HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL
I missed the 2013 AllIreland hurling final replay between Cork and Clare. The game was played in Croke Park of a Saturday evening and Clare won their fourth ever Senior title. Traditionally, the hurling final was played on the first Sunday of September. In 2013 the first Sunday was actually the first day of September, so the hurling decider went ahead a week later than normal.
There was a full three weeks between the draw and the replay so the buildup in both counties and around the country was massive. The national and secondary schools ‘were back’ so it was nothing only talk of hurling, hurling all the way - what a change from July this year - you’d hardly know the final was on that Sunday 23rd!
Anyway, the week of the replay was also the week of the Ploughing Championships in
Ratheniska in Laois – I was there on the Thursday. All ready in giddy anticipation of a Saturday evening replay under lights in Croke Park.
What do they say about the ‘best laid plans of mice and men’? So it turned out for me that weekend. A close family relative died and after the removal on the Friday night, I was asked to go under the coffin at the burial on Saturday morning. I suppose I could still have made the game by tearing off up to Dublin immediately after the interment, but no, I stayed on with family and friends and watched the game on television alone, all alone at home that night.
Clare won a high scoring game (5-16 to 3-16) and all Cork fans thought back to the drawn game. We should have seen that game out only for Clare to get a late equaliser. I didn’t begrudge Clare the win, but now a decade later, memories of Cork’s last win in 2005 seem a lifetime away.
Later in that Autumn of 2013, we visited Clare for a few days and took the advice of the great Seamus Heaney;
‘And some time make the
time to drive out west Into County Clare, along
the Flaggy Shore In September or October,
when the wind
And the light are working
off each other
So that the ocean on one
side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones’. Indeed it was just as the poet had written, exactly as he so perfectly described the Flaggy Shore in his poem ‘Epilogue’. Heaney was a proud Ulsterman, but his weaving of wonderful words was and still remains like a great artist painting a never-to-be-forgotten scene.
That magical afternoon near the wild ocean was in October of 2013. In February of that year I’d lost a great friend, a great Clare man and by all accounts one of the best hurlers ever seen. I speak of Jimmy Smyth. For nineteen seasons from 1948 he wore the Clare Senior jersey - all he won was an Oireachtas medal and a Thomond Feis medal, but with Munster he won 8 Railway Cup medals. He worked for years in Croke Park. After he retired in 1988 he went back to college. He got an MA with a thesis about the songs, poems and recitations of Gaelic games in Munster.
Through that passion I got to know Jimmy. Along with the late Jim Cronin, Brendan Barry and Jimmy, I worked on producing the ‘GAA Ballads of Rebel Cork’ in 2001. Jimmy called here a few times and I just loved his company and ability to sing and recite poems celebrating our native games.
In the Spring of 2013 I was unable to make it to Ruan where Jimmy was buried. Now a month after, Clare were once more crowned All-Ireland champions as I stood by his graveside in his beloved village of Ruan. I prayed a bit and cried a bit and then recited a few verses from Bryan McMahon’s ‘Lament For Dr Tommy Daly’:
'On the wind swept Hill of
Tulla,
Where the Clare men place
their dead,
Four solemn yews stand
sentinel
Above a hurler's head, And from the broken north
lands
From Burren bleak and
bare,
The dirge of Thomas Daly Goes surging on through
Clare.
Beyond this place of toil
and tears
Beyond this plain of woe, There is a bourne in
Paradise
Where all the hurlers go, And there in prime they're
goaling
And race across the sod And thrill our dead forefathers
On the level lawns of God.’
Since I first made my way to Croke Park on a September Sunday in 1972 - Kilkenny beat us that day - I’ve been lucky to have only missed a handful of hurling finals. The end of summer, the schools open and the year beginning to wind down meant always glorious September Sundays. They were more than Sundays in reality they were weeks of looking forward to and anticipating great games and seeing our heroes, our stars of our games.
You know, I loved to see Cork winning as anyone with Rebel blood in ‘em would, but oh how I loved to see hurling from players all across the country. How I wish I’d seen Waterford and Antrim and Laois and Dublin win, but hope springs eternal in every county where the clash of the ash is revered.
A week after the hurling final, the talk about the football would begin and to tell ye the truth, those great September Sundays left a glorious afterglow right into October. I recall Bryan McMahon talking to me at Listowel Races after we drew with Meath in the football final in 1988 - ‘Wisha’, he said, ‘twill shorten the winter for ye waiting for the replay’!
In a biography of Jimmy Smyth published just last year, there’s a quote from a beautiful letter written by Jimmy in 1996:
“The essence of the game is the friendships built up rather than the antagonisms on the field of play, I have the fondest memories with whom I held some stern moments on the field of play, we now meet and we don’t have to be introduced, we know each other and have forged a friendship that will last a lifetime, we are at ease with one another and we don’t have to go through any artificial ritual.”
2023 – A P.R. FIASCO FOR
THE G.A.A.
Yes, that sums up the essence of hurling for me and to tell the truth, I was so sad and forlorn coming up to the Sunday of this year's final. It used to be a festival celebrating our national, ancient game each September. On the Saturday in Kilmacud and at St. Judes 7-a-side, hurling teams from every county would gather on the eve of the final.
Dublin can be heaven on a final morning as we’d all try and get in early to see the Minor final - the young men of the future. That’s gone too, as the GAA rush to throw away everything that’s traditional and great about hurling. I say shame on them for downgrading the biggest day in Irish sport.
Truly, 2023 has been a public relations fiasco for the GAA. Starting with the Glen v Kilmacud Crokes club final debacle, the GAA refusing cash at turnstiles and the GAAGo unmitigated disaster - and to cap it all, the GAA appeared before the Competition Authority – all self-grown, self-imposed shambolic cock-ups.
Sport with dash in it Clatter and clash in it Something with ash in it
Surely a game.