The subtle magic of the GAA has romanced me from the sidelines

As anybody who knows me will tell you, only a couple of small things stood in the way of my career as a big GAA football star.

A stunning lack of ability and skill was probably the main wrinkle, although not being immediately able to tell the difference between left and right could have been a tiny bit problematic too. There was also an overriding desire to keep my hands clean at all times, and a strong preference for stepping out of the way of a moving football instead of trying (and failing) to catch it. I won’t go into a slight weirdness about physical contact with strangers and well, a dislike of moving too quickly.

Adding it all together, it felt at an early age that my best position in the sport was as a supporter. In the 1980s and 1990s, this mostly involved following the then perennially hopeful game played by Tyrone, my home county. I honed my attachment in visits to exciting locations such as Omagh, Derry and Armagh and, if we were lucky, Clones, the romantic cradle of Ulster football.

Close your eyes and try to imagine it or, more specifically, to smell it. The glorious scent of cheap burgers mixed in with vast open-air beer consumption on snaking Monaghan streets, trampled summer grass and thousands of adrenalin-filled humans whose skin, unburdened by sun screen, is burning before your eyes. Even if you left before the game started, you’d have felt something in the ugly-beautiful mess of it all, a something that might just start to follow you around.

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It’ll appear without warning in your kitchen when your child half-floats, half-dances through the door from summer camp because the local GAA god dropped in to sign about 300 sweaty shirts and patiently told everybody present what great kids they were while posing for grinning photos with each one.

Or when the local club organises car parking and guards of honour for the enormous wakes and funerals that still reign supreme outside the capital, without ever being asked to do so.

This stuff that comes on top of community mental health awareness courses and Irish-language lessons for beginners, and youth leadership seminars and charity cycles, rapidly adds up to a quiet but very powerful whole.

My team didn’t do that well this year, but we did manage to supply a referee for one of the men’s senior football semi-finals. Sean Hurson seemed to me to do a good job, but due to the various deficiencies outlined above, I may not always be 100 per cent on top of the rules.

What I do know however, is that he sprinkles a potent drop of unvarnished emotion on to each game he oversees via the coin he uses for the toss at the start. It is a special one, given to him by one of his regular umpires just before he died too young in 2019. This umpire, a cousin of mine, told Hurson that every time the coin was used by him as a referee, he would be there watching down on proceedings. What a lovely, resonant thing for all involved.

I was sharing this story of the pared-down best of GAA with a Derry friend last week and, like almost everybody even peripherally involved with the whole business, she immediately had her own sentiment-packed tale to share.

Her much-loved aunt had recently died, two days before the men’s Derry Minor Football Team played their All-Ireland Final against Monaghan. Her aunt was the granny of one of the Derry players and had, along with her huge family, been as embedded in local GAA as it’s possible to be. Two weeks before she died, she presented her grandson with a simple red and white scarf she had knitted by hand, in the way a proud granny might do. This grandson and his team went on to win, and he was pictured wearing the scarf around his neck as he celebrated the victory. She was there in spirit, sharing in all the bittersweet joy he must have been feeling.

A more subtle version of this GAA magic also found me a week or so ago listening to an Ocean FM podcast of a retrospective interview with Mickey Kearins, the biggest football star ever produced in Sligo, who is now aged 80. He was a contemporary of my Sligo Mammy, who would persist to this day in referring to him as “Micheal”, and whose father was warmly mentioned in the podcast in connection with Kearins’s entry into his cattle-dealing career. It was odd to hear the name of a grandfather who died before I was born, but special too, in the gentlest kind of way. It was another soft bolt of personal GAA significance mixed up with nostalgia, and nobody was even close to a field of play, which, as already outlined, was probably best in my case.

On the occasions where I do find myself standing on sidelines these days, it’s usually to watch one of my children play. I still feel silent terror if a dead ball lands anywhere near me – how could I possibly be expected to pick up that thing and throw it back? Or would this be a kicking situation? Even worse. By now, somebody else will have entered the fray and expertly delivered it back to its owner, wondering why that strange staring lady on the edge of the pitch looks so very afraid. Well, now they know.