The rare auld times

Foul Play recently heard an amusing story concerning a member of the Dublin senior football panel, and his behaviour at the second of U2’s concerts in Slane a couple of months back.

Two friends of mine were also at the show, and happened to bump into this player (whom they already knew) while standing some distance from the stage. Like most of the other concert-goers on the site, he was in a state of, shall we say, extreme sociability.

So anyway, there the three of them stood, chatting away, when something in the distance happened to catch the Dublin player’s eye. After a couple of minutes of periodically glancing over my friends’ shoulders, he slurred, “’Scuse me.”

He then dropped his pint of beer on the ground and vanished into the throng for five minutes or so, after which time he reappeared… sporting a newly-pierced eyebrow.

It should also be pointed out that our hero, in his day job, works for one of the biggest and most powerful financial institutions in the country.

In fairness, though, there is probably no point in trying to establish a link between this cautionary tale and the mixed results achieved by Dublin during the championship, results which ensured that manager Tommy Carr was given his walking papers last week.

Besides, the man in question was one of the Dubs’ better players over the summer. Indeed, he turned in a particularly tremendous performance when they hammered Sligo in July (and if you still can’t identify who it is after all that, then I’m guessing that your last visit to Croke Park was to see Billy Joel or Neil Diamond).

Last week, Carr got the boot after a characteristically unfathomable series of machinations and manoeuvrings by the Dublin county board. Balding, dour and intense, he was hardly a Kevin Heffernan figure, but he did a decent job with the materials available to him.

It’s difficult to see how having anyone else at the helm would have improved matters sufficiently to make the side into realistic Sam Maguire contenders. At this stage, most people would settle for them managing to win a Leinster final. Specifically, a Leinster final against Meath.

The defence is one of the better back lines in the country, but still far from impregnable. The inadequacies of the full-forward line have also been well documented. Ian Robertson seems to suffer panic attacks every time he gets the ball, Collie Moran’s undoubted gifts are offset by the wildness of his finishing, and Dessie Farrell has lately looked as if his heart isn’t in it any more.

There is also The Whelan Question. One of the primary challenges confronting Carr’s eventual successor will be to try and squeeze more than half an hour of good football out of Ciaran Whelan per game.

With Carr gone, the usual handwringing has begun, regarding the question of why the Republic’s largest county, with a population of well over a million souls, should be well able to manage more than one Sam Maguire per decade, not to mention putting out a half-decent hurling XV.

This, of course, is balderdash.

Dublin GAA may not yet be quite a cult activity, as one commentator described it last week, but it is getting there. The stark fact is that the majority of people in this city don’t give a damn about Gaelic games.

Here’s a simple test. Ask yourselves how many times DJ Carey, the most famous hurler in Ireland, would be stopped for an autograph if he walked through, say, Tallaght town centre. I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.

I picked Tallaght in that example for a reason, because it is the country’s largest suburb, home to a young and growing sports-mad population.

It should be prime GAA country, but due to several factors – changing economic and social trends, the (relative) success of the Irish national football team, and the failure to properly market and promote Dublin’s footballers beyond the short-term sales of Arnott’s jerseys – it is not, except for a few scattered outposts such as Thomas Davis and the like.

Tallaght is just down the road from Perrystown, a sleepy southside suburb that you might call upper working-class. That’s where I’m from, and when I was growing up as a sport-obsessed kid, Gaelic games might as well have been Aussie Rules for all the relevance it had to my life and the lives of the kids I was friends with. You either played soccer or you didn’t play sport.

And if you think that sounds a bit weird, it’s only a short hop down the road to Templeogue, where the two local GAA clubs, Faughs and St Jude’s, are right next to each other, with nothing else around for miles. Or to Rathfarnham, where one of the most prominent local GAA pitches is currently serving as a halting site.

That’s why Dublin don’t have a top-class forward line, and why they may well be unable to win another All-Ireland until a year beginning in “201”.

Notwithstanding the behaviour of the devious and Machiavellian county board, this is what Tommy Carr was really up against. Brian Mullins, I don’t envy you one bit, baby.