If an extraterrestrial landed in Ireland last Saturday week and strolled down your stairs to find you sitting on the couch sipping a full-bodied beaujolais and watching RTÉ’s All-Ireland final preview programme, Up for the Match, they’d likely have some questions.
Aliens being aliens, you’d expect them to have done a small bit of research before they loaded up their spaceship and travelled billions of light years across a myriad of solar systems and galaxies, but, even so, nothing could prepare them for Des Cahill and Marty Morrissey doing “light entertainment”. It might be enough to send them packing back across the Milky Way, but curiosity alone would keep them here.
“I get it,” they’d say, “you have this national game that’s utterly unique that absolutely everybody is interested in, and tomorrow is its biggest day. Its showcase. It’s a once-a-year extravaganza. So you put on this clown show the night before to keep the kids happy?”
“Yes, my new alien friend, that’s it.”
“Ok. So, where’s the rest of it?”
“What do you mean “the rest of it?”
“The rest of it? Like, an actual preview of the game? An analytical breakdown of both teams? A recap of the year? A history of Gaelic football in both counties? A deepdive into what makes them unique? Where’s the art and the culture and the people and the political context?”
“Aaahhhh,” you’d say, pouring yourself another glass, comfortable now that you can patronise your new friend the same way an RTÉ presenter might patronise a studio guest, “that all gets shoved into a 90-second montage with some Sigur Ros music 90 minutes before the game.”
“But what about between now and then?” the alien would ask, disbelief descending like a meteor shower from Sigma 5.
“Well, in the morning before the big game we’ll start off with some teleshopping. Then, as people are having their breakfast and reading the papers about the match, there’s a show called Lark Rise to Carlingford. It’s a cross between Downton Abbey and Biker Grove. Pure quality. After that, we have an hour of Casualty.”
“Casualty? Surely that’s a show about the emotional fallout from the Big Game you’re so excited about, but seem utterly intent on ignoring until right before throw-in?”
“Jesus, no. Casualty is about a hospital that handles at least one major bus crash a week, and everyone is sleeping with everybody else.”
“So, nothing to do with the game?”
“Nada. Anyway, after that we have the Great Celebrity Bake Off, and then Nationwide, which could in fact be about the counties involved in the final, but won’t be.”
The alien is utterly confused now, and is beginning to feel like you’re taking the piss out of him.
“After the bake-off, we go to Mass somewhere. I think it’s Carrickmacross tomorrow. That’s about an hour, all in, depending on how many ministers of the eucharist are on. Front there we go to a show called The Great Lighthouses of Ireland, which is actually a murder mystery set inside the training camp set inside the Galway Footballers. The title is a metaphor.”
“You’re kidding me!!”
“I am, ya stupid bollix. Nothing got to do with the football at all.”
“Ok, Ok, what time are we at now? How long until throw-in?”
“Ah, it’s only 1pm. Still a couple of hours to go.”
The alien is swigging from the neck of the bottle now as you get up to open another.
“Sister Boniface Mysteries,” you say, apropos of nothing.
“What?”
“Sister Boniface Mysteries. That’s what’s on next. I’m looking here in the RTÉ Guide and it says Sister Boniface investigates a coven of witches when a human sacrifice is discovered in the woods. Are you alright there, chief, you look a little pale.”
The alien is sitting with his head in his hands.
“Let me get this straight,” he says, almost angry, “otherwise they won’t believe me when I tell them.”
“Shoot your shot,” you say, popping the cork on Aldi’s finest.
“You have this day that only happens once a year. It’s fixed in the calendar, so you have 12 months to plan for it. It’s an extravaganza. A celebration of your history and culture and uniqueness. The teams might change, but the reason to celebrate it doesn’t. You could fill the entire weekend with coverage of that history and culture. With “where are they now” dispatches and letters from the diaspora around the world.
“You could show re-runs of classic matches and do a five-hour marathon build-up of the game from multiple locations around the country. You could – and I know I’m talking loco here, human, so forgive my hubris, but you could do proper, patient analysis of how both finalists play so that when something happens in the game, those watching it are fully informed and it doesn’t get lost in the moment. You could do all of that.”
“We could,” you say, enjoying the aliens’ disbelief about something you’d long given up caring about because what it describes encapsulates your entire life experience of All-Ireland final Sundays, “but if we did that, the people of Ireland would never know whether Sister Boniface figured out what was behind the coven of witches in the woods.”
“You’d rather hide away the one special thing that makes you different?”
“Yes.”
Silence descends on the sitting room as the two of you sit watching Des Cahill riding a mechanical bull wearing a cowboy hat and an Armagh jersey.
“Pour me another,” you say to your guest. “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is on after this.”
As you’d expect, but can never fully guarantee, the Olympic Games has thrown up a collection of incredible moments, the likes of which cannot be replicated anywhere else, in any other format. My mother, for example, has unexpectedly become the foremost authority on badminton, a development I never thought possible, especially as she thwarted my own attempts to turn pro as a tennis player when I was sixteen, ranked as I was, number 2 in the small Mayo town I grew up in.
How I wish she offered the same words of encouragement to me then, that she so generously did to Nhat Nguyen as he gracefully bowed out of the Games on Friday morning. “He’ll be back,” she said, knowingly, “he just needs to work on his feet and learn how to better counter his opponents’ hairpin netshot.”
Yes, the Olympics is, well, the Olympics for all of us who never reached the Olympics. As I watched Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy put clear water between themselves and their opponents to claim an emphatic gold, I had to explain the physics of rowing to my son. Face backwards. Pull hard to move forwards. The rather botched attempt at an explanation had the dual effect of confusing my son (and myself), and convincing us both that we could compete at the next Olympics as a father/son team.
So serious were we in our reckoning we even factored in the weight we’d have to gain to compete in the heavyweight sculls. This is what armchair Olympians do. We watch, become experts, and convince ourselves that, with a slight change in diet and a subscription to Jake Humphrey’s High Performance podcast, we could win gold in Los Angeles.
Such daydreaming is where the amateurism should stop, however. The treatment of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif by members of both the press and public on social media was nothing short of disgraceful, and a reminder that these Games have the ability to repulse just as much as inspire. While it might be counterintuitive at the actual Olympics, the Khelif affair illustrates why it’s much better to be right than first in our assumptions. There might be no medals for it, but there is at least humanity.
Want a good laugh? It’s 11 days until the Premier League kicks off, with Fulham visiting the Manchester Reds. What delights will this Klopp-less season bring us? How long will Erik ten Hag hang on to his job? Will Alex Murphy break into the Newcastle team, and announce himself as the next Maldini? Will Evan Ferguson rediscover his joy? By the time the Olympics end, we will all be happy for the next distraction.
The manner of Galway’s loss in the All-Ireland final will no doubt haunt them long into the winter, but, however bad their players may feel, manager Padraic Joyce might surely feel it the hardest. The nature of the loss – conservative, rigid, unimaginative – was the antithesis of his playing style. As we hopefully enter an era of new winners every other year, he should take some solace that his team may get another chance, and if they do, they should trust more in their talent than the process.