James Fitzgerald: This is the time of year when lovers of cricket in this part of the world begin to feel that familiar and bitter pang for summer that only a miserable January afternoon can bring. Forgotten are all those rain-affected draws or washed-out matches of last season; instead one remembers the sun-weathered faces, the aroma of freshly cut grass, the camaraderie of team-mates and the promise of endless summer.
It is also the time of year when cricket enthusiasts, denied of playing or watching their favourite sport, engage in their second favourite pastime, reading about it. Just published by Liskeveen Books is perhaps one of the most esoteric but nonetheless important books of the past year. Foreign and Fantastic Field Sports - Cricket in County Tipperary, by Patrick Bracken, challenges all lovers of sport in that part of Ireland and further afield to recognise a long forgotten but hugely influential part of their social and sporting culture.
In this impressive and academic study, Bracken has revealed that in 1876, when Tipp cricket was at its peak, there were at least 43 teams active in the county, making it the most popular team sport at that time in a part of the world that people would have you believe has been a hotbed of hurling since the time of Cú Chulainn. But in those days, it seems, boys and men, from town or country, from big house or lowly hovel, would rather wield the willow than the ash. According to Bracken, in 1850 there were more cricket clubs in Co Tipperary than in the whole of Ulster and in total he has identified some 260 cricket teams that played the game there since its introduction in 1834. The sport was prevalent all over the county but chiefly in and around Clonmel, Cahir, Cashel, Tipperary town, Nenagh, Thurles and Roscrea. It is interesting to note that long before the village of Toomevara, in north Tipperary, was dominating the world of club hurling, it boasted four cricket clubs. These days, Ballyeighan CC, who play at the foot of Knockshegowna Hill, and Clonmel CC are the last remaining clubs still active in the Premier County.
"Cricket [ in Tipperary] was widely played by Catholic and Protestant; landlord and tenant; clergyman and policeman; soldier and merchant," writes Bracken.
And it is not just Tipperary that was fascinated by cricket at that time. The game was widespread throughout Dublin - especially in Fingal - Cork, Kilkenny, Carlow and most other parts of Ireland that enjoyed or endured the presence of garrison or ascendant Protestant from across the Irish Sea.
But the day of cricket in rural Ireland was not to last long into the 20th century. Archbishop Thomas W. Croke and others in the GAA saw to that. The book's title is a quotation from a letter that the Archbishop of Cashel wrote to Michael Cusack in 1884 when asked to be a patron of the fledgling association.
"We have got such foreign and fantastic field sports as lawn tennis, polo, croquet, cricket and the like - very excellent, I believe, and health-giving exercises in their way, still not racy of the soil, but rather alien to it, as are for the most part the men and women who first introduced and still continue to patronise them." There then followed a chauvinistic rant from the archbishop, lamenting the demise of sports and activities he felt were peculiarly Irish, such as leap-frog, wrestling and rounders among others. "[ When we put on] with England's stuffs and broadcloths, her 'masher' habits and such other effeminate follies as she may recommend, we had better at once, and publicly, abjure our nationality, clap hands for joy at the sight of the Union Jack, and place England's bloody red exultingly [ sic] above the green."
With senior men of the cloth such as Croke wielding their considerable powers with incendiary language as that, it is no wonder that playing cricket almost became tantamount to treason in many parts of the community.
But the really sad thing about cricket is not that the game went through a decline (one which is now very much on the turn), but that its joyous and life-giving effects were airbrushed out of Irish sporting history and, indeed, Irish social culture as if it were somehow more politically distasteful than other "foreign and fantastic field sports" such as soccer, rugby or golf. The legacy of cricket in most parts of Ireland is, quite simply, that it has no legacy. It was demonised as a hateful tool and archetypal symbol of British imperialist oppression to such an extent that for generations no one spoke of it, like a shamed young woman banished to the Magdalen laundry. And as a result, it eventually disappeared not only from the village greens and open fields of rural Ireland but also from the consciousness of those whose fathers and grandfathers had innocently relished the purity and athleticism of the great game. As Bracken says, cricket in many parts of Ireland has been a victim of "historical amnesia".
Now, though, Irish cricket's renaissance is under way, with "new" Irish people at the forefront of its revival, men and women whose forefathers in the sub-continent or antipodes were never made to feel less Indian, Pakistani or Australian just for picking up a bat. Perhaps some day cricket will again be welcomed by all and sundry in Tipperary with the same free enthusiasm and zeal that marked its arrival to the county in the 1830s.