DUBLIN LETTER
DANIEL CAREY
IT was approaching nine o’clock when a man with no visible signs of county affiliation spotted a fella in a Mayo jersey in the bathroom of Jury’s Croke Park. “Did Mayo win?” he asked. “Ah, they won by a point,” the guy in green and red replied. If only.
A day that ended with that delusion had begun for many of us in a downpour. Our little group was making its way down Parnell Street (on foot, I might add) when a monsoon of biblical proportions arrived. By the time we reached Frederick Street, a sofa which had been left outside an odds-and-ends shop to attract passers-by had taken the brunt of the torrential rain. We were on Dorset Street (and we, suspected, halfway to hell) when the cloudburst suddenly ceased. God had suddenly remembered to turn off the taps, and the short skirt being worn by one of our number didn’t look like an act of wanton hubris anymore.
This wasn’t a treble-header that got pulses racing. Less than 28,000 people paid into Croke Park, and there wasn’t even that number in the ground at any one point. As Mayo and Tyrone fans headed for Jones’s Road, Antrim supporters began to drift out, having enjoyed a rare piece of footballing silverware in the day’s first game. One man looked at the result, recalled how the summer had begun for the defeated Wicklow side, and wondered: “Does that mean Kildare wouldn’t have won the Tommy Murphy Cup if they’d entered it?” After the Lilywhites beat Fermanagh on Sunday, he added the killer punchline by text message: “The Tommy Murphy Cup – harder to win than Sam?” Er, perhaps not.
In the hostelries in the vicinity of GAA HQ, normally thronged on match days, ordering a drink was straightforward. On big occasions hundreds make do with pints outside, but on Saturday, just three people – all smokers – huddled outside The Auld Triangle. A fruit salad vendor had abandoned his post in the deluge, and outside Hanley’s Newsagents (the one in Drumcondra, not Castlebar), staff were tipping the chairs on their sides to get rid of surface water.
A big shout went up from inside the ground as we neared the gates of Clonliffe College. Maybe Down’s Dan Gordon had produced the ‘straight red car’ (sic) which, according to a GAA statement, he had been shown in the round two qualifier against Laois. The Mourne men’s meeting with Wexford wasn’t shaping up to be a classic. One man in the press box was so bored by the fare on offer that he spent the second half watching archive footage of the Dalai Lama on CNN instead. The Mayo-Tyrone game seemed to interest him more, though at least one individual was ready to draw parallels between the sorry histories of Mayo and Tibet by the time it was over.
The Dalai Lama may be a holy man, but to the best of my knowledge, he’s never mastered the art of bi-location – unlike Mickey Harte. The Tyrone manager’s post-match interview was still being broadcast by RTÉ when he appeared at the door of the new media room – unseen by many of the journalists, who were gathered around the speakers to record what he had said to the national broadcaster.
John O’Mahony’s appearance before the press was, it goes without saying, a much more muted affair. He was in the middle of answering whether he intended to see our his third year as manager when an almighty pop-pop-popping began. The noise was, it later transpired, the result of a mobile phone-cum-tape recorded interfering with the speaker system, but from our vantage point, it sounded like the hail shower from hell. “Maybe that’s telling us something, is it?” the Mayo manager mused. Our bid for Gael Force is over for one more year.
