Fan who used her head gets tickets to dye for!
A GAA superfan who spent ten hours colouring her hair in honour of Mayo, has been rewarded with two tickets to Sunday’s All-Ireland final.
As reported in yesterday’s Irish Daily Mail, Kany Kazadi from Castlebar underwent a marathon hair-braiding session to turn her tresses green and red this week.
However, Congolese-born Kany didn’t have a ticket to the Big Match. Yesterday, Eir – which sponsors the football championship – took pity on her and she is now the proud possessor of two passes to Sunday’s decider with Dublin.
‘I am over the moon,’ the dyehard fan said. ‘I found out this morning. I got the call when I was getting ready for work.’
An ecstatic Kany is bringing her GAA ‘partner in crime’, Linda Herarty, as her guest. Linda and her husband, Richard, regularly provide her with transport to games.
‘She was my first choice,’ Kany said, adding: ‘We have been on this journey together. She is very happy. I am really happy.’
Kany said she was delighted to be joining this ‘big tradition’ by being present at the game, as she says ‘everybody knows the third weekend in September is something major’.
Kany first fell in love with the game when she moved to Castlebar after spending several years living in a direct provision centre.
The football fan said she has yet to find out where her seats are, adding that she has a fear of heights so she hoped it is not up too high in Croker.
And, she joked, ‘as long as it is not Hill 16!’
WHEN I go up to town tomorrow, I’ll see dozens of them. There will be women and men holding the hands of excited little boys and girls, all dressed in the two-tone blue strip of Dublin and waiting for Sunday’s epic All-Ireland Final rematch against last year’s defeated Mayo.
Nothing unusual in that, I hear you say, except for one thing – the town I will be strolling around will not be Dublin itself, but Gorey in Co. Wexford. Like other satellite towns that boomed in the bubble years, sleepy villages that overnight saw population explosions, in Meath and Louth, Wicklow and Kildare, the northern half of Wexford took in its fair share of Dublin refugees, myself among them. What was bought as a holiday house became my full-time home after my marriage ended, and I live now in splendid exile from the county of my birth.
In truth, it often feels very little different to actually living in Dublin anyway. There are times I could go days on end without ever hearing a Wexford accent, and seeing a Dublin football shirt on someone on the path actually is a daily occurrence. In fact, I once got the wrong end of the stick when a woman whose family used to own the local shop told me they referred to all Dubliners as ‘the Blues’. ‘Ah, the shirt thing,’ I said. ‘No,’ she corrected me. ‘They all come into the shop and ask for 20 John Player Blue.’
That mild mistake aside, one fact remains. We all can leave our counties – and, until relatively recently, that meant migration to Dublin, not from it – but we never leave our tribal loyalties behind. As a child at the time of one of the great waves of movement from the land to the capital, it was common to have friends whose parents never would dream of shouting for Dublin when a match was on, and many of the children took the lead from their parents, still decking themselves out in the colours of counties they visited just a few times a year.
In fact, if I am being honest, many disappointments at the hands, and feet, of Kerry in the ’70s and ’80s left me with an aversion to the entire county, but one I happily overcame when, after visiting, I decided it was ludicrous to dislike a place of such astonishing beauty.
Not everyone in the country can make the same leap of imagination, I know, and I even understand it. Let’s be honest. The only people cheering Dublin on Sunday with be Dubs themselves. Thirty-one other counties will root for the underdogs as they attempt once again to beat the so-called curse that has kept the Sam Maguire out of Co. Mayo for 66 long years of disappointment and pain.
I can see the romance in that, and understand the elation and pride that would result if Mayo actually did make it across the line. Even though I’m a blowin, I became engrossed in Wexford’s great run in the hurling this year. I loved seeing the houses decked out in flags and bunting, the signs on the side of the road wishing the team well, the banners hung from bridges on the M11, the increased number of kids on the street with hurleys. It would be a push to believe I’m ever going to feel like a full-blown Wexican because, in my heart, Dublin always will be home, but it’s nice to have a second county to root for without feeling like I’m letting anyone down.
Community
I was very taken with a story in yesterday’s Irish Daily Mail about a woman called Kany Kazadi, born in Congo and an Irish citizen since 2015. With her friend Linda, from the Philippines but living here for 20 years, she saw an interest in GAA as a way to integrate with her community, and then developed such a passion for the sport she has been to all but three inter-county games this year. In advance of the final, she even has coloured her hair red and green – as vivid a display of the Mayo colours as ever you’ll see.
And what she said actually touched me deeply. ‘The GAA made me feel really comfortable, because I found something I could really bond over with the Irish people,’ she explained.
What became her path to inclusion is, for those born in one county but living in another, a badge of identity that ties them together in a way that support for an English or Scottish soccer team never could do. My nephew, born and raised in Surrey, is a fanatical Liverpool supporter, and we all know millions of Manchester United fans probably never even have been to the city.
That fandom of choice is a luxury we Irish don’t have. We are duty-bound to support our own counties. Any failure to do so would be like turning your back on family, a betrayal that never would be forgiven.
This must be Purgatory for the counties that never win anything, in any GAA code, but their stoicism and loyalty are all the more admirable. Dubs have known many disappointments too, don’t forget. You might not remember this, but we went from 1995 to 2011 without a win, even though the rest of the country still passionately believes we sneak into Croke Park every year and prise the cup from the President’s hands, with only a curt ‘thanks, bud’ before it is filled with Coors Light in Coppers.
The truth is that Dublin might be dominant now, but they won’t have it easy on Sunday and I wouldn’t care to speculate on the outcome. In any case, a great game of football always is better than an easy win, and unless my heart feels like it is about to spontaneously splatter itself on the ceiling as the last minutes tick down, then I couldn’t be bothered watching anyway.
Outsiders love this. As one English friend said to me, when they meet strangers, the first question usually is: ‘What do you do?’, because class underpins life there. The first question we tend to ask is: ‘Where are you from?’, and that more often than not is followed by a discussion of how the county is doing in the hurling, football or, increasingly, camogie, which has taken on spirited new life.
And what all this leads to is a tremendous amount of one-upmanship and occasional slagging. All of it good-natured because we understand, instinctively, the importance of tribe, the comfort we get from our colours (well, maybe not Wexford – sorry, neighbours, but that yellow and purple combo is shocking), and the joy of finally getting revenge on an arch rival.
Maybe Mayo will taste that sweetest of elixirs on Sunday, and if they do, fair play to them. They have fought hard for it, and their fans deserve it to make up for all the lonely nights driving back west contemplating what might have been.
As for me, well, I’ll have my feet up at home in Co. Wexford, with maybe a can of draught Guinness to hand. When I shout at the television, my accent will get stronger again, and the air very likely will turn as blue as my shirt.
And, exiled or not, my county loyalty, my birthright, will be stronger than ever.
Up the Dubs!