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In this strangest of years, viewing habits for the GAA championship season have had to be amended.
Ordinarily, if Ginger Farrell, Larry Maher and I weren’t attending a game, we’d watch one together, rotating the venue and agreeing with each other about the rubbish the pundits were talking. Obviously, the house visits are out for now and we’re having to double-screen it – the matches on television in tandem with a Zoom call to keep the discourse going.
After Cork beat Kerry the other week with a goal from Mark Keane, who is officially an Aussie rules player now, it got us thinking about sporting crossovers. I remembered another M Keane, the Irish rugby legend Moss, mentioning in his autobiography how he started dabbling with the oval ball when the infamous GAA ban was still in place. As a Kerry U21 footballer, he had to play rugby for UCC under the assumed surname of Fenton and then, after the ban was lifted, the Evening Echo reported that Keane made his rugby debut and was a big improvement on Fenton!
We had quite a few examples from our own place, too. While the GAA club is the only sporting body in the parish, there are quite a few other organisations that are half-local and over the years there have been notable instances of sporting ecumenists making their mark.
Lineout mishap
Unfortunately for us, our rugby man wasn’t as big a success as Moss. If he hadn’t given himself away with his cotton shorts that had pockets in them, he certainly did when the ball ran over the sideline and he retrieved it to restart play. However, instead of kicking it back in, he set up for a lineout. Another lad who got confused by the rules was one of our own, but one who had been called for Aussie rules trials. That was his cue to start cutting the sleeves off the jerseys he wore at training, but he took it too far when he called a mark in a game, a good few years before it was introduced in Gaelic.
Then there was the underage boxing phenom who fell in with my minor team’s pre-season training as he built his stamina. He hadn’t intended togging out but, as so often happens, an early-season injury crisis – coincidentally the morning after rumours of a house party (pre-COVID, to be fair) – forced him into service. We threw him in at corner-forward, hoping that he might cause a bit of chaos and, to give him credit, he did.
No pugilist could ignore the close attention that he was receiving from the opposition’s delinquent corner-back and soon enough they were sparring while the ball was down the other end of the field. “Use your head!” I shouted, trying to get him to calm down. Unfortunately, he took that advice in a different way and knocked the corner-back clean out. The boxing career didn’t last for much longer either as he showed himself to be fond of a head-butt in the ring too.
Every so often, a GAA team will try something so off the wall that you think, “It just might work,” only for it to turn out even worse than you’d have imagined. For us, that was when a “progressive” manager read about a student in the local grammar school who had won an All-Ireland chess title. He thought that he might be able to bring something different – who among us could have predicted that trying to package football tactics as “gambits” or telling a wing-back to “think like a rook” would be tricky?
Admiration
We’ll finish with Fred Carr, the best football player the club never really had. That was because he excelled in another code of football, carving out a very respectable League of Ireland career, though of course that drew what was at best a grudging admiration from many in the club and his rare appearances for us tended to draw sneering comments rather than appreciation for his art.
This was due to the fact that the art was a bit too close to the foreign game on occasion, like the game where a ball came to him waist-high on the 13m line and he swung his leg to dispatch a perfectly struck volley to the net rather than catching the ball. That day, as well as the opposition and our own fifth columnists, even the referee was on his case, throwing out smart remarks and failing to give any frees.
Even so, we had the game all but won when the ref had to give a late penalty for a blatant foul on someone else. Fred stood up to take it and, as he did so, the man in black said, “I bet you 50 quid you won’t score this, you fancy-dan.”
Fred took one look at the ref, one look at the ball and chipped it over the bar before holding out his hand for the bet to be settled. CL
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