ONE summer Sunday when I was a small boy, my big brother took me to my first hurling match. The game was played in Wexford Park between two local teams. I was of course fascinated by the spectacle: the weatherbeaten men, mostly farmers, in their unaccustomed Sunday suits and white shirts, the women - not many, in those days - looking faintly wild eyed from the effect of so much free floating testosterone. There were orange sellers - oranges were still something of a luxury in those days - and vendors of rosettes and paper hats in team colours. A hysterical dog kept running on to the pitch, to the cheers of the crowd. The players appeared, looking stern and purposeful, and began to bang practice balls about so the pitch soon came to resemble a madly active electron chamber.
The game started, and almost immediately a fight broke out between two of the players. They were separated, and the referee delivered a warning, shaking his finger like an angry parent. Play resumed, but I kept a close and hopeful eye on the two combatants; sure enough, after a little while they were at it again, bumping each other with their expanded chests and walking backwards and forwards in a tight little scrum all of their own. Then fists began to fly, hurley sticks suddenly took on the aspect of tomahawks, and at once the game was transformed into a faction fight, with the teams going at each other like squads of kernes and even the odd onlooker, in an irresistible excess of enthusiasm, rushing out from the sidelines to join the battle.
I, of course, with a child's delight in the spectacle of blood and prone bodies, thought all this was wonderful fun, better than the pictures, for the gore was real and the punches instructively ragged, so unlike the obviously ersatz screen variety. I remember with particular vividness watching, at half time, one of the players holding his head under a running tap to wash the blood from a gaping wound in his scalp. "Is it always like this?" I asked my brother, and was disappointed with his answer. The next match he took me to was boringly staid and sportsmanlike. My interest in hurling waned.
Now, more than 40 years later, and a great many sliotars gone over the bar, here I was again, again with my big brother, on another sunny summer Sunday afternoon, making my, way through the crowds, the fruit vendors and the sharp looking fellows selling team colours, this time to see the All Ireland Hurling Semi Finals, between Limerick and Antrim, and Wexford and Galway. It was 28 years since Wexford had won an All Ireland. My fellowcountymen were in a state of some excitement.
I had been to Croke Park when my own sons were small, to watch football matches those were the great days of The Dubs but I had not until now seen the new Cusack Stand, a strangely delicate, ethereal structure, vast and glimmering in the August sunlight. There were more than 60,000 people in the stadium, all of them, it seemed, in good humour. I brooded on the strange fact that a people as prone to violence as the Irish are should be able to gather. in such vast numbers without even an insult being exchanged between the opposing supporters. Obviously, this was going to be a far cry from that memorable Sunday so long ago in Wexford Park.
The first match was between Limerick and Antrim. Even I with my unpractised eye could see from the start Antrim was doomed. The Northerners put up a brave fight (how quickly one slips into the lingo!), but to no avail. I sought to divert myself during the longeuers by speculating on the professions of the players. Lots of farmers, as usual, but the odd Mediterranean tan and £25 haircut attested to the encroachment of the urban middle class into these essentially peasant games. One of the Antrim team had flowing ringlets reaching to his shoulder blades - a long haired hurler! What next!
Half time. The Artane Boys' Band. Four junior league teams come out to play mini matches on the two halves of the pitch. "Uhoh," says a voice, there come the Munchkins." The band marches off, the junior leaguers scurry back to Oz, and poor Ant rim come out to take their medicine like men. There is a skirmish in the goalmouth, a forward gets a clear shot, but the goalie makes a seemingly impossible save. Afterwards the forward trots back and gives the goalie a quick congratulatory handshake. How moving, these small, unexpected decencies. The final score is 1-17 to 13. Not a rout. The Antrim men straggle off, bowed but unbloodied.
As Tom Humphries remarks in Green Fields, his recent, very fine book on Gaelic games, Ireland was divided into 32 parts for the convenience of an English bureaucracy, yet Irish people have an extraordinary emotional attachment to their native county. Natural, I suppose, for a colonised people to invest their allegiance in place, and the smaller the unit, the better county, townland, home and hearth. Within minutes of the opening whistle, Wexford scores. The reaction from Wexford supporters is loud, of course, but there is also a kind of dreaminess to it, a druggy euphoria, so that the cheers have something of the quality of a great, collective sigh of bliss. We're going to win! Galway scores too, but there seem to be fewer of their supporters.
I am struck again by the speed of this game. The action sweeps from one goal mouth to the other in a matter of seconds. Many points are scored points seem a bit too easy, I secretly think. In the entire match, only five goals are scored, and of those, the winners get only two. A butterfly wanders down into the stadium - no frantic dogs here - and staggers out again; what can the poor, frail creature have made of all this noise, this struggle? Thistledown in the air, too; autumn is not very far off.
Half time. Another skirt from the Artane Boys, another scurry of Munchkins. lee creams. Bottles of what in Wexford we used to call "minerals". Here come the teams again. Galway looking very determined, a bad sign for them, surely. More points; a Galway goal, an anguished cry from the Wexford supporters, as if at the death of Agamemnon. A confused tussle begins as six or seven players scramble to capture the ball, and as they mill, there is one of those strange, tense silences that fall at intervals in even the most exciting of matches. Behind me, a ruddy faced man in a Persil white shirt and broad braces growls in deep disgust, "ah, pickitupanhitdefukkenting!"
Suddenly, it is, as they say, "Ball over". Wexford has won, 2-13 to 3-7. Tomorrow it will all happen all over again the crowds, the colours, the touts. the band, the cheers, the stylised battle for supremacy, hatchets beaten into burley sticks. As Philip Larkin said in an entirely different context, let it always be there.