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For reasons best not examined too deeply, I’ve ended up being roped into being a selector for the club’s minor team again.
That in itself isn’t too intolerable – backchat from teenagers certainly isn’t a novelty for me – but my fellow travellers on the side-line might require some adjusting time. Or, rather, re-adjusting.
The manager is Barry Mooney, something I wasn’t aware of until after I’d given my commitment. When I happened to mention it to my father a few weeks ago, his response was, “Mooney?! Sure, he’s half a clown!” When I replied, “Only half?!” he said, “Ah well, being generous, I was giving him a 50% discount.”
Basically, he’s a smartarse with no conviction – he’ll have the glib saying but rarely offer a solution. This recently manifested itself in a text to parents with regard to training arrangements: “If there’s properly wet rain, we’ll be indoors in the hall but otherwise, if it’s only squally, we’ll do our best to try to stay on the pitch.”
Where one of our club’s top coaches, Roly O’Dwyer, has always been prone to endearing malapropisms, Mooney will butcher a saying into something nonsensical and completely without meaning, such as, “You can bring a horse to water and he’ll sup away, like.”
When we convened for our first meeting as a management team, he got the digs in early.
“It wasn’t out by the ditch you spent the winter!” he laughed as he poked me in the stomach.
He had a point, to be fair to him, but getting the last word in is his oxygen and I couldn’t let him have it. So, I decided to recall an event from our shared past – I glared at him and asked, “Did you ever find those footballs?”
The missing footballs
Barry used to have fingers in lots of pies as he tried to network – though of course while trying to avoid serious effort, so he ended up with a good few of vice-chairperson roles. One of these was on the committee of the county’s inter-firm GAA championships.
It seems quaint now to think that these competitions, entered by businesses, were so keenly contested as to give rise to a large number of ringers being smuggled in to play.
At the time, I was working for a building company and, for a semi-final game in the late 1990s, we were short on numbers and so one of the lads suggested that he bring along his friend, Eric Gilmore, who was on the county senior team at the time.
Mooney was an umpire that night and couldn’t resist asking me who the new employee was when he saw Gilmore. His class shone through and he scored 1-7 as we moved into a handy lead, but he couldn’t resist rubbing it in with a bit of sledging. A fight ensued and, when he landed a blow or two, he was sent off.
We still won and, with our opponents, the County Council, not contesting the result as they had a few shady team members themselves, that should have been that. The only problem was that there was a provincial championship game coming up and the referee had included Gilmore’s dismissal in his report – as well as the fact that he was illegal. This was a time when any GAA suspension was fully across the board and so Gilmore was going to miss the county match.
He had to appeal to clear his name – but in doing so, we were automatically deemed to have forfeited the match for fielding a non-employee. We could live with that, but the hearing fully displayed Barry Mooney’s gift for uselessness.
Having been one of the match officials, he was called to give testimony as to what had happened. As the fight broke out at his goalmouth, he essentially held Gilmore’s fate in his hands. As a committee member, he was caught in a bit of a bind – he couldn’t lie, but then he couldn’t be the man who ensured the county team was without a key man. So, what did he do? He prevaricated, as only he can.
“Unfortunately, when the scuffle happened, I was absent from my post,” he told the appeals body. “Two footballs had gone into the hedges behind the goal and I felt it was important to retrieve them, given the potential cost of the inter-firms board having to replace them.”
The referee’s report stood, Gilmore was suspended and he missed the first-round defeat. As this was before the back door era, it was one and done for the county team.
Barry never fully lived it down, so my reminder of that time shut him up. For a while at least – I fear it’ll be a long year.
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