TAKING A STAND
Ronan McNamee may not have thrown the first punch in the row over violence in Gaelic football, but in pointing out the hypocrisy of critics, Tyrone’s full-back has shown he’ll keep going until he’s thrown the last
‘PUNDITS WILL REALLY TRY TO DIMINISH WHAT YOU’VE JUST SEEN’
HE IS not averse to the genre, but Ronan McNamee has never seen that iconic clip from the 1970s when Derby County’s Francis Lee and Leeds United’s Norman Hunter cut loose with their fists as they make their way off the Baseball Ground pitch having already been sent off as a result of round one.
He was therefore unaware that he had been a central participant in a Gaelic football reconstruction of that moment at the end of last month’s McKenna Cup final at the Athletic Grounds.
The Tyrone full-back and Armagh’s Aaron McKay were both red-carded as a contest which had simmered with heat all evening drifted into injury time. And as they made their way to the line, McNamee found the timing and accuracy to deliver one final jab to the face of the man from the Orchard County.
He half smiles, half grimaces at the reminder of the incident a couple of weeks on.
‘You have to stand up for yourself,’ he explains. ‘I was taught always to stand up for myself, never to throw the first punch but if someone else does, then make sure you throw the last one.
‘If that was 15 years ago it would be laughed at but because now everything is social media-based you can’t say one word or do one thing. You are in the wrong.
‘Everyone is on edge waiting for you to say something wrong or do something wrong. It is a load of s***e if you ask me,’ says the 27year-old defender, breathing a heavy sigh.
His frustration plays for real. Heading into his seventh season, McNamee is living the dream playing for Tyrone, but the game he loves to play is getting harder and harder to find.
He is old school. He was reared to play football as a contact sport, but he is adamant that the opportunity to do so is now almost impossible when everything in the game is over-analysed and over-scrutinised.
That clip of Lee and Hunter may not have been on his radar, but he did find one in YouTube’s treasure trove to illustrate his point.
It is another iconic short fuse moment from the 1990 All-Ireland final when Cork’s Colm O’Neill punches Meath’s Mick Lyons straight in the jaw.
The latter does his best John Wayne impersonation, by merely rubbing his jaw in acknowledgment of the strike, for which O’Neill was sent to the line by referee Paddy Russell.
‘Go look at clips of games from the 1980s,’ gasps McNamee.
‘F**k, they just battered each other and nobody said anything.
‘You see that one where Colm O’Neill just smacks Mick Lyons. He just smacks him and he does not go down, he just looks at him.
‘Today, if someone gets rubbed they are down holding their face.’
The irony, of course, is that it was one of McNamee’s team-mates, Tiernan McCann, who was in the spotlight for doing just that when he went to ground in the 2015 All-Ireland quarter-final after having his hair ruffled, an incident that led to a red card for Monaghan’s Darren Hughes.
That created a media storm, one which blew most fiercely in the RTÉ’s Sunday Game studio where Meath legend Colm O’Rourke called on the GAA to come down heavily on McCann’s behaviour, which they did with an eightweek ban that, ultimately, did not stick. But McNamee believes that a culture of outrage is being cultivated by those who spent their own days playing inside the glasshouse, which they are now happy to throw stones at. ‘They are just waiting for you to do something and then there can be uproar. ‘Like, Colm O’Rourke was no saint when he was playing but if anyone lifts a hand now he seems to have something to say about it. ‘The same as Ciaran Whelan, his elbows were sharpened on a grinder for years and there was never anything said about that. ‘Those boys just want to hear themselves talking, in my opinion,’ dismisses McNamee.
The price being paid by the game and those who play it for what the 27-year-old Aghyaran clubman refers to as excessive scrutiny is too high, he argues.
‘The punditry in hurling for instance is always about how brilliant everything is.
‘They are constantly promoting hurling as a brilliant sport and the boys that are doing the punditry are building it up all the time.
‘In football, they are constantly scrutinising it. It could be the best game of football played for decades and they will pick something out of it, scrutinise it, break it down and try and diminish what you have just seen.
‘It is almost as if they want football to be overtaken or left behind. In fact, nobody knows what they want.’
That is a summary shared by many, including Dublin manager Jim Gavin, in the midst of the latest efforts to tweak the game with rule changes.
But McNamee believes that there is an appetite among players and the public for the game to go back to its future.
He is not for lawlessness to prevail, but the bar has to be raised to allow football to breathe as a physical contact sport again.
‘It is going to take a style change to restore it to a physical game,’ he suggests.
‘For instance, the first time the International Rules Series came over here they absolutely killed each other and people watched it because it was physical and people got hurt.
‘That is why people tuned in to watch it. And anyone that wanted to play it, wanted to play it because it was so hard-hitting and physical.
‘Now football has nearly reached the stage where you don’t touch anybody because you could end up on the front page of a newspaper looking like a mug. ‘Nobody knows the reason why something has happened on the field. That’s just the way I see it. Somebody with a high profile talks about it and it just gets wings and takes off. ‘And players get bad names, on and off the field, because of that.
McNamee is staunch about the sense of victimhood he feels when some less savoury scenes so closely mirror what’s gone before.
‘People just need to unwind and those with high profiles who get to talk about our game in public should remember how they played it on the day themselves.
‘When Meath played Mayo in 1996 there was a three-minute brawl and it was deemed to be all “handbags”.
‘Well, it is still only “handbags” but if there is pushing match in a McKenna Cup final or in a League game now, it is upgraded to a disgrace.
‘There is no middle ground anymore.’