By half-time in the Derry vs Cork quarter-final there might have been those who wished it had been put behind a pay wall too, just so they could have been spared the free-to-air snooze-fest. “It’s been a pretty appalling game so far,” Lee Keegan sighed, while Tomás Ó Sé, beside him, looked like he was about to nod off.
There were times in that first half that you’d be wondering if you’d sat on the remote and inadvertently hit pause, so little movement was there out on the pitch, and while it might have had some of our grannies and granddads spinning in their graves, some of us actually switched over to the cricket. Look, Ben Stokes was doing Ben Stokes things while Derry and Cork were sucking the sporting life out of us, so even they might have said, “go on then”.
The panel had kicked off the coverage by telling us that Kerry and Monaghan had bowled out Tyrone and Armagh behind the pay wall on Saturday, Monaghan dramatically so in a penalty shoot-out, Kerry without breaking sweat. “I’d say it was long Covid Tie-rone got that time, there has to be some explanation,” said Tomás of their performance. Cheeky monkey.
Anyway, come the first of Sunday’s quarter-finals, Derry won, and there’s not much more to say, really. “I don’t think you’d be afraid of them,” said Tomás, “but that makes them more dangerous in my eyes”.
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Lee and Ciarán Whelan were a bit stumped by that one, like they’d just been deceived by a googly, but it’s possible that Tomás meant that come the semi-finals Derry would place all their fielders around the Croke Park perimeter to prevent their opponents from scoring any boundaries, and therefore might win. We’ll see.
It was up to Dublin and Mayo to save the weekend and stop folk from concluding that cricket is more exciting than Gaelic football, so no pressure at all.
RTÉ’s build-up to this particular encounter included a montage of Mayo’s sad experiences in recent years, so they risked missing the first half of the game. Lee reflected on his schemozzles with Diarmuid Connolly in particular, those often ending up with ripped shirts, bare chests and the like, while growling at each other in a manly fashion. “There was a hatred within the confines of the pitch,” he said, but off it? Best of buds, he reassured us.
Team news. You could have knocked us over with a feather when Joanne Cantwell told us there were late changes to the advertised line-ups, the Dubs making an entire four. With the likes of Jack McCaffrey, Ciarán Kilkenny and Paddy Small left out of their starting line-up, their bench resembled the Team of the Century.
Tomás was hopeful-ish for Mayo, despite noting that “they have an uncanny knack of butchering good chances”, and they did indeed miss a few in that first half, but they only trailed Dublin by a point at the break and looked in reasonably fine fettle.
“This,” said Ciarán, “is a proper game of football”, even Tomás sitting bolt upright in his chair, suggesting that “Dublin are in right trouble”.
Dessie Farrell might well have relayed that assessment to his lads as they took to the pitch again, the punters barely back in their seats when they’d put a goal and a heap of points on the board without reply. “Mayo are self-destructing a small bit,” said Éamonn Fitzmaurice in the commentary box, Éamonn being a small bit kind. It was carnage.
And just as Mayo had run out of steam, Dublin only went and brought on McCaffrey and Kilkenny. So, no end to the cruelty.
“It has the feeling of a last hurrah, when they’ve got the band back together,” said Éamonn of the Dubs, Ciarán maintaining the theme back in the studio. “They have the band back, that was probably their first real gig, and it took them a while to tune up.”
Next for Dublin? Monaghan, with Kerry drawn against Derry.
“You can never write off Monaghan,” said Ciarán, before kind of writing off Monaghan. They will, he concluded, need to get the mother of all tunes out of themselves, as will Derry when they play Kerry, to prevent July 30th from being the ultimate battle of the bands: The Dubs v The Kingdom.
