IRELAND FOR EVATON
Gaelic football is winning hearts, minds and talent in SA, writes Carlos Amato
They may not be Irish, but SA’s Gaelic Football squad is as feisty as they come
AT first glance, it looks and sounds like a normal football match. The yelling, the scurrying, the time-honoured thump of Chinese pleather on Bangladeshi vinyl. There’s a wan winter sun, a round white ball and regulation football posts with rugby poles steepling above them, as they do on multipurpose pitches.
But this ain’t football. At least it’s not football as we know it.
A jet-heeled midfielder picks up the ball and bolts upfield, bouncing and catching it thrice on the run, before hurling it toward a gesticulating comrade, who is outrageously offside by soccer standards.
The forward snaffles the pass with a rugby lock’s leap, returns to earth, swivels and hoofs the ball proudly through the poles. Peeeeep! One point. The crowd goes as wild as it’s possible to go on a Sunday morning when there’s only 20 of you.
This is Gaelic football, Johannesburg-style. Ireland’s national sport is planting its mad green seeds all over Gauteng, especially in Alexandra and Tembisa — and the resulting crop of talent is as lush as a leprechaun’s lawn.
Thanks to the proselytising efforts of a network of Irish expatriates and companies, South Africa now fields a richly promising national Gaelic football side. Last year, the SA Gaels reached the last four of the intermediate cup at the World Gaelic Games in Abu Dhabi — a tournament featuring teams of expatriate Irish as well as nonIrish converts across the world.
Steven “Papi” Malinga, a lithe radio technician from Tembisa, is the skipper of the SA Gaels — and he craves gold at this year’s World Games, to be held in Dublin in August.
“We were the fastest team last year, but didn’t know each other as well as the other sides,” he says. “So we lost in the semifinals. But we’re coming up with some strategies to win it. We might be the smallest in the tournament, but we’re the quickest. So we’ll use what we have — move the ball along the ground, through the hands, not a long-ball game.”
At its best, Gaelic is played at pinball pace, and its variety of actions — kicking, throwing, dribbling, scoring football-style into the net, scoring rugby-style between the poles — makes for a beguiling spectacle. So much so that back in 1712, the Gaelic poet James Dall McCuairt wrote 88 verses of lyrical poetry about the earliest known inter-county match in Ireland, between Louth and Meath, at Slane.
Back then, it was an anarchic peasant sport, periodically suppressed by the land-owning class. Codified in the mid-1800s, Gaelic seeped into the fabric of Irish identity — and took on deep nationalist resonance on Bloody Sunday in 1920, when British troops killed 65 spectators at a match at Croke Park ground in Dublin.
Nowadays, 80 000 souls pile into Croke Park for the annual county cup final. Gaelic is the best-supported sport in the republic — though it’s strictly amateur, even at the highest level.
The purity of the players’ motives extends all the way to Johannesburg. “We don’t really care about money per se,” says Tshepiso Mogapi, a box-to-box midfielder and engineering student, who hails from a village near Mahikeng in North West. “It’s passion. Nobody is getting paid, but you can see how hard we run. Even when you lose a normal league game, it doesn’t sit well with your soul.”
Mogapi’s formative sporting experience was in cricket, football and middle-distance running, which served to instil the endurance and ball skills to rock in Gaelic. He savours the game’s decision-making rigors.
“You have to think about when to execute the various skills. It’s not just about running like madmen.”
But there’s plenty room for craic amid the concentration. “The Irish guys are such good lads to be with,” says Mogapi. “Friendly, great people.”
On a tour of Ireland in 2014 by the SA Gaels, the team had tea with the Irish president, Michael Higgins, at his residence. Both Malinga and Mogapi were struck by the echoes of South Africa’s struggle in the Irish struggle.
“We attended a lecture about how Ireland and South Africa have similar histories, in terms of how people were treated,” says Mogapi. “In Ireland there was a division in society. So you realise it’s not just our struggle in South Africa. Oppression happens around the world, but the Irish dealt with it. They are no longer victims.”
But come August in Dublin, these kasie Celts might victimise a few of them.
‘We might be the smallest in the tournament, but we’re the quickest’