eff-all wrong with ya.”

If a player happened to be bleeding profusely, he had to go through the ignominy of allowing the doctor/physio to bind an impromptu turban there and then on the field. This practice reached epidemic proportions after 1988, when Oliver Stone's massive cinema hit Platoonmade the head bandage seem irresistibly macho and heroic.

Willie Joe Padden of Mayo famously reappeared for one of those west of Ireland battles swathed in hospital white and Ciarán ‘Dinky’ McBride of Tyrone was all but mummified for the second half of the 1996 All-Ireland football semi-final. And McBride was going back in to face Meath; the only suitable headwear would have been a motorcycle helmet.

The “hamstring” was the other old chestnut of the GAA medical dictionary. Any kind of ailment beneath the hips could invariably be attributed to this temperamental little bastard which seemingly had the power to hold the rest of the anatomy to ransom. It was funny how “dodgy” hamstrings were most common among the most skilful and celebrated players.

Many’s the rainy league day that the crowd would moan in disappointment when the marquee forward, looking tanned and lean, would “pull-up” after five or six minutes of a unpromising tussle, shake his head and frustration and offer a rueful signal to the bench for a few beefy nobodies to come in and chauffeur him from the field.

“It’s the hamstring,” the crowd would murmur knowingly.

Sometimes, he would wave regally to the crowd as he was ferried to the dressing room, where grapes, a masseuse and first use of the shower awaited him. The crowd was sympathetic. “Only for the hamstrings,” they would say, “he’d be the best player in Ireland.”

By Tuesday, the manager would happily confirm that the hamstring wasn’t as bad as first thought. Lesser players – doughty, fearsome harriers of limited skill who held down their places through grit and determination never suffered from hamstring injuries.

That is because they were afraid to. If they left the field injured, they might never get their place back. And it is true that old-timers – those hurlers and footballers from 1884-1969 – were a bit sniffy and disdainful about the very idea of concept of a ‘hamstring’.

“There were no hamstrings in our day,” they would chuckle at anyone who would listen in a voice which made it clear that they thought the modern player was a softer breed.

God only knows what they make of the cruciate, which has swept the GAA fraternity like a plague in recent years. If you were to put together a football team of cruciate victims, it would almost certainly have a reasonable crack at winning the All-Ireland football title. Although still a dreaded affliction, it is not considered the career-ending misfortune that it once was. Instead, it involves a tortuous period of strengthening work and conditioning which almost all managers darkly refer to as “a lonely road”.

Henry Shefflin has just returned from that desolate stretch. Poor Eoin Bradley is just setting out on it. The cruciate has become such a grim reaper of talent that the crowd considers itself something of an expert in spotting its visit. A player cannot as much as wince these days without several spectators muttering with grim certainty that “it’s the cruciate for sure”. A silence will fall over the ground while the player is helped off and afterwards the manager will tell the public: “We won’t know ’til we get a scan”.

The theory now is that cruciate ligaments are not a modern development but were always there. It’s just that medical science – or at least that version of it practiced at provincial GAA grounds – didn’t really know about them.

In this instance, ignorance really was a kind of bliss. Players who had actually suffered this cruel and agonising misfortune could easily be persuaded by the team doc, as he sponged his patient down, that he would run it off after a few minutes. In time he would learn to live with the pain, sometimes dull and searing and grow accustomed to the hobble which worsened in later life.

In fact, you might see him limping into your GAA ground this Sunday.

“Toughest man that ever played,” those of his vintage will say admiringly.

“No bloody hamstrings in his time.”