Day out at Hyde Park strictly for the birds

SIDELINE CUT:It is hard to convey just how grim and cursed the day was as we bravely gathered in Roscommon town for the Connacht final showdown . . ., writes KEITH DUGGAN

IF, IN 20 or 30 years’ time, we are asked if we remember the day “Big Darren” won the British Open golf tournament, those of us who spent the afternoon cowering from the gods in Dr Hyde Park will immediately say yes. And shiver.

The GAA has always been sparing in its allocation of awards and medals, which is why the All-Ireland Celtic Cross remains such a coveted prize. But it is about time that they considered creating some sort of Purple Heart for the most valorous of its supporters and they should place every man, woman and child who attended the Connacht final in Roscommon town last Sunday on their short list of contenders.

It is hard to convey just how grim and cursed the day was. It was not the fault of Roscommon town. We have all turned out in miserable weather before but this was different.

There was something doomed and beaten in the expressions of the gardaí manning the roundabouts, in the desperate attempts of the vendors to keep their Dairy Milk boxes from falling apart in the rain, in the way the wind whipped at the Ros’ and Mayo flags that children carried, in the long march that the fans made up to the Hyde and in the protest over Roscommon Hospital, where hundreds of people carried banners and symbols conveying death while Luke “Ming” Flanagan resumed his natural role as a street agitator, marching up and down outside the stadium and shouting words of defiance through a megaphone, his long ponytail looking sorry and drenched in the rain.

There was something deeply hopeless and touching about the whole scene and even though the crowd inside Hyde Park were “up” for the match, it was hard not to feel we had all, somehow been transported back to 1942.

The big speculation was about whether An Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, would have the temerity to show up in Roscommon in his sleek state car and brave the protesters. It’s a shame he didn’t manage to persuade his French counterpart to attend the game as his guest because if Nicolas Sarkozy could have spent just that afternoon in that part of Ireland, not only would he push for a cancellation on Ireland’s sovereign debt, he would organise an international compensation package.

If the Taoiseach made it to the match at all on Sunday, he kept a low profile. There were over 25,000 people in Hyde Park and many of those seemed to be inside the cavernous press box at the rear of the big stand. Gaining entry was a bit like getting through an East German checkpoint, with proof of documentation preceding a stern grilling from a man wearing the feared orange bib of the Connacht Council.

Up in the press box, the first person we encountered was Marty Morrissey and although his greeting was as friendly as ever, the RTÉ man looked unusually forlorn and troubled as he gazed out upon the scene; the crowd huddled and sheets of rain sweeping across the pitch.

The gathering was a who’s who of west of Ireland football; former players, managers and television men all wearing big Dave Lee Travis headphones for their radio and television work and scanning the match programme. All agreed that they had never seen a worse day for a Connacht final.

Every available seat had been taken hours ago and so a bunch of us took up standing positions. Among the group was the Man from the Examiner, the Man from the Mirror, the Man from the Herald and the Man from the Sun. Shortly before the throw-in, a man in an orange bib instructed our group to follow him down to the end of the stand, where he opened up a kind of box room and proceeded to take the shutters from the windows. The place was empty except for three chairs and two dead birds, who looked as if they had been sitting on the chairs and just keeled over and died right there – possibly while watching an FBD league game in the perishing cold of January.

The Man from the Examiner removed the stricken birds with admirable tenderness and was proceeding to wipe away the dust and debris from the narrow ledge when another official came running up to declare that the space was, in fact, “reserved”.

The Man from the Examiner naturally thought this was a joke and laughed heartily. But it was no joke. The official was stern; he looked offended by the idea that newspapermen would just presume they could sit down in a press box. “But the birds . . . ” the Man from the Examiner protested.

It was no use.

The seats were reserved for guests of the nation and the press men reluctantly returned to their original posting and scribbled their match notes standing up. Still, the press box was luxury. Outside, it became wilder and darker with every passing minute and the tea at half-time was a godsend – the Man from the Sun wept quietly with gratitude as he drank deeply from his mug.

The match was played, after a fashion. The irony of the fact that Roscommon had a player named Enda Kenny on the substitutes’ bench did not go unnoticed. The Man From the Mirror predicted he would come in late and hit the winning score.

“Whoever thought that Enda Kenny would be a hero in Roscommon?” he said, composing his Monday opening paragraph in advance. “Write that down,” he told us. “You can have that. It’s good stuff.”

As it happened, Kenny did make an appearance but couldn’t conjure up a winning score. The crowd left quickly after the Mayo captain made his speech. They looked blue and shook. Most seemed intent on making it to the local hotel and ordering either a hot soup or a hotter whiskey. In the bar, they were showing Big Darren playing golf on all the televisions. It looked like a golf-ish crowd in that many of the men wore white polo-necks. We sought in vain for a television showing the Ulster football final and were eventually told that it was showing in the ballroom.

The ballroom was huge and had plush carpeting, like a room from The Shining. Two gentlemen, who were plainly of Ulster stock, sat patiently while a member of staff fiddled valiantly with a television set that looked like it had been imported from Brezhnev’s Russia and was clearly only used for emergencies.

He moved a set of rabbit’s ears over his head and managed to attract tantalisingly brief and snowy signals from the match in Clones but the rain was so thick and relentless now that it was hard to imagine any kind of frequency getting through. The television went off and on again and every time the staff man left the rabbit’s ears down, the picture vanished; the thought occurred to all of us that he would feel obliged to hold the damn thing above his head for the entire match.

The two Ulster men sat on with infinite patience and the staff man eventually connected us with faraway Clones . . . but the sound kept breaking down.

And so we watched Donegal win their first Ulster title in 19 years in a very quiet ballroom with a beautiful marble bar, a room perfect for glittering New Year’s Eve dances but a really odd place for a crowd of three to watch a football match. We watched but could not hear the Donegal captain give his winning speech. By the time it was over, Big Darren had won the Claret Jug. “Oh, he’ll never forget this day,” chimed the man from BBC.

None of us will.