IT MIGHT still be a bit of an exaggeration to say that, when the Dubs take on Kerry tomorrow, they will have the support, tacit or otherwise, of 31 counties. But the boys in blue have certainly gone a long way towards reversing the situation that existed the last time they beat Kerry in an All-Ireland final, half a lifetime ago.
Trawling this newspaper’s September 1976 archives yesterday, to remind myself of what the world was like back then, I came across a curious detail in our front-page report of the match. It concerned the ubiquity in Croke Park of the Dublin colours, which were said to have been everywhere in the stadium, “but nowhere more obvious than on the Till”.
What cash register was this, I wondered? And why, of all the tills in Croker, was it so famous as to merit a capital T? Alas, on closer inspection, it proved a mere misprint. The Dublin media – as they were known then too – had obviously celebrated long and hard the night before. Which said, the typo was not inapt.
Should the Dubs win again tomorrow, their colours will be seen on Till 16 and on the till of every other pub between Balbriggan and Bray. But this time, possibly, it won’t be just Dublin fans and publicans cheering. Subject to probation – which in their case is always ongoing and may result in culchie sympathies being revoked at the first sign of triumphalism – the Dubs have become the nation’s favourites.
This not true everywhere, of course, even outside Kerry. In fundamentalist strongholds like Meath – especially the Pashtun tribal areas west of Navan and the lawless Helmand province around Dunboyne – the appetite for seeing the Dublin infidel humiliated has never waned. In the absence of a Meath challenge, yet another Kerry All-Ireland tomorrow would be the lesser of two evils.
But in large swathes of rural Ireland, there is a feeling that Kerry have won enough and that a Dublin win would be good for the game – subject, as I say, to certain provisions, such as that their supporters don’t enjoy it too much, or show any signs of abandoning the humility that decades of underachievement has taught them, or start thinking they’re God’s gift to the sport again. That was at least a common perception back in the 1970s – that the Dubs believed themselves to have reinvented Gaelic football. And in some ways they had.
The rest of GAA Ireland looked on with a mixture of amusement and horror at such innovations as singing on the terraces. Which in itself might have been considered harmless. Except that there was a fear that prolonged Dublin domination would lead to worse excesses: elaborate goal celebrations, perhaps; or on-field homoerotic hugging sessions; or the popularisation – God forbid – of multicoloured football boots.
All right, that last but is an exaggeration, because multicoloured football boots had not been thought of yet then, even in soccer. And it was to soccer, the English variety in particular, that all the evils threatening the GAA were at the time attributed.
Yet somehow the threat waned eventually, and Gaelic football as our fathers knew it prevailed, more or less. In fact, it’s part of the current Dubs’ appeal that they’re seen – the way Kerry always have been, but without that county’s irritating habit of winning every damn year – as guardians of the sport’s traditional values. Even in Ulster, the semi-final defeat of Donegal was widely interpreted as a triumph over the forces of darkness.
It probably won’t last. The trouble is that, like English success in anything, a Dublin All-Ireland win would be amplified way beyond its borders. It’s not that we in Ireland would be any less chauvinistic about a World Cup victory than England; it’s just that we’re more exposed to their media than vice versa. They don’t have to listen to us being insufferable. And that’s how 31 counties of Ireland tend to feel about the national press.
So one Dublin All-Ireland may be celebrated. Maybe even two. Anything more might start to oppress the rest of the country. And soon everybody would be yearning for those plucky underdogs from Kerry to come back and wipe the smug smiles off Dub faces.
In the meantime, the boys in blue are a good cause, if only for strategic reasons. In which vein, I was talking to a Northern zealot recently who, although never a Dublin fan, wants them to win tomorrow because (a) he hates Kerry even more; and (b) hopes a Dubs bandwagon might arrest the popularity of rugby.
Which sport, incidentally, has replaced soccer as the perceived threat to GAA. All the more so because Gaelic football (especially the kind played in Ulster) has more in common with the oval-ball game than soccer ever had.
The threat has not been obvious in recent weeks, thanks to a situation in which the Irish rugby team has outdone even the Dubs in dampening the hype that normally surrounds them. But the hype will probably be mounting again by the time you read this, after Ireland’s stunning victory this morning against Australia, crowned as it was by that last-minute try by Tommy Bowe, who – as the aforementioned zealot reminded me – learned everything he knows playing GAA under-12 for Emyvale.