THE CUP NOBODY SEEMS TO WANT
The League provides so little outward joy in its winning, it begs the question: What is the point?
WHAT we would have given, just for a moment in time, for the chance to take breakfast with Brian Cody last Monday morning.
Just to sit there and watch as he spluttered on his cornflakes (although it is rumoured he likes having Wexford for breakfast) as he listened to the radio, while Michael McCarthy reported for Morning Ireland that the Galway hurlers had been warmly received by their fans at a homecoming reception for winning the Allianz League the previous night.
According to legend, herds of suckling calves in Kilkenny have been weaned off their mother’s milk while being fed nuts out of the Allianz League cup.
We don’t really buy that because their serial success in the League under Cody suggested anything but disdain for the competition, but you would genuinely fear for the physical wellbeing of any club chairman who lit a bonfire to welcome home a League-winning Kilkenny team under his care.
This week as Galway partied, Kilkenny already have their Championship faces on and gum shields in, while the western county is still dancing a jig to a seriously dodgy Ed Sheeran tune.
In time, no doubt, when Galway hit some speed bump on the summer road – quite possibly in a Leinster final against Kilkenny – this will be the stick of choice used to beat Micheál Donoghue and his players.
‘Here lays the Galway team who lost their heads when they won the League,’ rest assured some miserly-spirited stone mason is already chiselling out that inscription in memory of the soon-to-be departed.
Except from the grabs we heard on the radio, the Galway captain David Burke and Donoghue seemed about as comfortable addressing their supporters last Sunday evening as Shane Ross would a bus drivers’ convention. ‘They don’t seem too excited,’ Gavin Jennings, the Morning Ireland anchor, observed. Indeed. Nothing quite sums up the GAA’s twilight zone between League and Championship like the discomfort which attaches itself to the winners of the former. You could see it at the end of the football final last month when a Kerry team with a number of rookies understandably lost themselves for a moment in the realisation that they had got a monkey off their back in beating Dublin, before cottoning on and walking off the pitch sober, pokerfaced and a tad embarrassed by their earlier display of emotion. There can be no other sport in the world where the winners suppress any outward feelings of joy that could be confused for a state of happiness at winning a trophy.
Compare that to across the Irish Sea where Jose Mourinho, after spending the GDP of a developing country to build half a team, has recently expressed his joy at winning two trophies already this season.
It did not faze him in the least that one of them was the Community Shield – in GAA currency the equivalent of the now defunct boozy post All-Ireland final Goal charity match – and the other the League Cup, whose Irish first cousin is the Walsh Cup.
‘We have won one and a half trophies,’ he crowed recently, his appropriate use of a fraction suggesting that he is not entirely shameless.
Much as we would have liked to have buttered toast with Cody last Monday, we would have given that up to see Mourinho at Croke Park earlier this month, or at the Gaelic Grounds last Sunday.
It would have been worth seeing his reaction as he watched captains go to the podium with the demeanour of men more comfortable in receiving a public flogging from the GAA president rather than be handed some gaudy silver in the month of April.
The United boss would know that the winners would be much happier if, rather than be toasted with a homecoming, they could Snapchat daily updates to their public from a three-day camp in Lough Derg where barefoot and feasting on black tea and dry toast, they purged themselves of happy and satisfying thoughts that are apparently the sinful and unfortunate by-products of success.
Of course, this begs a question. If a competition which provides the GAA calendar with a series of regular, competitive games and provides so much pleasure in its playing but ultimately so little outward joy in its winning, what is the point?
With the Super 8s on the football horizon and talk of an imminent Special Congress that will see something similar happen in hurling, are we not coming closer to the day when the League and Championship merge as one?
True, fewer trophies to go around but we would be spared the awkwardness which comes with winning some of them.
Jose would never get it, but Brian would be able to eat his breakfast in peace.
He seemed about as comfortable as Shane Ross would be at a bus drivers’ convention