Soldiers Are We?

For the last number of weeks I have been trying to get to the bottom of The Great Anthem Debate. For those in the dark, what follows is a short description of the dilemma sweeping stands up and down the country this Summer. There was a time when the anthem meant a great deal. It was an expression of culture and identity, hearing it on the television before Kerry gave some Ulster county an unmerciful hiding during the 70s and 80s. Or maybe you attended your own county final and the County Board wheeled out a dozen oul fellows from the area, stuck kilts on them and told them to splutter and wheeze their way though Amhrán na bhFiann on the pipes. It may have been impossible to make it out but you were all in it together and sure there was no one recording it to play it back and embarrass the lads. It was a novelty back then and we appreciated its value.

Although it’s not a popular view to promote, someone has to call a stop to what the pre-match rendition has become in the 21st century. The current run of things is this: the players go through their elaborate warm up routines as the crowds slowly stagger in from the local hostelries about fifteen minutes before the ball is thrown in. The players then make their way behind St Michael’s band or some other collection of talent musicians as they parade three-quarters of the field as supporters let out yelps of encouragement for their heroes. The atmosphere is now as close to electric as it can be. Hush descends over the ground as we prepare for the National Anthem, hopefully whipping the Gael into a manic frenzy. Within fifteen seconds, all that energy that the occasion has created over the preceding hour has disintegrated, sapped by the modern ‘done thing’.

More often than not it’s some young female teenager who has a great chanter. She has probably cleaned up at the Scór na nÓg and sings at the chapel every Sunday. That’s why it’s frowned upon to comment on this phenomenon. You don’t want to hurt the young vocalist’s feelings. After all it is not her fault. She has been asked to do it by some eejit on the provincial council who thinks that this is the way to go now. Or, as I suspect, he carefully handpicks these cailini in order to dampen any threat of things boiling over with passion on the terraces and a few digs being dished out amongst opposing fans. Well, fair play to him if it is for that reason; it works.

The young lass will only have managed the first dozen words or so, or two bars, and a minute will have passed. You sometimes expect pallbearers and a funeral hearse to make its way onto the field. Even the most excitable and half-drunken fanatic is now slowly losing the will to stand up. There’s no accompanying music, no dramatic drum beat, no tears flowing down the cheeks of some player’s mother. On the other hand, with three minutes having lapsed and she still hasn’t reached ‘Anocht a théam sa bhearna bhaoil’, some supporters are contorting their faces into scary formations with others momentarily forgetting why they are here in the first place. Your eyes begin to water, not with emotion, but because you’ve been staring at the tricolour for nearly five minutes now and the sky is cutting the lining out of your eyeballs.

Players start to stiffen, standing still after such a vigorous preparation. Nowadays they ignore the anthem and launch into press-ups, stretches and manic scratching of their lower regions. The whole affair is a torture now. More often or not the sound of the lady’s voice is completely lost in the wind as she has been made to stand on the pitch on top of a crate with a fierce breeze behind her. I was at a game lately when nothing was heard at all. We stood there for 15 minutes staring at the flag, not knowing that the singer had been red up five minutes earlier and was already in the crowd staring at the flag because everyone else was.

I’m not getting at the singers, nor am I calling for a new anthem. What needs to be done is simple. Get a pipe band or even St Michael’s themselves who do a great job entertaining the early birds in the stands. They play the thing at a decent tempo whilst the blood is still furiously swirling its way around the beery veins of supporters on both sides. It sets the tone for the players to go hell for leather in the opening plays. Now they’re that numb from the death march they’ve just endured that they take 5-10 minutes to stir from the semi-slumber.

I know what the Ulster Council are at. There’s no chance of a slap or two coming from the crowd if the young girls continue to suck the devilment dry before throw-in. It’s like some kind of anti-craic drug in order to sedate the excitable. Yet they’re doing us a disservice. Billy Connolly used to joke that the English had the worst anthem on the planet for creating any kind of fist-thumping motivation before a sporting event and that they’d win nothing until it was changed. We’re not at that stage yet but it’s becoming a painful experience. I’d rather see the whole joint bulging at the eyeballs with foam gathering around the chin than cross-eyed staring at the sky. We could learn alot from the Koreans during the World Cup.

Take A Break

Times have definitely changed. You only have to avail of newspaper archives to understand the peculiarities of a few decades ago. I was browsing one such organ and came across a story about a man who was jailed for kicking a dog. On the other side of the page, another man had been arrested for ‘roaring his head off’, in Greencastle. There have also been some peculiar rules in the GAA. A good few years ago you might have scored 0-20 with the opposition scoring 1-0 and they won. That was simply because at one time games were decided on the amount of goals scored, with points only counting if that was equal. Another was the red card rule in December and January in that you could get the line as often as you wanted then and there’d be no further punishment. I remember looking forward to games at that time of the year knowing that you could take the head off anyone without fear of discipline. Matches at that time of the year were great score settlers. Men were decapitated before the ball was even thrown up. Thousands would flock to see mass brawls between parishes. But it was part of the game, all within the rules supposedly.

Not all of the oddities within the general rulebook of the GAA have been addressed. One such bizarre regulation is the ruling regarding the training of sides in December. Apparently there should be no get-togethers on the field of play for any squad. They’re prepared to have back doors, front doors, cups, inter-provincials, club competitions for every level, U10, U11, U12, U13 and so on throughout the season, but under no circumstances should there be any laps done in December. Have you ever heard the like?

Last year I was contacted by a high profile inter-county manager who was sweating about the season ahead. In 2008 they had underachieved slightly and he was keen to have a head start on the chasing pack by getting a few fitness and bonding activities out of the way before Christmas. He gathered his troops in Mid-Ulster for a one-hour lapping session. Within two minutes a car load of Ulster officials landed on the field and chased them. It was clear then that The Powers are randomly roaming the streets and backroads of Ulster every day looking for anyone who is breaking the rule. It’s cat and mouse time.

I had to think on my feet. I knew that one of the national papers had advertised a drive-in cinema whereby punters simply drove there in their motors and watched the picture. Soon myself and the manager in question were thinking along the same lines. He advertised a drive-in at a farm in the remotest of locations although he made sure all his squad knew about it. In the meantime, he put together a motivational film for his men, with tactics and training regimes discussed in great details, to be shown on the big screen. On the day of the viewing things seemed to be going to plan as the projector was set-up against the gable wall and the first few motors arrived, all members of his squad. Soon things turned pear-shaped. Word had got out about the venture and all manner of farmer attended in their Masseys, Combines and horse. They then caused havoc when it dawned on them that this film wasn’t all that good and soon started hurling abuse and manure at the screen, eventually smashing the projector in an ether-fuelled frenzy.

After that disaster, I concocted another plan. I had once read about a teacher in the 1700s educating his pupils in the fields of Donegal whilst picking spuds. The pupils just stood around in the drills listening to him speak Latin and learning it that way. Well, the county I was dealing with had bogs a-plenty and in no time the boss had his side out in mid-December cutting and stooling the turf. It was a tough number as the ground was rather frozen as the spades rattled their bones every time they made contact with the bog. All the while, the manager rallied his troops with tactics and motivational speeches for the coming year. Unfortunately, conditions worsened and three men were laid down with the frost bite and another got stuck in a half-frozen sheugh. Before long, the officials were on the scene, probably tipped off by a rival county’s housewife.

Further schemes were invented: Meeting upstairs in the gallery during Mass; running around the church during Mass; training at midnight with no floodlights; dressing up as women and pretending they were just happy girls skipping around a field with gay abandon – all ideas were attempted at least once. However, every time that car load of Ulster Officials would land within minutes to spoil the party. You have to give it to the Ulster Council. When they are given a directive, they carry it out to its extremity.

It then dawned on me that perhaps the Council were right after all. December is a time for family, for rest and for attending dinner dances, getting full and taking part in fist fights afterwards or menacing stick-wielding battles. Years ago, men and women used to get nicked for ‘roaring their head off’ at this time of the year and not worrying about running around a field 12 months a year. What have we become if we’re thinking about 2010 before the year that’s in it has been properly celebrated and reviewed. Take a break, lads, and kick a dog.

Leave The Kids Alone

I was talking to a boy who was on his way to the gym earlier in the week. He was a well-known inter-county footballer from Derry and not fond of referees. I enquired as to why he was bothering with something like a gym when this time of year is for resting up after a long season from the year gone by. I can remember from my own playing days that no one ever trained from late August until the following Easter. By the time the end of the summer had arrived, your club was either out of the running for any silverware that there was no point in running around a field twenty times on a Wednesday night, or they were playing enough league and Championship games to keep you naturally fit anyway. Training was only for the early part of the season to trim down the belly and get the lungs at full capacity. Teams still won All-Irelands and county championships back then so it must have been an alright strategy.

Nowadays the pressure is on young lads to train eleven months in the year. The player I was talking to said his individual training was vital as if he didn’t do it, the management would know. He said they take a blood sample, urine sample, hair sample and a photograph of you naked to make sure you’re alcohol and drug free as well as toning up your body. That’s a world gone crazy. I’m led to believe that Canavan is a great man for the drink abstinence of his players at Errigal. I’d say the same boy was living it up rightly in his early twenties running around Omagh or Cookstown at the weekend. These middle-aged managers are some craic, forcing some kind of Chinese military regime on their players when they themselves were half cut at throw-in.

What has happened to the carefree days of seeing how many cowboy suppers you could fit in, in a week, without piling on the weight? It was some feat, back in the day, finding a balance between calorie and alcohol consumption without the manager suspecting an over-indulgence. I know of a few players on the great Monaghan team of the 80s who had the diet of some kind of American Texan oil baron and still managed to make the weight on any given Sunday. I’m told that nowadays that personal gym training you have to do in January is a litmus test for modern managers. They apparently attend secret training sessions that inform them of how to read eye and body language to spot the spoofers in the camp.

I’m also led to believe that Baker Bradley can look at a man from ten paces and tell if he carried out his two-dozen bench presses within the last 24 hours. The likes of Bradley, O’Rourke and McCartan are as good as the mind-readers you get on the television. It’s the first think county boards look at before they appoint a manager; do they have supernatural powers. Chancers haven’t a hope of hoodwinking these lads. I don’t know how true this is but apparently Mickey Moran used to condemn anyone caught neglecting their personal training to his Room of Shame. In there, he’d tie the spoofer to a chair and encourage the locals to berate him with insults regarding his playing ability, manhood and family history dating back centuries. Muldoon subsequently never missed a gym session til Moran headed off to Mayo.

But that’s the way things are and rarely to sports revert back to how it used to be. The fear is that things get worse in terms of preparation and what is expected of our young playing members. I hope we don’t suck the individuality out of them. I fully understand the need to self-assess and improve though. Take the Gaelic Life newspaper for example. It is roundly viewed as a good read on a weekly basis. But editor Bogue should maybe be looking at how to move it to a level of greatness. And how to you do that? – monitor his team. Bench presses and the like are no use to pen-pushers but abstinence from harmful substances can clear the mind and help create moments of great clarity and insight. It wouldn’t be an altogether ridiculous idea to perhaps invest in some kind of physical assessment on a Monday morning with the threat of disciplinary action hanging over their weekend activities. I’d include Brolly, Devenney and Burns in that although the Mullaghbawn man will be a hard one to nail He’s keeping his nose clean for bigger fish. You wouldn’t catch him making disparaging remarks about female lineswomen. There’s a skeleton there somewhere, we all have them, but it’ll take a bit of digging to reel Burns in.

But you see what I’m getting at. Our young lads are often criticised in the media for being self-obsessed, lazy and mannerless. Little do you know what discipline they possess in order to earn a starting jersey every Sunday at all club levels. Whilst you have the Loup’s full forward running a lonely 10k on a Saturday morning for the love of a game, Ronan Scott is ordering a Variety Meal from KFC to soak up his hangover before driving to Keady to watch a MacRory match on soft seat thinking about his hourly wage. There’s something wrong there.

Waltzing Matilda

I think the Australians get a raw deal. You get the feeling that the resentment many hold towards that great nation is the result of two things. Firstly, the fact that they have a Union Jack on their flag gets a few goats up as you know flags are deemed important in this part of the globe. Secondly, they live the lifestyle we all aspire to. They play something close to what we do in terms of a national sport, but do so in fine weather all year round. They’re better looking and are naturally stronger and fitter. We may harp on about the hardiness of a bog man or the stamina of a lad who dungs out the yard but these lads from Down Under are born like that before lifting a shovel. Let’s face it – we’re fairly jealous of our cousins from the southern hemisphere even though many of them were rogue ancestors of our own, sent down on a boat for being a bit of an eejit.

I speak with authority here on this subject. It’s not a period of my life that I’m overly proud of but it’s worth the telling if it makes the average yokel change their views on the Aussie nation. Back in 1959 the convict boats were still in use even though it wasn’t common knowledge. The Irish Government turned a blind eye to the Guards turfing a few lads onto a prison ship and pointing it in the direction of Circular Quay. I had been playing a bit of Rugby in Blackrock at the time and living the life of a handsome bachelor. Unfortunately I feel in with a middlin crew and began to ape their mannerisms, turning my back on the hard-working Presbyterian ethos instilled in me by the Northern way.

Missing Mass soon turned into bad language. I togged out for Drumcondra GAC one Sunday morning as a ringer in the Dublin Championship and was torturing the Glasnevin full back with a torrent of verbal abuse in a strong northern twang. I’d never seen a man as intimidated. I was also probably one of the strongest men in Ireland at that time, having spent weeks honing my muscles outside the pubs of Dublin. My job was to lift inebriated women home up to four miles away. I was feared throughout the county and beyond. Unfortunately that sense of infallibility got to me completely and I embarked on a period of complete disregard for anyone I encountered in authority.

It all came to a head when I was lifted by the guards for stealing a bag of Greek spuds and apple tart from a small vendor outside Quinn’s, five minutes after the act. It was 8pm when I was taken. By midnight I was sailing.

I’d rather not go into the details of the journey apart from the fact that everyone on the boat had heard of by feats on the field and I won the bare knuckle competition as I had no willing opponents. By the time the ship docked in Australia , the locals had been well clued in about my arrival and before I had time to draw breath, two contracts were set before me by the now defunct Sydney Swallows and Perth Packers. That apple tart seemed to have awarded me with a ticket to fulfil the dreams of most red-blooded Irishman, getting paid abroad for playing a bit of ball.

The Swallows were my choice and I arrived bright and early next morning for the first training session of the season. The squad seemed a bit stand-offish at the start, perhaps afraid of my fearsome appearance and reputation. I was also quite confident having been the King Dick of Dublin County football for the previous season. To me, the Aussie game seemed a little easier what with points for wides and taking a breather for a few seconds every time I fielded the ball. I thought I would lord it.

In an unprecedented fall from grace, that notion of rugged Irish toughness outperforming beach-toned Australian muscle was shattered when the first ball came my way. I was unceremoniously flattened on the Australian grass with a gentle shoulder by the Swallows’ captain Brett Dinkum. For the next hour the hard man from Ireland was made fun of, humiliated and tortured by every member of his new club. Even the female physio cracked me a swift left-hander when I complained of double vision. I screamed a woman’s scream.

In order to save face and return some pride to the country and association I was representing, I decided to do a bit of slagging off the ball. My ‘your blade’s a glipe’ was met with blank stares. The level of sledging back then wasn’t what it is now. Those were more innocent days.

I never returned to the club and signed up to doing toilet duties at the Grand Opera House for the next three years. Mickey Harte has often lambasted our relationship with their game. He’s right. They’ll only expose us for the white-skinned, freckle-faced, jelly-legged sports men we are. Those fellas are serious. They haven’t wasted years toning useless muscles stooling in the mosses across Ireland . At the age of five they’re in the gym. All we can do is complain of their brutality whilst secretly harbouring a serious resentment that they have it all. Compare Kylie Minogue to Foster and Allen. Barbequed chicken to a plate of beans. Jason Akermanis to Colm Parkinson. I thought I was the GAA’s High King in 1959. Over there I was just a Joker.

Feck Sake Umpire

Another weekend and another controversy. Colm Cooper scored a point against the Dubs in Croke Park only it wasn’t. The umpire decided not to allow it for a reason only he knows to himself. Maybe the sun was in his eyes but sure it was February and the sun isn’t really all that taxing approaching the evening time. Perhaps he looked at Cooper and though a lad that slight couldn’t have possibly hit the ball that far. Only he knows. But as Jack O’Connor stated afterwards, enough is enough. Ireland’s not the laid back country it once was. In the past, such a dispute was resolved with a wink and a pint and forgotten about in the morning. All that changed eight years ago when Marsden got the line for chinning Jordan in the final. Before that, players like Paidi O’Se could go toe-to-toe swinging right hooks and at worse end up with a stern talking to by the ref. Now, the right thing is done it seems, that is unless it involves the men beside the posts.

What can be done about this? I have heard that they might change the coats that the umpires wear, bringing them more in line with the striped outfits you’d see our Australian cousins don for their games. How that will address their decision making is beyond me. I’ve heard of vertical stripes helping weighty people look slight less hefty but I’ve yet to hear of it rectifying chronically deteriorating eyesight. For when all is said and done isn’t that the problem here? The GAA are holding on to a tradition that sees them hire pensioners to gauge whether a ball has gone between two posts. It’s a well known yarn that just before Sludden awarded that goal for Meath against Louth last year, he threatened the umpire that he’d not give him his teeth back from the officials’ changing room unless he raised the green flag. It left the umpire perturbed and confused about the whole incident.

The major hindrance here though is surely eyesight. I’m not aware of one man or woman over the age of sixty who can drive a car without the aid of seeing glasses. What makes GAA headquarters think that the same men can see a white ball amongst the white clouds pass between two white posts? It’s lunacy and I cannot get my head around their persistence in employing officials in this age bracket. There has to be some kind of financial reason such as exemption from paying tax if they hire pensioners or maybe it cuts down on the catering bill as all those lads would want after a game is a cup of tea and a scone. No matter the reason, the advancement in technology means their persistent errors are highlighted with undeniable evidence.
Referees are given vigorous tests to see if they are fit enough to take charge of a game at any level, and rightly so. What examinations do umpires endure? I would excuse them from treadmill analysis or bleep tests but surely some form of eye examination is a must as well as the ability to make correct decisions and lift a flag. Some umpires might claim that the glare of the sky on their spectacles hinders their sight or that the rim of the glasses may cause them to misjudge the flight of a ball. They are good points and the GAA know they’d be in choppy waters if they discriminated against people with glasses. My solution is to look at Art McRory. He wore the thickest-lensed glasses ever seen on a man and never missed a trick, winning Ulster and league titles. It also gave him a menacingly wide-eyed look that offered him an advantage in any form of combat. I’d imagine that if Sludden had faced an umpire staring back at him with those type of glasses, Louth might well have been reigning Leinster champions today.

There are also the small binoculars that can be attached to glasses as well as tiny wipers for those drizzly days when the spectacles get streamed up. As well as that, I have a friend who works in a science factory in South America and he informs me he has been assigned by some GAA bigwig to investigate the use of an electric current that picks up any movement between the two posts. This volt then surges into the body of the umpire through a wire up their sleeve from the bottom of the post. The umpire will automatically jump slightly into the air and lean forward to pick up the flag. It has been tested twice on two Maned Wolves which ended tragically. The South American Maned Wolf is now an endangered species. The point is that moves are being made to do the best with what we have. The GAA know that ageism will be used against them if they begin to phase out the current batch of umpires. Be it thicker glasses, electric shocks or standing on scaffolding, something needs to be done soon before the crowd begin to turn on the defenceless old-timers.

I just cannot see how the striped jumpers will improve umpire performance. Stripes have often been associated with criminals or burglars. Maybe there’s more to that than meets the eye.