We have a sneaking regard for handbags

WE’LL admit it ourselves. One minute we were tut tutting with the best of them and the next we were rolling around in fits of laugher at the sheer preposterousness of it all. Don’t you ever go changing on us football, we wouldn’t have you any other way. Of course, there are times when we’ll say differently and there are different categories of aggression and the likes, but good old-fashioned handbags is as much part of the game as ‘45s, high-fielding and hop-balls.

People, whether they care to admit it or not, definitely have a sneaking regard for that aul sort of messing that sometimes goes on in Gaelic football, the temporary outbreak of handbags and what the great Weeshie Fogarty, late of this parish, once described as ‘hold me back, let me at him’. That’s not to condone more serious outbreaks of violence – which seemed endemic in the winter of 2018, but didn’t seem to have been as much a factor at all of the 2019 club season – and that’s the problem with the sneaking-regardism we’re sometimes guilty of. Handbags can escalate, dangerously so.

Still it did the heart good to see what we saw at the club finals last Sunday evening at the end of a niggly and cynical and sometimes fractious affair between Corofin and Kilcoo. When the final whistle blew there was an outbreak of pushing and shoving, faux hard man stuff, unedifying in its way, a touch embarrassing for the GAA, but harmless enough all the same.

As the teams made their way down the tunnel all hell seemed to break loose temporarily and that’s where the hero of our story comes in. Inflamed with the passions of the moment he couldn’t help himself, he wanted, nay he needed, to make his presence felt.

The only trouble was he was above the fray – literally though as he clearly wasn’t figuratively – and felt compelled to hop the railing down into the tunnel. The trouble was our hero struggled to stay upright, going temporarily head over heels before recovering slightly before hitting the deck right way up. Buster Keaton would have been proud of slapstick like that.

It’s all a part of the madness that makes the GAA what the GAA is. We all like to talk about how professional it is – and it actually is – in a lot of ways, but when it comes down to it, the GAA is still reassuringly amateur. As we say, we wouldn’t have it any other way.