The GAA summer that might have been:
Six Sunday big-match venues but no games
Tadhg Sauvage, aged 3, pucks a sliotar outside Walsh Park which was yesterday due to host the Munster SHC opener between Waterford and Tipperary – Read Eamonn Sweeney on the dreams of a championship we may never see
WE SHOULD have been in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Or Walsh Park. Or Clones or Carrick-on-Shannon, Parnell Park or Portlaoise. If we hadn’t been there we’d have watched or listened to the games or kept track on social media. We’d have been part of it.
Cork would have launched quick ball for Horgan and Harnedy to test the Limerick full-back line. Hayes and Hegarty would have fetched puck-outs and driven remorselessly at the heart of the Rebel defence.
Liam Cahill’s thrilling tyros would have tested Tipp and seen if the hunger was still there. Bubbles, the Mahers and the McGraths would have shown that it was.
The Dubs would have tried to shock Kilkenny like they did Galway last year. On Saturday night, Laois would have tried to do to Galway what they did to Dublin. Monaghan and Cavan would have put a match to the tinder of local rivalry, the experience and obduracy of the former countering the flair and exuberance of the latter.
Leitrim would have battled away as always until overcome by the inevitable. Mayo’s supporters would have renewed their faith in a happy ending to the greatest quest in Irish sport.
We’d have spent all last week thinking and talking about what might happen and all this week talking and thinking about what actually did.
Yesterday morning fans from farms and villages, small towns, county towns and cities would have woken from dreams of the match to find it still on their minds.
Optimists would have luxuriated in the best possible scenarios for the day ahead. Pessimists would have informed all and sundry that they had a bad feeling about this one.
Newspapers and radio programmes would have been scrutinised for encouragement and disparaged if they didn’t provide it. Kids would have been gathered and herded out the door in a hurry before someone had to go back inside for the vital thing left behind.
Flags planted in gardens, beside road signs, held by teddy bears dressed in county colours, would have whetted the appetite as the miles between home and pitch fell away. Match-day traffic would have been roundly cursed before a miraculously intact parking space was pounced upon with the keen ruthlessness of an opportunist corner-forward reacting to a rebound.
Pulses would have quickened, blood flowed faster and a tremor manifested itself in the throat as the stadium came into sight. Change, for scarves and headbands, crisps and minerals, programmes and tickets, would have been fumbled for.
Propelled
Then the first whistle would have propelled the game, and this year’s championship, from the realm of anticipation into that of reality. There would have been no turning back. The Irish sporting summer would have been up and running.
Queries about what you had to do to get a free off this ref would have been accompanied by dark mutterings about having seen this client in action before. A bit of consistency would have been all the fans wanted, preferably a consistent flow of decisions in favour of their team.
At half-time news would have filtered through of happenings elsewhere, upsets developing, comebacks beginning, the first controversial black and red cards of the season being delivered. At the final whistle shellshocked optimists would have wondered if they’d ever get sense as grinning pessimists declared themselves pleasantly surprised.
Some sociable souls would have nipped in for a drink near the ground while others waited before hitting their locals like couriers bearing crucial despatches from the battlefield. As night fell, the verdicts of ‘The Sunday Game’ would have provoked passionate shouts of dissension in living rooms and pubs alike. The whole day would have been bliss on a national scale.
We should have been doing all these things. But we did not do them. Yesterday was the GAA’s day that never was. The roads were quiet, the stands empty, the terraces deserted, the streets lifeless, the turnstiles silent, the pubs shut and the debates stillborn.
It’s easy to portray sport as a trivial thing at a time when matters of life and death dominate the news. But nothing that gives people joy is ever truly trivial. There’s more to life than survival. If merely not being dead was enough to make us happy, we’d never pass a sad day in our lives.
In recent years we seemed to become slightly embarrassed by our unbridled enjoyment of sport. A certain puritanical morbidity was in fashion.
It became de rigueur to find a link, no matter how tenuous, between sport and death or illness or whatever else might, ‘put things into perspective’.
But sport doesn’t need a connection with the darker side of life to make it matter. The joy it provides makes it important in its own right. Its very gratuitousness and lack of wider meaning is what lends sport its peculiar power.
Sport provides us with a glorious respite from the starker concerns of existence. That is not a small thing. The sporting public are citizens of no mean country.
We’ve had enough ‘perspective’ this year to do us for the next decade. The truth is that even in normal times every match coincides with someone’s personal tragedy. We’ll all get our turn. Death makes far weightier endeavours
than hurling and football matches seem ultimately futile.
Covid-19 does not make the sweeter things in life irrelevant. It shows why they must be cherished to the full while we have the chance. Never again will the first Sunday of the championship be taken for granted. Instead it will seem like the beautiful miracle it was all along.
The championships, not just ours but those everywhere a ball is kicked or thrown or struck, are above all a celebration of life.
They will be again. But May 10, 2020 will be remembered as the day the GAA’s great grounds echoed to the sound of silence.
This was The Saddest Sunday.