Glad to be GAA

Cold turkey has kicked in with a vengeance. Summertime obviously brings much to look forward to by way of blue skies and sunshine (or at least it’s supposed to) but in odd-numbered years, where there is no World Cup or European Championship to look forward to, it is a horrifically empty time of year for the chronic football junkie (er, what about the League of Ireland? – HP token real-life footie fan).

Sure, the outlook is not totally grim. The European under-21 championships and next month’s Copa America will provide some relief. The latter, in particular, is a mouth-watering proposition which takes place at a very Foul Play-friendly time of day (most of the games kick off at midnight GMT) and has a whiff of the exotic about it. But, for the most part, summer is something of a bleak and barren wilderness. Which is where the GAA comes in, stampeding to the rescue, functioning as a sort of sporting methadone, satiating that mysterious part of the brain which can’t completely function without watching some sort of contest that involves a ball of some description.
All that said, I have a couple of friends who view the equation in precisely the inverse fashion. One lad in particular springs to mind: a Galway hurling maniac whose pulse has never exactly been set racing by the prospect of Blackburn and Bolton slugging it out on a Monday night, but who was almost certainly in a frenzy of anticipation counting down the days until Longford squared off against Laois to kick-start the 2011 summer’s festivities. For reasons which I don’t doubt are perfectly valid and thoroughly considered, he has something of a visceral antipathy to the sight of Irish people sitting in pubs goggle-eyed at the deeds of British football teams comprised chiefly of hired mercenaries from many corners of the globe. He is also on very safe ground when he points out that you never see a scoreless draw in Gaelic football or hurling.
And his viewpoint is undeniably valid in one respect. Whatever about Gaelic football (Leitrim against Roscommon on Sunday was the sort of match that not even a mother could love, and there will be many, many more where that one came from before the Championship has run its course) it cannot be denied that hurling, at its best, is an utterly spellbinding spectacle of scarcely-believable beauty, skill and bravery. So spellbinding, in fact, that you often draw breath after a particularly gripping encounter and reflect, fuck it, this genuinely is a million times more exciting than anything the global game has to offer.
This isn’t just semi-sincere lip-service on my part to a noble native tradition which it would be sacrilegious to disrespect; this is an incontrovertible fact. Scandalously, I must confess here that, coming as I do from a part of the world where hurling was lazily dismissed as a rustic if amusingly demented pursuit inherently of exclusive interest to ‘bog-monsters’ and ‘muck-savages’, I never actually watched a hurling match in its entirety until the day of my 25th birthday, when I woke up with a crippling chemically-induced hangover of the sort that instantly precludes any faint possibility of getting out of bed, forcing one to reach for the remote control, the weed-pipe and the painkillers. I then pieced what was left of my head together while watching that day’s All-Ireland Final between Cork and Kilkenny.
To my absolute amazement, I was smitten within the first five minutes, gobsmacked at the levels of virtuosity on display. Oddly, this particular match would in no way be remembered as a classic Final: goalless, and played in torrential rain, it remains the lowest-scoring hurling Final of the last 23 years.
Yet I couldn’t take my eyes off the thing, and without having the blindest bit of interest in who won or lost, I still marvel at the exhilaration even now: that spine-tingling sensation when you realise you’ve discovered this entirely new world previously unknown to you, and are compelled to immerse yourself in this world as much as you can, a bit like stumbling upon the work of a truly fantastic writer or band or film-maker. You want to find out more and more; you can’t wait to turn the next page.
I’ve never looked back, and in the decade since, I have in no way been disappointed. Sure, it was a little deflating to discover that only a dozen or so counties compete with any level of proficiency, that the sport’s competitive hierarchy is in many ways every bit as lopsided as that which applies to cross-channel football.
But good god, when you watch two genuine heavyweights trading blows on one of those days where the goals are raining in and the lead changes hands every few minutes, there are few sights on Earth to compare.
And the only black mark – the fact that my native county, Dublin, were not seriously competing in the same universe as the established superpowers, leaving me with little or no emotional investment in the business end of the Championship – has been erased in spectacular fashion over the last three or four years, as the Dubs’ long-prophesied coming of age as a genuinely top hurling county has materialised.
The crowning glory thus far arrived on the May Bank Holiday weekend, when they put (of all people) Kilkenny to the sword in the National League final, forcing the bookies to slash Dublin’s All-Ireland odds to 14/1 (four years ago, their price was 5,000/1).
I refuse to be accused of bandwagon-jumping, since I climbed aboard this particular train in 1999 and have looked out for the result of every one of Dublin’s games since then. I can still remember watching us succumb meekly to Westmeath in wretched weather on a thoroughly nasty summer’s day five years ago, and while I admit I may not be quite as steeped in the game as some, I think I’m now fully entitled to rejoice in whatever triumphs lie ahead.
Galway lie in wait this weekend for what promises to be a knife-edge encounter, and I’m already slobbering with excitement. A word of advice here for those sports fans among you who, for whatever reason, haven’t yet given hurling the time of day: do yourself a favour and tune in this weekend at 7pm on Saturday, even for a few minutes, and see what you make of it. It might just enrich your life.