In today’s Hospital Pass, the strange road trips of a GAA summer, and effigies of referees in “Up Meath” hats in Clane.
We know the so-called back-door system has its problems. It annoys the hell out of the provincial champions by making them wait for weeks and weeks before the quarter-finals and giving second chances to everyone else. It’s predicated on the numerical inequalities of the provinces. It means we have to watch Monaghan at least twice every year.
Still, it’s at this time of year that the GAA really makes us sit up, take notice and rub our hands together like slightly eccentric old men in flat caps and soiled suits. Sunday night’s qualifiers draw threw up a handful of games that we never thought we’d see (as well as one, London v Waterford, that we never really wanted to).
The standard of fare in the early rounds of the qualifiers might be low-grade for the most part, but for a few weekends every summer we’re transported to a new Ireland where our summer Sundays aren’t dictated by arbitrary provincial boundaries.
This is one giant leap away from the norm in GAA. We must consider questions like, how will Tyrone deny all human instinct and enjoy themselves in Longford on a Saturday night? And when would a Carlow Gael of peaceful disposition ever before have had the need to visit Belfast?
Embattled Lilywhites
The fall-out from Sunday’s Leinster semi-final debacle at Croke Park continued today with a life-size doll of a referee in an “Up Meath” hat reportedly burned in a Super Valu car-park in Clane.
At this stage the Lilywhites are used to being hard done by in Croker. Last August, Benny Coulter had time to build a nest in the small square and lay four eggs before clucking his way onto a high ball for the winning goal. (Okay, it was after about ten minutes, but don’t let anyone tell you it wasn’t the winning goal.)
On a red-hot day at HQ yesterday, with a swing of his right and a swing of his left Eamonn Callaghan scrubbed out Dublin’s lead in the space of 60 seconds, and the stage was set for one of those draws that stifles the cheers in everyone’s throats.
But Cormac Reilly, the referee from the teeny weeny little St Mary’s club in the north-east of Co Meath, was having none of it. By hook or by crook, he wasn’t going to make this afternoon an anti-climactic one for everyone. So he invented a phantom free, gave an O’Neill’s football 25 yards from goal to the most accurate footballer in the country and caused wild wailing and gnashing of teeth not only in Kildare but, much more importantly, in the GAA’s finance department.
Which brought another question to our minds: short of silently suspending Reilly from all GAA activity until 2031, how will the top brass be able to fill that €1.25m-sized hole in the Association’s end-of-year accounts?
[Main picture: Belfast, via bea y fredi/Flickr]
