Some Connacht final thoughts from days of yore

Some final thoughts

Days like Sunday bring back memories of ‘The Ban’ and painted faces

Willie McHugh

SLIGO’S arrival on the Connacht final stage in in the monochrome days of 1971 heralded the first great change of the GAA. Among their line-up were David Pugh and the late Gerry Mitchell, two League of Ireland soccer players who were equally adept at playing Gaelic football in Markievicz Park or soccer in The Showgrounds.
Both venues were hardly the length of a Barnes Murphy clearance apart, but in the Ireland of the time, they were deemed sporting worlds away. A boundary of the soul most members of the Gaelic Athletic Association never dared crossing.
And certainly not until Easter Sunday 1971, when delegates attending the GAA Congress in Belfast voted to abolish Rule 27. Or ‘The Ban’, as the ruling prohibiting GAA members playing or attending so-called ‘foreign games’ (including soccer, rugby, hockey or any social functions aligned to other associations) was commonly referred to.
No transgressor was above sanction.
President of Ireland Douglas Hyde was expelled from the organisation in 1938 for attending an international soccer match. Waterford All-Ireland winning hurler Tom Cheasty received a six-month ban in 1963 when he went to a dance organised by a soccer club.
But Ireland was already pulling back the cobwebbed drapes of darkness, and Congress weren’t a day before time in eventually seeing sense.
Maybe that’s why the drawn and replayed Connacht finals played in MacHale Park in 1971 between Sligo and Galway attracted full houses on both days. Even though they were on the Sligo team on merit, the presence of Pugh and Mitchell also signified Renaissance Ireland hammering the final nail in the coffin of a draconian era.
The attendance swelled more for the replay, even though it poured rain incessantly from early morning. The sodden and long-faced ice-cream vendors were left with a far greater stock of melting lukey-lukeys and a surplus of free spoons.
Rasher sandwiches turned into mush on opening and nobody shouted “Take down your bloody umbrella, will ya, or we’ll see nothing!”
The rain served as a precursor for the advent of face-painting. Sligo supporters looked like extras in a black and white minstrel show. A maroon tinting streaked down Galway faces.
The workings of the elements faded ruination into white Sunday shirts as dye streamed from crepe paper hats.
And despite previous concerns voiced among the last of the purists, David Pugh didn’t head the ball to the Galway net from a Gerry Mitchell cross. Disappointing too, because it’s probably a happening most supporters hoped against hope for. Sligo lost by a point in a high-scoring classic.BUT old Father Time keeps things ticking along, and Sligo were back again in 1975 on the west’s biggest milestone day when they played Mayo in the Connacht final replay in Castlebar.
Sledging was what sledging always was until a clique recently plagiarised the term to describe verbal and uncomplimentary exchanges between players. And there was plenty of sledging (and mouthing too) as Mayo and Sligo players thundered into each other.
So much so that Father Leo Morahan pleaded to both sides over the public address at half-time to play football instead. Never was a padre’s Sunday pleading heeded less. Sligo won a match more noted for its physical nature rather than any display of footballing skills.
More was expected of Mayo in 1975. Down south, Kerry manager Mick O’Dwyer was leading his young guns out of Munster in search of All-Ireland glory. O’Dwyer later remarked that the road opened a bit wider for them when word reached him that Mayo were out of the equation.
It’s why all this nonsensical and premature talk of ‘the strive for five’ only serves as an indication of how short our selective memory is. We take winning Connacht finals almost for granted now. There’s a tad of foolish arrogance to the way we sometimes treat the occasion. We see it as only a matter of turning up.
But it wasn’t always so. In a recent Mayo News football podcast recorded in Jack Gibbons’s Bar in Shrule, one of Mayo’s best supporters, Johnny Hennelly from Rostaff, spoke passionately about what winning a Connacht title stands for.
“When I hear Mayo people giving out about the present team, remind them of the terrible years we went through between 1969 and 1981 when this county couldn’t win a Connacht title. And we shouldn’t forget the fact too quickly either,” Hennelly said.
Mayo’s 1981 victory over Sligo ended a barren spell almost beyond present-day fathoming.  And more’s the pity both sides aren’t returning to Castlebar on Sunday for the next instalment. Common sense should have prevailed.  
But regardless of the venue, it’s still a Connacht final, and one of the landmark days the year’s passing chimes loudest on. And only death itself will ban us from attending it. It’s not just part of what we are.
It’s everything we are.