An electrifying All-Ireland final is no picnic for 82,000
05 September 2010 Edited by Pat Leahy All-Ireland hurling final day, the greatest day of the year.
Listening to RTE over the last few days, you’d think the big event of the weekend was on in Stradbally, where they were still struggling to sell 30,000 tickets to the Electric Picnic last Friday night. Some 82,000 will be in Croke Park today and millions watching or listening to Micheál worldwide.
Ah, maybe the Electric Picnic is more important. Or maybe you’re more likely to find RTE reporters and producers in Stradbally than in Dublin 1 today.
Never mind. It’s All-Ireland final day, the greatest day of the year. Tipp vs Kilkenny, young pretenders vs the history makers.
The drive for five, the greatest team in the history of the world, better than Brazil, better than the Harlem Globetrotters. Apparently. We’ll see, we’ll see. AOB is not exactly neutral on this one.
The greatest day out for hurling supporters. Here’s what historian Paul Rouse wrote about them in his brilliant and beautiful 2005 essay about the hurling final: ‘‘The hurling final is no mere occasion for the partisan supporter. Every year the stands are filled with neutrals who love hurling, who love the first Sunday in September.
They might end up favouring one team over the other, but they’re there for a good match above anything else.
‘‘Some of the people here have never seen their own team play hurling in Croke Park on All-Ireland Sunday, and they never will.
‘‘They come to the final every year because they love the game and they will have spent much of the summer - and most summers of their lives - driving around Ireland in search of good hurling matches.
‘‘The roar comes from the gut. It fills the air and closes in on the whole stadium, like a warm, thundery night. And it comes from everywhere, not one end or the other. It comes from every row and every section.
‘‘First for Cork and then, a few minutes later, for Galway as the teams hit the field one after the other. Two sets of supporters mixed and matched throughout the ground. There is no section of seats where opposing fans aren’t seated together.
‘‘When devotees of the Premier League soccer in England come to their first hurling match, this lack of segregation always draws great surprise. Why are there not more fights, they ask. Never answer that question. By the end of the match, they have it worked out for themselves.”
The culmination of the year for the players, the biggest stage in the game, the greatest thing most of them will do in their lives. Ordinary men doing extraordinary things. Rouse again:
‘‘The players are out. You look at them and the sacrifices they make, and glory in the fact that they are amateurs.
It is now a cliche almost beyond repetition that these are the men who teach your kids and sell you milk and farm the land and drive buses and pull pints and basically do everything that everyone else in Ireland does. They even pretend to stay off the drink.
And then in the mornings and the evenings and the weekends, they go to the gym and lift weights, or go to the field for training. This is one cliche that demands repetition, however. It lies at the heart of the GAA’s greatness.
‘‘They’re the same as us - and they can tell us where to get off too, because we don’t pay their wages for them. The freedom of the amateur is liberation from the obligation to play or to train. You do it because you love to do it, not because you want to buy your third SUV. The players are as dedicated as any professionals - maybe they even want to win more. The wages of amateur sports are championship medals, not signing-on fees or new contracts.”
Michael Cusack once wrote that a brilliant hurling match was like a city on fire, where the crackling of burning timber and the hissing of flames swelled into a roar of conflagration.
Well, there’ll be sparks flying in Croke Park today. The greatest day of the year.
Normal service will resume next week. Unless it goes to a replay.
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