“Janey Mac,” said Paul Flynn at the end of Saturday’s league meeting between Armagh and Dublin at the Athletic Grounds, and hats off to the fella, that’s pretty much the only way you could have summed up what we had just witnessed. A heap of chaos, a dollop of madness, a pile of scores, and a contest divided in to two thirds and one. It was almost like watching hurling.
“What a game,” said Paul on RTÉ, “that today is what you want to see, it was so utterly engaging.” A tweak or two to the new rules and, he reckoned, we’d be laughin’.
Mind you, the folk who aren’t laughing this weather are those tasked with listing the scores in games. Spare a thought for them. Take for example Con O’Callaghan’s haul on Saturday – it read: ‘1f, 1f 2p, 1 2p.’ Those still traumatised by trigonometry, unfathomable formulae and the like in their school days will be haunted all over again.
There were 19 minutes and 37 seconds on the clock by the time O’Callaghan scored Dublin’s first point, Armagh having helped themselves to 1-09 by then. “They’ve got a wee foothold in the game,” said our co-commentator Enda McGinley, the emphasis on wee, but the gap was 12 points again at half-time. Ger Canning was a wee bit shocked himself. “Who could believe it,” he asked.
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Dublin were, said Peter Canavan, having an absolute ‘mare with their kick-outs, the bulk of them falling in to hands of, well, an orange hue. “They’ve only won three out of 14,” he reminded us. “Unbelievable,” said Joanne Cantwell, while Paul inserted his face in his hands.
But Peter had a daft notion that the game wasn’t done and dusted yet. “In every game that Armagh have played, they’ve taken the foot off the pedal in the second half,” he said. “And I can see Dublin improving – they have to improve, they couldn’t be any worse.”
It was like the fella was armed with a crystal ball. In the space of 12 second-half minutes, Dublin put their foot on the pedal and scored 1-8 without reply, and we had ourselves a game. A mad one. Those two-pointers, which have turned lost causes in to retrievable deficits, might just be the eighth wonder of the world. (Ninth if you’re going all Angkor Wat on us. Thank you Google).
Adding to the madness was the goalies being penalised for being tardy with their kick-outs, resulting in easy-peasy frees that had smoke emanating from Armagh manager Kieran McGeeney’s ears come full-time, if though his side prevailed.
Peter, who just happens to be a member of the Football Review Committee, conceded that 20 seconds might be a wee bit short for a goalie to dispense with the ball, so that’s a tweak we might see tweaked.
Armagh ‘keeper Ethan Rafferty would welcome that, he told RTÉ, but otherwise he didn’t see “a whole pile wrong” with the goalie’s life last season, being somewhat opposed to restrictions on their freedom to roam, with some stopping just short of suggesting they should be handcuffed to their posts. “I could be out of a job,” he said.
So far, though? So good. In fact, the only more absorbing contest over the weekend was that of Tommy Tiernan v Chris Eubank.
“What’s remarkable about you?” Tommy asked the former boxing world champion. “What’s remarkable about Chris Eubank?” asked Chris Eubank, who seemed a bit offended by the question. “What is remarkable about Chris Eubank is that the Chris Eubank you are speaking to now gives credit to everything he has been able to achieve to the spirit that lives within. That is what is remarkable about me. I take every thought captive and make it obedient to the spirit. The spirit is the king. I want to emit this vibration.”
Tommy’s face, a bit like those of the viewers, said ‘huh?’ But when Chris Eubank stopped being pantomime Chris Eubank, he gave a moving account of the impact of his 1991 fight against Michael Watson, which left Watson in a coma and “still disabled today”. “I hurt him,” he said, waving off Tommy’s insistence that he couldn’t be blamed. Watson’s life has been one long struggle since, you suspected Eubank’s has been too, despite all the bombast.
