WHY ROSCOMMON BOARD SHOULD BE PRAISED
WANTING it every way is one of the most powerful human impulses. This accounts for much of the misery in life. Contentment is more likely to be the lot of those who understand that decisions have to be made, that some desires have to be traded off for others.
If, say, we want indigenous sports that speak uniquely to Irish culture, that we can show off proudly in magnificent stadia, and that we can compare favourably against global sports riven by venality, then there will be occasions on which those sports need protecting.
If the right to the ancient Irish brag about hurling and football and finishing the conversation with the line, ‘You wouldn’t see that in the Premier League’, is to be preserved, then keeping those points of difference safe is important.
The Roscommon County Board have been derided for asking supporters not to boo opposition players after Andy Moran got stick in their draw against Mayo.
This was not just because Moran is from the town of Ballaghaderreen – which is a part of Roscommon in the eyes of the State, but which is a part of Mayo according to the GAA, for reasons now over a century old – but also because of a pre-season match in late January.
The FBD League is an improbable tinderbox, but it was Moran’s role in a dramatic Mayo win against Roscommon that seems to account for the boos in Croke Park.
With Mayo losing by eight points last January, Moran entered the pitch and scored two late goals.
The second clinched a Mayo win, and Moran, who reports of the match say took a deal of ribbing as he warmed up, responded to his strike by celebrating lustily, including kissing the Mayo crest on his jersey as he ran back out the field.
I made the Iliad from such a local row, Homer’s ghost once whispered to Kavanagh.
That parish needle survived the spring and summer and was given voice in Croke Park last Sunday. If the rivalry between bordering counties is what helps make the GAA great, though, the way it manifested itself was dull and ignorant, just as Moran’s celebration in Kiltoom was misguided.
Booing is the universal language of the disgruntled sports fan, Esperanto for the disaffected. But it has never improved an atmosphere yet.
It brings nothing to an occasion but negativity, and it didn’t do a thing to help Roscommon as they tried to eke out some tiny advantage in the suffocating end to their draw with Mayo.
In a match where they played at times with daring ambition, the Roscommon players could take no sustenance from hearing a rival player booed. When they were at their best in the first 15 minutes of that match, the noise inside Croke Park was magnificent.
Their supporters were in the majority in the stadium, and it’s not often that Mayo are out-numbered. After the extended, deadening agonies of the Kerry-Galway warm-up, the second match provided an example of what a big day in Dublin 3 at the end of a summer should sound like.
And in that context, the boos made for dumb, discordant notes. They did nothing to push Roscommon on, just as the Mayo cat-calls when Donie Smith lined up his marvellous equalising free did not add to their men’s cause.
The Roscommon board have been mocked for their naivety in issuing their plea to supporters. They pay for their tickets, goes the argument; let them do what they like.
Follow that line of reasoning, of course, and you won’t be long running into chaos.
If we celebrate our games for stirring great passions in supporters while never encouraging the ugly partisanship that has ruined countless soccer occasions, then we should also recognise a county asking its fans to keep their standards high.
Nobody is calling for the banning of boos, but Roscommon’s statement was a reminder of what practical support should be about.
The match itself careered to a crazy beat, and analysis of it afterwards indulged two goofy Connacht teams, one famously incapable of winning when it matters most, the other ingénues on this sober stage.
The two teams played the game as if they enjoyed it. Where was the joylessness, for pity’s sake? Modern, winning football is not supposed to be so wide-eyed and reckless, and that same condescension was applied to what the Roscommon board had to say some days later.
But just as Kevin McStay and his players deserved credit for their courage on the pitch, so their board should be commended for expecting standards off it.