Hurling has the thrills but only football has democracy
There’s no competing with the sliothar spectacle but big ball still allows smaller counties to dream
‘FERMANAGH AND CARLOW BOTH DISPLAY SPIRIT AND STRUCTURE’
IHAVE a mental picture of the only time I ever played ball in Enniskillen’s Brewster Park and all the counselling sessions in the world will never erase its crudeness. Halfway through an Allianz League match in the mid noughties, Tomás went crashing to the ground as if his hamstring had been pierced by sniper fire.
When we got back to the dressing room afterwards he was standing there in his birthday suit letting it all hang loose as his hamstring was attended to by our female Australian physio.
It was a sight too sore for too many eyes.
‘You’d want to start watching the news, Tomás,’ grunted Darragh.
‘What’s wrong with you,’ enquired our exhibitionist sibling.
‘They decommissioned up here years ago, boy, so now put that thing back in its holster before you threaten the peace,’ fired back big brother to hoots of dressing room approval.
Last Sunday Fermanagh reminded Tomás and the rest of us that size really does not matter and for good measure Carlow are going to do the same today.
The provincial championships are dead, long live the provincial chamkicked pionships. In the past month, it is these two unlikely counties who have stood up for a football Championship which has been totally lost in hurling’s shadow.
It is impossible to compete with hurling as a spectacle when it is played to the level we witnessed last weekend in Munster, but Fermanagh and Carlow have reminded us that football is a greater democracy than hurling’s closed shop.
For that, we owe them a great debt of gratitude rather than turning our noses up at the air and professing our disdain for how it has been accomplished.
Look, it is not how I would like to play ball or I how would like to see ball being played but I reckon if I came from a county like Fermanagh, where only half of its 60,000 population is disposed towards the GAA and where you have only 18 clubs to select from I might see things very differently.
Or for that matter, if I had played for a county like Carlow where I was from pillar to post year in, year out, I might just acquire a taste for winning football rather than fine football. That’s the bottom line. Rory Gallagher and Turlough O’Brien have provided the leadership and the structure to give the people of two of the GAA’s smaller counties the summer of their lives. Okay, last Sunday’s game might have been hard to watch but the explosion of joy at the end, when you got to see what it meant, made it something to behold. And I also thought it a better match than what a rather impoverished scoreline may have suggested, because there is far more to our game that just kicking the ball between the posts. It was a masterclass in how to defend as a group and the manner in how they nullified the threat of Conor McManus was fascinating.
They defended on two fronts, there were never less than nine players inside their own half and that number would grow when retreating players set up a full cordon across the 45.
But they took out the double insurance in that Che Cullen did not allow the protection offered to distract him from his job of sticking to McManus like a limpet.
But to get a team playing with uniformity and structure is not easy.
Some players do not see the glory in spending most of the game doing a job which is functional rather than expressive and it takes an inspirational manager to get them to buy into that.
It is in effect the gameplan which Donegal unveiled under Jim McGuinness and Rory Gallagher in 2011; one which was tweaked 12 months later to take them to the All-Ireland.
The difference is that Fermanagh do not have the same quality of players as that Donegal team but then they don’t need to have them. Winning a first ever Ulster title is their All-Ireland and if they manage that, it will become one of the sport stories of the year.
Let’s be clear, no matter what happens today Carlow are not going to win the Leinster Championship.
But then, again, they don’t have to because they have put a smile back on our faces. Just like Fermanagh, their game is based on spirit and structure with the appointment of another Ulster coach in Stephen Poacher having had a transformative impact.
But O’Brien is a charming, roughish leader who sets the tone.
I love the trust he places in the players, his refusal to go down the drink-ban route because he knows when you treat someone like a responsible adult, the chances are they are going to behave like one.
He has a very clearly defined emotional intelligence and he is dead right when he draws the link between a successful county team and the way people carry themselves in a county.
He name-checked Kerry and Kilkenny in making that point and it set me thinking. As a county, we would probably be known for having a roguish, confident streak to our personality, but it is quite likely that comes from the success we had on the field rather than anything in our tap water.
And to see that confidence spreading on the strength of a football team which is putting its best foot forward by putting so many men back, is a great thing to witness.
My gut is telling me they will find a way to squeeze past Laois to reach a first Leinster final in 74 years.
But even if that does not come to pass, what they have achieved already has reminded us the prize for getting the best out of yourself is that it can make the smallest feel like giants.
Even if it is only for a day, everyone should have a shot at walking tall in those shoes.