Remember the Fraher 15!

An early chance for revenge in the Munster Under-21 final as Waterford draw Clare in the 2010 senior Munster championship. Bring it on! On a less flippant note (after all, you wouldn’t have to look far to find something needing ‘avenging’ with the other three counties) for the second year running the draw has been sweet to Waterford as Cork and Tipperary are paired in the other half of the draw. Clare will be quite pleased too. As if that wasn’t enough, we’re in the soft half of the draw in the football too with the All-Ireland champions, the Munster champions and the Division Three champions all on the other side of things.  Well done Jimmy O’Gorman on a draw well rigged done.

The wretched of the earth

Eamonn Sweeney is as curious a hack as there is going. The first time he entered my consciousness was the publication of his book There’s Only One Red Army, a paean of praise to the virtues of following Sligo Rovers. I haven’t read the book, and my kneejerk reaction on reading the reviews was that this would be a typical blast from a chip-on-the-shoulder League of Ireland diehard who can’t understand why the domestic game isn’t carrying all before it and it must be the fault of the beastly GAA with their bog ball and their bog hockey.

Still haven’t read the book, so there’s a remote possibility that my initial prejudices were correct. But they’d be very remote as Sweeney has written some very complimentary things over the years about the GAA in general and Waterford in particular. Indeed his defence of Waterford in the face of Brian Corcoran’s withering comments about us in his autobiography was enough to make a grown man weep. Predictably I haven’t been able to find them online, but the most memorable comment was to the effect that Corcoran may have thought Waterford would try to drag the game down to their level but that Waterford had dragged the game up to a level that Cork couldn’t reach in the 2004 Munster final. I never had any great issue with Corcoran’s comments – one must assume they were what he thought at the time and all you can do is either agree or disagree with the sentiments – but it was nice to see a prominent hack leap to Waterford’s defence.

Having established Sweeney’s credentials as a latter-day sporting Renaissance man, time to plunge the knife. He was writing this week about the attitudes towards the League of Ireland (h/t to FootballPress, not that he’d appreciate it). It’s hard to dispute his central contention, that it’s not enough for certain sports fans to ignore domestic soccer and how many people get a good kick out of giving the League of Ireland a good kick. I’ve done it myself more than once and, having recently observed first-hand the aching sincerity of people following the Blues, can admit to feeling rather guilty about it.

Two things stuck in the craw though. Let’s take the shallowness of following teams in England as a given. It’s certainly true that it is relatively easy given that few people choose to support the bad teams. But if Liverpool FC were to implode and vanish from the earth, Colm Cooper and his ilk wouldn’t turn around and satisfy their love of soccer with . . . well, who would Colm Cooper support in the League of Ireland? Limerick United / City / 37 / FC? Having grown up in a GAA household, albeit one without any trace of supremacism, it never entered the heads of our parents to bring us to soccer matches. Chiding Colm Cooper for hankering after Anfield while not following the domestic game is akin to criticising a Protestant for going to St Peter’s and not getting Mass.

Secondly, and this is the elephant in the League of Ireland room, why is there no questioning of those who now go cross channel where they once went to the likes of Kilcohan Park? While perusing the match programme for the St Patrick’s Athletic game, I was gobsmacked to find that there were five thousand people at the quarter-final against Drogheda United in 1997. Those are the people Eamonn Sweeney should be chasing to account for the gap of at least 4,300 on the match against Pats. You’re unlikely to find them at a league match in Walsh Park.

While it’s reasonable for Eamonn Sweeney to be irritated by those who would “recommend that [the League of Ireland] be liquidated altogether”, some of those people would be genuinely concerned at the seeming death-spiral of professional soccer in Ireland. In their book Why England Lose: and Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski noted that people ‘reward success and shun failure‘ (another book I haven’t read. Oh the shame). You don’t have to hate the League of Ireland to propose outlandish schemes to fix it; carrying on the way things are doesn’t look like an option if you want the League to be a success, or at least successful enough that people reward it with their bums on seats.

I’m not pushed. My future presence at the RSC will not be determined by whether Waterford can win things or not. It’s been great craic thus far, but the occasionally rancid contempt in which the GAA is held can be off-putting. Eamonn Sweeney has the experience to straddle the fence. Time will tell whether I’m too long in the tooth to learn this new trick.

Counties That I Don’t Hate – Down

(No 2 in a series of 2)

Picture it. Waterford. 1991. Since we had won our first ever title in 1929, we had managed to win something – anything – in every decade. Until the 1980’s, that is, when we had not only won nothing but had plumbed the depths of Division Three hurling and been massacred in our three Munster final appearances. We’d even had the privilege of watching the team implode live on national television in the 1989 final. Not a good time to be following the Déise.

The 80’s had been a grim time for the GAA. An All-Ireland hurling semi-final had been attended by a mere nine thousand souls (Galway – Cork in 1985) and the Ulster and Connacht football championships were utterly bankrupt – the champions of those provinces had not beaten a team from Leinster or Munster since Galway in 1973. It’s hard to sustain interest in a sport when there is so little competition among all teams in general and from your own in particular. Add in the thrill of Italia ‘90, and people were asking in all seriousness where the GAA was to go from here.

The first step in the rehabilitation of the GAA came from Meath, or specifically the sensational clash between Meath and Dublin in the 1991 Leinster championship that captured the imagination of a nation. It was so all-consuming that even my mother sat down to watch the fourth and decisive match. I had developed a loathing of the Royal County in the preceding years, fuelled by paternal links with Cork and the cast of, er, characters that populated Sean Boylan’s team. Every match you’d watch hoping they’d trip up, every time they’d sail close to the wind, and every time they’d squeeze through. They were behind for most of the semi-final against Roscommon but with a mixture of grit, nerve and (I can admit this nearly 20 years on) talent, they were ahead at the finish. Another failure from the Connacht crew. It was galling, and all the more compelling for that.

Meanwhile in the other half of the draw, Kerry had sucker-punched a previously dominant Cork to come out of Munster. No one was thinking they were world beaters – the hiding they had taken in the 1990 final and the less-than-stellar manner in which they had disposed of Limerick saw to that – but they were still Kerry, right? Yes, they were and while Down had a cute record of never having lost to Kerry in the championship, they were still from Ulster and thus were going to fill their appointed role as the Munster team’s bitch. Even leading for much of the game did not change that. Had Tyrone not done the same in 1986?

Then it happened. It may not have played out exactly as I remember it, but the sentiment is what matters. A slick Down move saw Peter Withnall put clear through on Charlie Nelligan and he smashed the ball to the net with aplomb. Suddenly Down were in a winning position and they never faltered in the remaining time, belief that they would do it coursing through every action. Watching it at home, I was gobsmacked. A minnow could put it up to one of the kingpins of Gaelic games and succeed.

Five weeks later Down were back in Croke Park against the evil Meed, and it was clear they meant business. The sea of red and black that rippled across Hill 16 was utterly inspirational, one Tricolour-wielding fool only slightly marring the beauty. Down duly shot down Meath, even withstanding one of those famous zombie-like comebacks. For the first time in my lifetime, a team who had no expectation at the start of the year to winning the All-Ireland had won the All-Ireland.

A year later another county would unexpectedly taste success.  I genuinely don’t think this is a coincidence. Could Donegal and Derry have won Sam Maguire if Down had not shown them the way? And why should such a transmission of belief stop at the Ulster border? Since then, I’ve always had a soft spot for Down. They showed the rest of the GAA world that it could be done. And more importantly, they showed me that it could be done, something has sustained me to this day.

The kiss of death

With friends like this, who needs enemies?

Summertime blues

Kicking people when they are down is never nice, but it’s doubtful that anyone is kicking themselves harder at the moment than the Waterford footballers. For years in both League and Championship we were grateful to Kilkenny for keeping us from the very bottom of the pile. Then something curious happened in 2008. Waterford put together a few wins in the League. All other things being equal, Waterford would have been promoted from Division 4 but for a last minute Tipperary goal. Now, all other thing are not equal and it is unlikely Waterford would have played with the same amount of joie de vivre that saw them beat Antrim in the last round had promotion been at stake. But it was clearly an improvement, and it’s been matched by some excellent performances this year in the League.

To recap: in the League we can compete with Tipperary, now a Division 2 side, and Antrim, this year’s Ulster finalists. So why do things go so badly wrong in the Championship? In 2008 we lost to Clare who had finished way down Division 4 and beaten in the 2007 Munster championship. This year saw a limp performance against Cork followed by a massacre from a Meath team who haven’t being pulling up trees recently. Why do things go wrong? Buggered if I know, but something clearly ain’t right.

Free to do whatever I choose

A thought began swirling around in my head after the Clare – Tipperary game which formed into a fully-fledged lightbulb after this weekend’s round of matches. Colin Ryan’s excellent performance from frees against Tipp was matched by one from Alan McCrabbe for Dublin yesterday. It seems that any team with pretensions to excellence in hurling has to have a player who can rattle over dead balls from anywhere inside the 65 metre line. Having someone with that talent is not a sufficient condition for success - Kieran Delahunty couldn’t save Waterford back in the 80’s – but it is surely a necessary one.

Which made the display of shooting in the game between Monaghan and Armagh in Clones on Saturday so shocking. Anything more a than a few metres either side of the posts seemed to go wide, and rarely by a small margin. Paul Finlay kept on missing, yet no one seemed willing to step up to replace him, which suggested that out of his fourteen teammates there was no plan B were to have a ‘mare.

If free taking in football has gone to pot, why? Jimmy Keaveney, another top free taker in his day, has observed that it more reliable to kick off the ground as kicking from the hand involves dropping the ball on to your foot. Maybe it’s a low percentage opportunity. It isn’t an easy thing to strike a football at the best of times, and investing the time and effort in training to perfect the skill like, say, Charlie Redmond used do isn’t worth the effort.

Whatever it is, the art of free taking, so marvellously displayed in the past by the likes of Larry Tompkins, Brian Stafford and Maurice Fitzgerald, seems to be dead in football just as it is all the rage in hurling.

Counties That I Don’t Hate – Dublin

(No 1 in a series of 2)

Jerry Seinfeld once made the observation that when it comes to sport, we are ‘rooting for laundry‘. When Michael Owen was playing for Liverpool he was a hero to the Kop – his outside-the-outfit-y-fronts were slightly skid-marked for effectively displacing uberhero Robbie Fowler, but he was still an object of veneration. Yet three years ago he was roundly jeered and even booed by most of Anfield. His crime? Wearing a Newcastle United shirt. Wearing different laundry.

We’re meant to hate. Nick Hancock – yep, my vision of the world is informed by the bon mots of comedians – put it well when he denounced the habit of having a ’soft spot’ for a team. Hancock denounced such talk, saying that “football is not like religion, football is religion, and you don’t hear the Pope saying he has a soft spot for Islamic fundamentalism”. His addition to this quotable quote, that he was disappointed every weekend of the season that the optimum set of results – Stoke City winning and everyone else losing – didn’t come to pass, struck a chord with me back in the mid 90’s.

Now though, I’m not so sure. Even Nick Hancock would admit that Port Vale are singled out for special doses of venom – he must be having a right old time at the moment as Stoke sit comfortably in the Premier League while Vale languish in the depths of League Two. And once you admit that all teams are equally hateworthy but some are more equal than others, then there’s got to be someone you hate least. It might be due to geographical distance, or lack of competition, or lying down like a whipped cur whenever they meet your team – take a bow, Newcastle United. And my recent affection for the England soccer team has shown me that is possible to change your tune as you grow old(er) and mellow(er). So with all those caveats in mind, I’d like to record the existence of two counties that I like to see win, even feeling some disappointment when they fail.

The first of those is Dublin. I can imagine the splutters of outrage that would greet such a sentiment expressed anywhere else online or in the real world. The Jackeens! How could you like the soccer hooligans masquerading as GAA fans? And it would be fair to say that in the real world there is a divide between them and culchies. Many’s the time in my time in college in Dublin where I encountered situations where they looked down on everyone and everything from the provinces, as if the only difference between their home town and New York was that only one of them was still a capital city.

But in GAA terms, that sense of difference is something to be celebrated, not scorned. Noel Purcell was once asked when he would be heading up to Croke Park to watch the Dubs. Why, he replied, would he be bothered with a team of culchies? At the time I thought he was making some Hot Press-style cut at bogball and stickball. Now a little older and a little wiser, I can see that he meant that ‘Dublin’ GAA teams were stuffed to the gills with people up from the country who only played for the Metropolitans because it was impossible to haul themselves back home of a weekend to play for their real county. It would be hard for the native Dubs to get excited about a team like that.

Which is what made Heffo’s Army so exciting. The weight attached to this team in GAA history far outweighs their achievements. Four All-Ireland’s in ten years was a decent return, but Offaly won three All-Ireland’s between 1970 and 1983 and their legend is almost entirely based on one kick by Seamus Darby. The Dubs were different because of that soccer-style sense of razzmatazz and the townie ways of Tony Hanahoe, Brian Mullins et al. But they were the same too because, well, they loved Gaelic games (or one form of it, and how many of us genuinely devote equal time to both football and hurling?)

The Dublin GAA fraternity are our allies, not our enemies. When the rugger buggers were swooning because 20,000+ attended the decisive match in the 1993 All-Ireland League between St Mary’s and Young Munster, such hubris was slapped down by Robbie Kelleher who scornfully noted that the Dubs could get attendances like that at League matches. Whether this  is true or not – seems unlikely – it doesn’t change that fact that having the likes of Kelleher, a D4-type stockbroker, on our side against those who despise the GAA and everything it stands for, is something to be celebrated.

The charges laid against the Dubs are usually puddle-shallow. Supposedly they are all bandwagon jumpers because 70,000+ go to Championship matches while you’d be doing well (whatever Robbie Kelleher says) to get 7,000 at Parnell Park in the spring. This means they have an awful lot in common with the rest of us beyond the Pale. There were only 14,000 people at Waterford’s opening Championship match last year against Clare and a lot fewer than half of them were from Waterford (full disclosure: I wasn’t one of those present). Yet there must have been 50,000 people in Croke Park in September wearing white and blue. By that measure, it is the Déise ‘faithful’ who are the bandwagon jumpers, not the Dubs. These metrics – modest crowds far below the capacity of the venue in May / June, hysterical bleating that the diehards can’t get tickets in September – can be applied to every county in Ireland. Except Dublin.

Then there’s the whole soccer thing. It’s been a long time since liking soccer was considered an insult even among diehard GAA types. Almost everyone I know who is involved in the GAA, even those who are active in their clubs, has some interest in soccer, particularly (and ironically) English teams. Yet when the Dubs are involved their olé-oléing is instantly bracketed as some manner of crime against the memory of Michael Hogan. So what if the way the Hill supports its team is different to the rest of the country? Would people rather they were down in Dalymount Park?

So those are some defences against the Dubs. But there are reasons other than numbers and a shared sense of tribalism to like Dublin. In football, they are truly a bunch of the most lovable losers. Mayo are often cited (not least here) as a county whose inability to close the deal makes them attractive. Yet in 2006 Dublin managed to out-Mayo Mayo, throwing away a seven point lead against supposedly the most brittle county in the land. How could you hate someone who could implode in a manner that would make a British tennis player blush?

In hurling, sympathy for Dublin comes from another direction. Hurling is a sport constantly having to prove itself. With Laois completely gone out of the picture, Offaly and Wexford heading that way, and Clare, Galway, Limerick and Waterford continually flattering to deceive, the sport is desperately in need of some new blood.  It’s not a question of someone challenging Kilkenny. At the moment, we need Kilkenny to dip their standards for that o happen. But once that happens – and it will; it must – Dublin, with a lot of success and minor and Under-21 level, could be waiting in the long grass.

All this might change were Dublin to become any good. A team striding through the world would get old pretty fast, and there might be some justification to concerns that Dublin’s population advantage would make it invincible were they ever to get their act together. The thing about sleeping giants though is that they invariably tend to go comatose rather than wake up. Look at Newcastle United. Why have a down on a team for something that might, but probably won’t, happen? When the facts change, I change my mind. If Dublin become successful, I’ll reassess my attitude to them in that light. Until then, it’s hard to hate.

As I wrote this, it dawned on me that a success for Dublin could have immediate dire consequences for Waterford. If Dublin win Leinster and we win Munster then one of our rewards would be put in the same half of the All-Ireland series as Kilkenny. But you know what? I’ll take that chance. Winning Munster is an end in itself, and the odds are that we’re going to have to meet Kilkenny at some point if we want to win the ultimate prize – avoiding them until the final didn’t do us any good in 2007. So bring on a Dublin win in Leinster, a fitting reward for the efforts of those faceless drones that have dragged Dublin hurling up from the mire over the last decade. And when the capital joins the rest of us in embracing the joys of Gaelic games, you will all be grateful for what they did.

Be careful what you wish for

The question of whether the back door is harmful for the provincial champions is one constantly bandied about. Opponents of the back door will point in recent times to Armagh’s experience, champions of Ulster in four of the last five years and yet not even a final appearance to show for it in the main event. They’ve also seen Sam carried off by three back door teams, most gallingly seeing Tyrone do it in 2005 and 2008. So it will be interesting to see how they react to today’s football qualifier draw, which has seen Armagh draw the utter stinker of Monaghan away. And God knows what hand grenade awaits them in the next phase should they overcome Monaghan. With Tyrone looking forward to the winners of Cavan and Antrim, no prizes for guessing which is the happier county at the moment.

This debate also has its hurling counterpart, and the fate of Clare should provide a sharp counterpoint. The same people who think the back door is an easier router to the McCarthy Cup would no doubt be suggesting that Clare would be pleased to lose to Tipperary today. Having given a fine performance that would have shaken off any post-League blues, they could now look forward to a serene trip through the qualifiers. Then out come the one team that seem to be able to routinely put it up to Kilkenny. At least they’ll have home advantage, but Tipp have a Munster final to look forward to and still have their get-out-of-jail-free card.

Things could be worse for Clare. There are more middling-to-bad teams in the football qualifiers than good ones, so the odds should have been in Waterford’s favour to have a decent draw. Despite their recent decline, Meath are not ideal opponents, especially away from home. After being put in the same half of the draw in Munster as Kerry and Cork, Waterford might ponder that if it weren’t for bad luck they’d have no luck at all.

Great-ish expectations

The footballers kick off their Sam Maguire campaign today, and no one will be under any illusions that Division Three third-placers and first round Tommy Murphy Cup exiters Waterford are about to power past NFL Division Two winners and Munster champions Cork to secure a tilt at National Football League winners and All-Ireland runners-up Kerry. Waterford’s goal for the season will be to have a run through the back door which should be eminently achievable given the quality of their league campaign – a kind draw would be nice though.

Update: a 14 point defeat probably represents a nudge towards fears rather than hopes. They would have been hoping to do better – unless they’ve put money on scoring a goal, in which case it’s party time!

Found: Lord Lucan, Shergar and a proper Waterford GAA site

Type waterford.gaa.ie into your address bar and you are one click away from such pearls as “MANAGERS RETURNED – John Kiely and Justin McCarthy ratified as Senior Football and Senior Hurling Managers” and “Accolades keep coming for Waterford Hurling Players – 3 Players named on Opel GPA Hurling Team of the Year“. With friends like that, who needs the Sindo?

Which makes the arrival on the scene of the too-cool-to-have-two-dots site that is waterfordgaa.ie such a shock. You could argue that not many people want to know that Alan Kissane will referee the match when Tramore host Ballygunner in Division 1 of the Under-16 hurling championship this Saturday at 3pm. But since the dawn of the GAA someone has to have written this information somewhere, and anyone with experience of software like that provided by WordPress will know that it should be a doddle to move it online. And it seems someone in authority has decided to do that. Well done to all concerned, long may it continue.