GAA moustaches and the good old days

GAA moustaches and the good old days


Daniel Carey

BEFORE the Tyrone footballers went beard-mad last year, it seemed we had seen the end of facial hair in the GAA. Liam Horan devotes one track on his hilarious CD ‘The Adventures of Championship Man & Other Cruciate Stories’ to the issue, and asks the question: when was the last time you saw a player with a moustashe?
As a baby cries in the background, Horan muses that Offaly hurler Aidan Fogarty may have actually been born with a moustache, it looked so right on him.
By contrast, the soup strainer sported by Galway’s Joe Connolly always looked incongruous – ‘a sort of National League tash, not something to be let out in the championship’.
The Ballinrobe man’s humorous take on GAA life has been a feature of the last two summers on RTÉ Radio’s Drivetime Sport, and it’s not just the over-zealous use of the razor than concerns him. Much of the subject matter on this ‘best of’ album has a nostalgic tinge to it.
Among the topics for discussion is the seven-a-side tournament, where the best teams ‘contemplated running only as a last resort’, and whose only real foe was sunburn. “This,” Horan notes, “they averted with the deployment of a handkerchief on the head,” itself the subject of another radio essay in the collection.
Some other features of the GAA in past times are remembered with less affection. But, Horan notes, the third-man tackle (off-the-ball fouling, to the non-aficionado) was ‘the ultimate organ of democracy … it kept more men playing the game than all the Schools of Excellence’. Players without an ounce of skill were picked on the off-chance that they might ‘take out some good lad’ with a third-man tackle – the hope that the good lad would be on the other team went unspoken. Their training consisted of repeatedly ‘shouldering a stout oak tree’ – either trunk or man would eventually give way.
Funny sound effects and Horan’s ear for dialogue offer some of the biggest laughs. The pitch invasion – a once-common occurrence at football matches – was led by fans who resembled ‘deranged extras from Braveheart’, and bringing up the rear were people who had to put their false teeth in jars before they could join the action. “Hold on lads, the missus’ll kill me if I get these things broke,” is one of the more memorable reasons for being late to a fight.
But some of these phenomena of yesteryear may be on the way back. Horan gives a vivid picture of what he calls the great man to get a goal – ‘big, balding, and shipping some extra poundage’. Noting that ‘until about 1995, it was not unusual for some clubs to field three great men get a goal’, the freelance journalist laments that the Celtic Tiger rendered him extinct. Yet with the economic downturn, perhaps a revival is on the cards. “Some good might come out of this recession thing yet, you know,” he concludes.

 ‘The Adventures of Championship Man & Other Cruciate Stories’ is available on www.championshipman.com