Tony Forristal success

I feel a wee bit churlish after the previous post, so let’s rejoice in Waterford winning the de facto Under 14 All-Ireland for the first time, beating Tipperary by 0-12 to 0-4 in the final. Thankfully the future is in the hands of the likes of them and not embittered old gits like myself.

Oh, and they utterly murdered Kilkenny en route. Sweet.

Finally! Oh . . .

It’s all very well writing about the need to reach an All-Ireland final, but it’s fair to say that getting there is rarely (read: never) enough. Waterford’s weekend loss to Wexford in the All-Ireland Intermediate hurling final demonstrated that while we may be the bees knees at losing semi-finals, we’re equally adept at blowing it at the final stage.

Consider our record in finals at All-Ireland level since 1959:

1963: Senior v Kilkenny: lost
1974: Under 21 v Kilkenny: lost
1982: Club (Mount Sion) v James Stephens: lost
1992: Minor v Galway: lost
1992: Under 21 v Offaly: won

And now 2007 , another defeat. It makes for grim reading, and suggests that even should we slay the white whale of semi-final defeats, our problems would only be beginning.

Still, let’s finish on a positive note. Winning the Munster Intermediate title represents progress in a competition where Declan Browne once scored 4-12 against us, and Wexford won the competiton in 2005 so they can’t be that bad. And how far do you down through the ranks to measure success? 2007 has seen Waterford claim success at All-Ireland Colleges level for the first time thanks to De La Salle, while the weekend also saw Waterford win the Tony Forristal tournament, another first. All together now: we shall overcome . . .

Paul Flynn and The Secret Ball

It won’t be long – hopefully it’ll be years yet though – before we start writing tributes to the career of Paul Flynn. In the meantime, mullanimal of Up the Déise fame starts the ball rolling.

Happy are those who believe

No sooner than I have leapt to the GAA’s defence against the insinuation that the Grab All Association doesn’t look after the peons at the bottom of the pyramid, than the GAA announces a €38 million investment at club level (I hate the phrase ‘grassroots’), a cash injection funded in no small part by revenue from the rental of Croke Park. So many thanks to the IRFU and the FAI.

Read the full story here.

Love me, love the GAA!

Emmet Malone, writing in The Irish Times (subs needed – but the pertinent quote can be found in the summary) a few weeks back, referred to the late Brian Moore and his regret at the effect Sunday afternoon highlights packages had on the attendances at matches in the League of Ireland and the Irish League. Anyone, like myself, who has grown up viewing the stories of Cecil B DeMille-style attendances at League of Ireland matches in the 1950’s and 1960’s with eyebrow-raising scepticism should take heed of such warnings from history. In the wake of Daire Whelan’s excoriating account of the decline of domestic soccer in Who Stole Our Game?, it should be obvious how television has cut a savage swathe through sporting attendances, and only the paranoid have survived.

With that tangent fixed firmly in mind, picture the scene in the deiseach household: the convalescing man of the house, his English wife, her English friend, our English neighbour and his virulently anti-GAA wife, come together to sup wine and talk crap in the finest Irish tradition, the one that Maeve Binchy encapsulated when she referred to a nation that valued talkers, not listeners.

Virulent is too strong. She is hardly the only person to have been turned off, not without good reason, from the skullduggery that has permeated the GAA throughout its history. Her thought processes veered off from a spot of de Valera bashing – nothing inherently wrong with that – into the usual litany of crimes committed by the GAA, i.e.

• personal accounts of the madness of The Ban (an incident which occurred over half a century ago and impossible to happen for thirty-six years since Rule 27 was abolished; curious how, amidst much talk about the joys of rugby, the inviolate prohibition on players who ‘went North‘ or the IRFU’s rancid attitude to apartheid South Africa, both of which still pertained as recently as the 1980’s, was never alluded to)
• the mean-spiritedness of the local club regarding a stage show that she was involved with (impossible to defend)
• the travesty of making the Waterford team travel up to Dublin on a train on the day of the match last Sunday, in contrast to the local golf club which always sent teams up to stay in a hotel the night before (golfers presumably tee off first thing in the morning; what benefit you’d get from having a team farting around Dublin until 4pm was left unsaid)
• the habitual moan that “I paid for the rebuilding of Croke Park, I should get a say in how it’s used” mantra (so should taxpayers get access to your house because you benefitted from mortgage interest relief? This was dismissed as “not being the same thing at all”. Actually, in an economic sense, it is exactly the same thing)

None of this was worthy of getting het up over. People are entitled to hold all of the above against the GAA. What sent me off the rails was when the rhetorical question was asked, “what do they do with the money?” 80,000 people at Croke Park last Sunday paying €40 a head, you’ve got to ask what they do with the money?

Well, I suggested that splendor of the GAA’s facilities up and down the country might account for it. When an Irish Independent hack visited a Dublin cricket club in the aftermath of Ireland’s heroics in the West Indies during the summer to have a go at putting willow to leather, he was shocked at how poor the facilities were. He even went so far as to say they were far worse than those he utilised during his brief underage hurling career in Tipperary. That, I suggested, was where the money was going.

Nonsense, I was told, and was treated to some apocryphal tale of poor hurling clubs on the telly recently who couldn’t get some essential facilities. Clearly this club showed how the money was not getting to the fabled grassroots.

So where, I asked (shouted, I ruefully confess), do you think the money is going? Ah, that’s the question, “what do they do with the money?”, the implication of it being used to buy guns for the IRA or feather Frank Murphy’s nest being clear. Thankfully, Mrs deiseach stepped in this point to prevent me from going into complete meltdown and the conversation was steered towards more mundane (and sociable topics).

Three lessons came from the evening.

First, I need to control my temper.

Second, I can cope with many criticisms of the GAA, but the idea that the megabucks that have flowed from Croke Park have been frittered away is hard to take. All sports have had to face the rapaciousness of television since the 1970’s. Soccer’s abdication of the domestic game as a spectator sport is well documented. What is more surprising is the implosion of athletics. Paul Daffey wrote on the Morton Mile (subs required) and how crowds of 20,000+ in 1958 for an amateur show had dwindled to double figures by 2007. Rugby has retreated to its ghettos in south Dublin, Limerick and Ulster. This stands in stark contrast to the backwoodsmen of the GAA. Once upon a time, the GAA seemed to be going down the same road, nine thousand hardy souls attending the 1985 All-Ireland hurling semi-final between Galway and Cork. Twenty-two years later, Waterford’s three appearances in Croke Park would, in conjunction with other matches, garner a collective attendance of over 230,000 people. All this despite being televised! All hail an organisation which has taken on the television bogeyman as fretted about by Brian Moore – and won.

And the third lesson? Foreigners are entirely ignorant of the GAA, which means they are blank canvases on which the Irish can paint their opinions. My neighbour’s husband casually buys into the backwoodsman theory of the GAA as expressed by his wife. Later on in the evening, my wife would express “100% agreement” with my analysis. 100% agreement? To my own surprise, it seems that I really love Dis Great Asssooosheeayshun Of Ours.

Random thoughts on defeat

Suffering from a dehabilitating condition has its uses. Inability to post means you don’t leave yourself any hostages to fortune when the result does not go according to plan. And going to ground (because I’ve certainly done this, zealously ignoring all forms of media relating to the match) doesn’t seem like going to ground because you haven’t been around to be noticed going to ground.

Having secured a place on the Croke Park honours board with a five-for of semi-final defeats, it is reasonable to ask which was the worst, and the onset of a few days to allow the initial heartbreak to subside has not changed my view that this was the worst of the lot. In 1998, we were still viewing this Croke Park stuff as a great adventure, and I naively assumed we’d be back in the mix next year. In 2002, I was still filled with the joy of having won the Munster championship. 2004 might well have been worse for those in contact with it – having seen Waterford win what some viewed as the best hurling match ever played, it seemed but a short step to win the All-Ireland – but I was in England at the time and sufficiently far removed to take it on the chin. 2006 was cruel, but we had probably played above ourselves to keep Cork to a point, and the steely glint in the eyes of the players that it wasn’t going to happen again made it a harbringer for 2007.

With that last thought in mind, it’s easy to see why I didn’t see last Sunday coming. What I think went wrong, I’ll get back to in a moment. The overwhelming thought is that I was supremely confident of victory. Even after the event, I don’t see why I should blush at saying that. Right from the nailbiting win over Tipperary in the National League quarter-final, this Waterford team have shown astonishing levels of courage, most notably in finding themselves three points down midway through the second half, and level going into injury time, against Kilkenny and still winning. Each subsequent victory only added to the aura of invincibility, an aura that any successful team is entitled to tap into in the buildup to another crucial game. It’s what winners do, isn’t it?

Well, maybe. The excellent sports writer (to use the American vernacular for ‘hack’) King Kaufman observed in a recent column (subs / view ad) that “knowing how to win” is an over-rated concept. Milan ‘knew’ how to win the Champions League in 2005, having won it a mere two years previously, yet that didn’t stop them being bearded by a team containing Djimi Traore in that year’s final. Still, Kaufman’s point – that talent usually matters more – works for Waterford. Why should we be afraid of defeat when we have the hurlers, something we’ve already demonstrated this year?

It’s because we have the hurlers that this year’s defeat is so hard to swallow. One of the great fallacies of sport, one perpetuated in these islands by the ‘road to Wembley’ nonsense, is that it’s more difficult to lose a semi-final than a final. This is self-evident nonsense. I comforted myself in 1998, 2002, 2004 and 2006 that I had missed out on the misery of losing an All-Ireland final, something Limerick fans might be able to tell us about as they try to avoid their own five-for of 1974, 1980, 1994, 1996 and 2007. But this year, I was certain that we had what it takes, that just like in Thurles in the National League, we could go toe-to-toe with Kilkenny and come out on top. It’s that confidence that made Sunday such a letdown.

What went wrong? I reject out of hand the notion that the team were tired, an explanation Ger Canning reached for as he tried to explain the madness unfolding in front of him. Waterford utterly bossed the third quarter, a period when Limerick only managed to score in right at the beginning (pity it was a goal). And they showed no little skill and courage to trim a ten point deficit to only one with the game entering the last ten minutes, so they can’t be accused of ‘not wanting it’. The whirlwind nature of Limerick’s start defied any suggestion that Waterford were complacent. Limerick got a fat slice of luck in those opening moments, and Waterford deserve credit for the manner in whch they knuckled down.

No, what went wrong (and this should in no way be construed as personal criticism) was that the pressure of expectation got to the players. Earlier in the week, I had speculated to my brother that should the quest for the McCarthy Cup end in glory, it would represent the longest period in modern times in which a team from outside the Big Three had gone from first seriously thinking they could do it to gettting their hands on it.

• Limerick went sixteen years without appearing in a Munster final between 1956 and 1971. That 1971 team would only have to wait two years before winning the All-Ireland
• Galway first sprang to prominence in 1975. Five years would pass for them
• Offaly won their first ever Leinster championship in 1980. They won their first All-Ireland in 1981
• Clare were battered in two Munster finals in 1993 and 1994, the close calls of the 70’s and 80’s a distant memory. Yet we all know what happened in 1995
• Wexford in 1996 had a list of recent near misses that would make any Waterford fan wince. Like Clare, it only took one provincial championship win for them to get the All-Ireland

In retrospect, such a list shows exactly why we didn’t get the monkey off our backs. Either you do it quickly or you don’t do it at all. We’ve been waiting a decade to reach the summit, and like Clare of the Loughnane (the player) era – six Munster final defeats between 1972 and 1986, some of them hammerings but some of them by a handful of points – or Limerick of the 90’s, the fear of failure soon contaminates everything you do.

Perhaps we will overcome yet. The system means that even a team as mediocre as Wexford can anticipate reaching All-Ireland semi-finals on a regular basis, so Waterford’s number might come up yet, much as it has done for Limerick this year. The performances at Under-21, Intermediate and Colleges level suggest a robust future for Waterford hurling. The need to slay the white whale of the semi-finals though, before we can even contemplate the finals, doesn’t fill one with confidence.

Don that hairshirt

I decided several weeks ago that I would only cut my hair once Waterford were out of the All-Ireland. So here, like a Neapolitan shanty town reduced to a pile of post-Vesuvian ash, are my folicles. Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.

Hah, hah, hah, hah, stayling alive, staying alive

On the morning of the drawn match against Cork, I surfaced to find myself with double vision. After staggering around Dublin like a drunken sailor and watching the match with one eye closed (not such a bad state of affairs, the sensory deprivaton reduced the trauma), I returned to Waterford and attended Specsavers in City Square on the Monday. They sent me straight to Ardkeen where I got progressively weaker over a number of days and was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome.

Glad to report that I’m making a decent recovery, as you can see from the photo taken moments after the win over Cork, accompanied by the christened-earlier-in-the-day (honestly!) Dan the Déise Cub. I should note that I received first-class care out in Ardkeen (after all these years, I still find it hard to see it as Waterford Regional Hospital), the only setback being when I refused to lie still during the match, leading tio blinding headaches. Totally worth it.

I’m still at the time of writing unsteadier than a new born foal. It took me a whole day of to-ing and fro-ing between the PC and the bed to write the report for the drawn game. Suffice to say, I wasn’t at the replay, I won’t be at the Limerick match today and . . . any subsequent events that might take place this year. My season following Waterford in the flesh is over, so I’m not bothering with match reports that are only a rehash of what we can all see on telly.

But I am alive and recovering, and as the Déise boys continue winning, that’s the main thing. By which I mean me recovering is the main thing, of course. Of course . . .

Waterford – Cork highlights

Part I

Part II

Part III

Thanks once again to DeiseFan aka Man from Delmonte over at Up the Déise