The Way of Things

Not the greatest week for Irish sport, was it? The accelerating pointlessness of our international soccer team, the bewildering collapse of the rugby team, and another lopsided, anti-climactic All-Ireland football final.

All we need now is for Padraig Harrington to test positive for cocaine (those post-Open celebrations at Stackstown Golf Club having gotten out of hand) and Aidan O'Brien to be caught in a compromising position with George Washington for the full set.


But while the All-Ireland wasn't the riveting spectacle we always hope for it to be, after a week of mediocrity there was the consolation of savouring the quality of a Kerry side that now begin to look their legendary predecessors directly in the eye.

The day after last year's All-Ireland final I wrote about having reservations about this Kerry team, following their hammering of Mayo. They needed, I felt, a championship-winning campaign that involved a titanic, defining victory over a similarly serious side, probably Tyrone, to ascend to that nebulous state of 'greatness'.


This year feels different. They had tough games; the three victories which preceded yesterday's were by small margins: two pints over Cork in the Munster final, one over Monaghan in the All-Ireland quarter-final and were two better than Dublin in the semi.



But there no longer seems the need for them to have conquered one of the other great teams of the era at their best. The fact that they appear to have outlived Tyrone as Gaelic football's masters might be part of it. But the simple, unequivocal total of Sam Maguires totted up is the main reason. Eventually, you have to stop speculating about the true worth of a team, stop trying to put their success into the context of the time and simply allow the weight of trophy numbers to win the argument.



Along with Kilkenny's hurling championship victory, Kerry's third All-Ireland in four years seems to have engendered a belated appreciation for the merits of the GAA's dynastic powers. After the vogue for the bench-pressing, wife-ignoring, self-flagellating preparation methods as espoused by the Ulster giants early in the decade, there's a definite re-evaluation of the merits of Kilkenny and Kerry's seemingly unforced cultures of success.



Without suggesting for a moment that the twin pillars of the GAA's intercounty temple don't scourge themselves in the gym and in laps of the winter fields, there's a naturalistic quality about their success that doesn't seem to be the result of the concerted efforts of a group of special, determined men, but rather is the involuntary expression of their people's sporting identity.



Both counties have had to ride out sustained periods where their pre-eminence was challenged over the last 15 to 20 years. Sooner or later other counties will come again, and take joy in knocking Kerry and Kilkenny off their perches. But eventually they'll return to where they belong, stronger and better than ever, restoring that feeling of permanence again. That's just the way it is.

Kerry On Winning

Moving on, then, to the major field sports at which we can't suffer international embarassment...

Funny old All-Ireland, this one. Barely more hype and hullabaloo than a decent provincial final. In fact, many have described the feeling ahead of Kerry v Cork as not much more than that of a Munster final, with the location, date and reward being a minor footnote.

As well as the distractions in France and in central Europe, it's the flipside of all the good things the qualifier system has brought us. All the novel pairings, all the hitherto neglected counties having their 15 minutes of fame, the extra fixtures - it's all done wonders for Championship GAA. But when you get a final like this one, it feels like getting an invite to the afters of a wedding: you're more than welcome to come along later, but, you know, it's going to be quite a private ceremony.

Funny, though, I recall much more anticipation for the Tyrone v Armagh final in 2003. Perhaps that was the novelty of the fixture, or the interest in what, at the time, seemed like a frightening new epoch of Ulster dominance. (Remember when RTE sent Tommie Gorman to make a documentary called The Men Behind Maguire shortly after Tyrone won that year. It seemed like Gorman was playing Leni Riefenstahl to Mickey Goebbels and Adolf Kernan at the time).

Leaving aside the likely disappointing viewing figures for Up For The Match tomorrow night, this is still an intriguing final between two very fine sides. I hesitate to tagline it as a battle between the forwards of Kerry and the backs of Cork; both have oodles of quality in the opposing halves, particulary Cork with the return of sharpshooting James Masters.

But why complicate things? Cork will succeed if they dominate the Kerry forward machine. Graham Canty is the type of defender you'd go to war with, and if anyone can subdue Kieran Donaghy, it is he. But the loss of Anthony Lynch hurts. The Gooch loves All-Ireland finals. He just does.

In the Munster final, which Kerry won by two points, Cork enjoyed a spell of dominance when they wrested control of midfield. The Rebels are strong here with Nicholas Murphy and Derek Kavanagh, and Michael Cussen will presumably be brought out again to buttress that area for Cork. They pretty much strangled Meath here in the semi, and Sunday demands a huge game from Darragh O Sé to hold the fort here.

But Kerry are not Meath. They seem to putting together one of those wonderfully timed Sam Maguire runs that they are able to do by second nature. Doing enough against Cork in Munster, Monaghan in the quarter-final, releasing the throttle a little more to pull away from Dublin.

With a bench bursting with impact players, Sam should make that familiar trip again this year.

Spillane The Beans on Kerry's Success

Pat Spillane, talking to Uncle Des on RTE Radio 1's Drivetime Sport on Wednesday evening, spoke about the simplicity of Mick O'Dwyer's approach to managing his great Kerry team.

Never, said Spillane, in all of the hundreds of team-talks before matches and after training sessions, did 'Dwyer' ever as much as mention the opposition. Neither their tactics, nor their star players were given the slightest consideration by the Waterville wizard.

The belief - reinforced without possibility of question by the record books - was that if Kerry went out and played their game, the fact that they were better players in every position would assure victory. That superiority complex - the sense that the identity of the opposition is irrelevant, that they were oblivious to the quivering fifteen they had to play - was the key to that team's success, as it is to any dynasty.

The interview with Spillane was similarly brilliant in its simplicity, by the way. Give the guy a microphone and get him to talk about his part in the greatest team of them all. Spillane's ubiquity in the GAA media might blur for some the clarity and articulacy of his commentary. Many have bemoaned the fact that his role as anchor for The Sunday Game has effectively neutered much of his potency as pundit.

He was, after all, in the vanguard of the 'new wave' of RTE sporting punditry that came along in the 1990s (himself, Brolly, O'Rourke and Loughnane in GAA and Hook and Pope in rugby being the Sex Pistols and the Clash to Dunphy and Giles' groundbreaking New York Dolls), the author of the still-stinging 'puke football' rebuke.

One of the many transfixing moments in the interview concerns, unsurprisingly, the Kerry and Dublin rivalry of the era, which has its latest revival this Sunday. Dublin had won the All-Ireland in 1976 and 1977, enjoying famous victories over the Kingdom each time, the latter season featuring the classic All-Ireland semi-final which has been revisited so often in recent weeks.

Spillane detailed how the tide was turned: "We learned from the defeats of '77 and '76...we sat down and looked at our performance and we felt we weren't putting in as much training as Dublin; they were fitter than us, they were stronger than us. They were more determined than us. We noticed that when Dublin fouled, or when Dublin hit, they hit hard. When Kerry fouled it was a pull on the jersey. We felt they were knocking us around. The only way we could succeed against Dublin was to go toe-to-toe with them; to take them head on.

"The first chance we got to do that was in a game to raise money for Sister Consilio's home for alcoholism in early '78....the game became a bloodbath. But it was the day that Kerry stood up to Dublin. After the game there was broken noses and a lot of rancour. It was a filthy game. I think we won. But it was the turning point; it was our watershed moment, that no longer were we going to be pushed around. Then we got the missing piece in the jigsaw in the 'Bomber' (Eoin Liston, who first appeared for Kerry in that season) and that was it.

Great stuff. Will Sunday be Dublin's turning point?

They Got Game

Isn't Killarney lovely? All the mountains and lakes you could want. Hotels, B & Bs and diddly-aye pubs as far as the eye can see. Enough Arran sweaters to clothe the entire North American continent. Lovely.

Fitzgerald Stadium? Just lovely too. It looks like a scene from one of the miniature snowshakers sold in the souvenir shops on Main Street. Like someone hand-painted a preposterously picturesque mountainy-lakey background onto a picture of a tidy provincial GAA ground in order to flog it to gullible Yanks.

And lovely football too! Of course, with such a setting, it's no wonder Kerry pride themselves on the aesthetically pleasing nature of their football. Perhaps, during a particularly free-flowing attacking move, the players are being subliminally inspired to create something as breathtaking as the MacGillycuddyreeks that occupy their peripheral vision. Certainly you can understand why the ugliness of blanket defence never truly found a home in the Kingdom; it would have been like putting a MacDonald's franchise in the sacristy of the Sistine Chapel.

If Kerry do feel a certain noblesse oblige to demonstrate the finer aspects of a game of which they are the masters, it's a responsibility that sits easily with their players. The purity of Gaelic football as played by Kerrymen emerges through the innateness of their skills. They are a testament to an uncomfortable truth for sporting ecumenists like me: that true mastery of a sport can only result from complete focus on it, without distraction from others.

Not that Kerrymen don't kick a soccer ball now again. And, of course, Kieran Donaghy has achieved the highest honours in Gaelic football only after initially excelling at basketball (and indeed as brought many of the skills of the latter to the former).

But your archetypal Kerry footballer seems to be spiritually in tune with the game in a way that suggests that call-up to the senior team requires one firstly to spend seven years in a Himalayan monastery with an order of Gaelic footballing Shaolin monks.

Colm 'Gooch' Cooper is, of course, the golden child in this particularly exclusive order. Yesterday was another addition to the long list of Gooch masterclasses. His goal was a classic demonstration of this higher level of understanding of the game that someone like Gooch possesses. His execution is almost always perfect, but the key to a piece of Gooch virtuosity comes in the milliseconds before the magic. The guy is quick with his hands and feet, yes, but also, more importantly, with his mind.

Gooch's footballing brain operates at a speed that goes beyond simple, quantifiable thought or decision-making processes. What he does is instinctive, like the way great songwriters often say that they feel as if they are simply plucking melodies from the air around them, so in tune with their muse are they.

Perhaps Gooch is an exemplar of what Malcolm Gladwell (the journalist and author of The Tipping Point) called "rapid cognition" in his follow-up book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, basically the idea that one's initial, instinctive judgement of a situation is generally the correct one. Gladwell believes that those who are successful can make snap judgements based on the correct evidence, discarding useless or irrelevant factors.

It was there in the pirouette for his goal; in the slide-rule foot-pass along the ground to Mike Frank Russell in the second half; in that moment in the first half when the massed Cork defence froze in front of his serene presence, and he unlocked them with a simple handpass that had been hithero invisible to any normal observer.

Gooch is only the finest exponent of this instinctive 'feel' for the game, but it's everywhere in the best Kerry footballers; in the way on Mark and Tomás ó Sé solo the ball as if it was just a normal part of running, or the way Darragh ó Sé fields, or Mike Frank shapes to shoot.

Lovely stuff.

Jack and the Green Talk

The threat to his life might not be as serious, and it may not have caused quite such a global incident, but in the context of the past week it has seemed that Keys to the Kingdom, Jack O'Connor's account of his Kerry football managership was the GAA's very own Satanic Verses.

While the prophets of the county's glory years under Mick O'Dwyer got the sacrilegious treatment from a bitter O'Connor, it was the Ayatollahs of Croke Park who cried "fatwa" when the manager's claims in Keys to the Kingdom to have been "reimbursed" for lost earnings during the 2006 season were publicised.

The irony of this most sizzling of GAA hot potatoes - the illicit payment of managers - re-emerging in relation to Kerry is that the Kingdom are generally noted for not being involved in such naughtiness. The honour of managing football's premier franchise has always been considered reward enough, and the issue of payment to managers is more often associated with clubs and counties whose deep hunger for success, and even deeper pockets, lead them to seek the services of managerial mercenaries outwith their own borders.

O'Connor and Sean Walsh, the county board chairman, presented a united front on local Kerry radio yesterday, both pointing out that the reimbursement O'Connor received in return for taking half days from his teaching job came in the form of a family holiday offered at the end of the season. If so, and the honour of Kingdom football has been impugned unfairly, then it was at least a strange choice of words by O'Connor, and peculiar not to refer directly to the holiday being the compensation.

The county board's indignant response to any innuendo over illegal payments can, according to Walsh, be backed up by the detail of their accounts. Cynics will remember that the GAA's last effort to turn up hard evidence on such payments foundered, there being few county boards including the line "Manager's Bumper Salary" in their profit and loss accounts. These payments are instead often classified as travel, accomodation and food expenses, which GAA boards are allowed to pay.

The word 'hypocrisy' is dusted down whenever this issues arises, and yesterday Dessie Farrell, chief executive of the GPA, was the one calling for the discrepancy between the association's saintly stance and the clandestine reality to be redressed. "We all know that many managers at the top level, and even at club level, are being paid. So let's eradicate the hypocrisy, make allowances for what's happening and try and control it in an acceptable way. Managers have to devote so much time, effort and dedication that it has now gone to a professional level," said Farrell.

The preservation of the 'amateur ethos' is such a cornerstone of the GAA philosophy that the tendency of Croke Park to put its fingers in its ears and go "la-la-la" whenever whispers of the existence of such payments become audible is understandable. Denial is an easier option than initiating change that would fundamentally redefine what the organisation reprensents, and how it likes to perceive itself.

By establishing the principal that a person should get financial reward for participating in the association's activities, the GAA would undoubtedly provide the pathway to formal professionalism not just in the managerial ranks, but soon too amongst the elite players (who are, by the way, subject to plenty rumours of "reimbursement" themselves currently).

However, by persisting with the pretence of the GAA's amateur purity, the association are beginning to resemble the propagandists of a failing communist state, broadcasting images of rosy-cheeked youths building the socialist utopia, and ignoring the black market reality on the ground.

Initially, when news of O'Connor's statement about "reimbursement" emerged, it seemed as if the former Kerry boss was about to become a high profile agent of a campaign to take the practice of payments to managers above ground. Despite backing down on the issue, the suggestion that even the Kerry manager, probably the most prestigious job in Gaelic football, might be a part of this secret economy will surely shake the GAA's steadfastness on the matter.

Salman Rushdie might yet have to advise O'Connor of some suitable hiding places.

Paidi's Way Or The Highway

Paidi O’Se will be back prowling the touchlines of inter-county football fields after a year’s hiatus, having been appointed as the new Clare senior football manager. With O’Se and Ger Loughnane both donning Bainisteoir bibs anew for next year, we will perhaps look back on 2005 in twelve months time as an gentle, prelapsarian era, when kindly souls like Mickey Moran and John Morrison and perfect gentlemen like John Allen and Jack O’Connor dominated the GAA landscape, and the worst vibes going were the odd scowl from Billy Morgan or patrician glare from Brian Cody.

Paidi was on the news last night, intercepted on his way to Clare for his coronation by the intrepid Marty Morrissey. Bottled up in a smart-cut suit, he still bubbled with that spiky charisma that generally spills into offence or upset of some sort before too long.

Seeing his cheeky, feline features, my dear lady-friend recoiled: “Oooh, I hate him! Look at him!” she spat forth. I was surprised at the strength of this opinion, given her well-articulated lack of interest in any pursuits of the field. “He looks like he’s been drinking,” quoth she, pointing at his admittedly reddened visage.

“He’s just…wild!”, she added, and I understood that this was not the quality of wildness which she might once have ascribed to a River Phoenix or an Ethan Hawke in her frisky, bobby-soxing past, but rather a disapproving distaste for one who was, quite clearly, an enemy of decorum.

I don’t have such a strong opinion on O’Sé myself. Positive, I’d say, in the sense that for one who writes about things, the presence in the field of a character like Paidi is a useful one. Positive too, in the sense that for one who watches such things, the presence in the vista of a character like Paidi is an entertaining one. But I understand, too, why he is not universally loved.

Two Paidi stories.

I quote the following from the Newry Democrat of Tuesday March 9, 2004:

The Newry and Mourne Annual Sports Awards were held last Thursday night, but events did not go to plan when the guest speaker, Paidi O Se, chose to talk about political rather than sporting issues.

The awards were hosted by Newry and Mourne District Council and sponsored by the Newry Democrat and the First Trust Bank. The Chief Executive of the Newry Democrat, commenting after the ceremony said: “As part of our contribution to the evening we agreed to engage a guest speaker. We were delighted when we engaged Paidi O'Se, a Kerry ‘great’ and their former football manager, to speak at the awards.

"We looked forward to being regaled with stories of the glory years of Kerry football and perhaps some stories about the rivalry between the Munster and Ulster Counties on the football field.

"This was not to be the case and Mr O’Se started his speech by saying that while in New York a number of weeks ago he was asked if soccer and rugby should be played at Croke Park, he replied: “Fine, under one condition, that it is under a 32 county All Ireland.”

Both nationalist and unionist politicians and local business leaders attended the awards ceremony. Mr O’Se proceeded to say that he was delighted there were no more “foreigner people”, referring to the British army, checking at the border any more. A DUP councillor from the Banbridge area left the ceremony at this point.

“We were disappointed that Mr O'Se strayed from the subject of sport and into the area of politics. We had no advance notice of what was to be said by Mr O'Se and we deeply regret the politicalisation of the sports stars awards,” said Mr Brennan (the Chief Executive of the Newry Democrat".

Speaking from his pub in Ventry, Co Kerry, Mr O’Se said he regretted if his remarks had caused any difficulties for anyone.'

I recall my only close-up experience of Paidi. It was about a year ago, in the upstairs bar of Kehoes on South Anne St. in Dublin. It must have been shortly after the end of his Westmeath reign, a Saturday night, the pub packed. I glanced across the bar and saw Paidi.

Sitting on a stool, facing the bar, arms folded, red face screwed up in that expression that lurks somewhere on the flipside of amusement and pain; Tomas O’Flahartha (his erstwhile Westmeath assistant and successor in the position) standing at his shoulder, leaning down to speak into his ear; Paidi reacting only in nods or tilts of the head; the rest of his party behind him, momentarily cut-off from any contact – save through the intermediary of Factotum O’Flatharta) or even the courtesy of conventional social body language.

Paidi O’Sé sat in the upstairs bar of Kehoes in Dublin and had his pint, the way he wanted it, like he was sitting at his own counter down in Ventry. He was so convincing, that for a moment I thought I was too.

The good folk of the Newry and Mourne District Council know that Paidi does things his way.

The footballers of Clare will, I expect, be aware of that fact too, quite soon.