Well, that didn’t last long, did it? After what appears to be the briefest of interludes, the GAA intercounty season is back this weekend, and going to the first game of the year is for many people at least as much a part of saying goodbye to the festive season as taking down the Christmas tree.
Of course, we should attach the caveat that attending the first game of the new season always seemed a much better, much nobler idea than attending the second, third or fourth games of the season. Like baseball’s opening day in the United States, going to the first game was a chance to see some new players, share in the optimism of day one . . . and, well, after that, we’ll see you in a couple of months when the weather is a little more amenable.
Often the build-up to these games will focus on the big-name managers making their debuts in new surroundings – this weekend for instance, much interest will centre on Seamus McEnaney and Davy Fitzgerald as they take charge of the Wexford footballers and hurlers for the first time.
There’s no doubt they would like a win to start their year, but they know this is not what they’ll be judged on. They know that a couple of early wins in the league are certainly necessary to keep spirits up, but that’s not what they’ll be judged on either. They can talk about three-year and five-year plans, and mean it.
Names and faces
There is another group of people, however, for whom this coming weekend may well be a defining moment. From the legion of club hurlers and footballers there will be plucked a selection of unknown names and faces, in the hope that a couple of them might be ready to make the next step. Every county will have a few, and there are some counties still on foreign holidays that will have an entire team made up of them.
For these lads, the road to summertime looks pretty unforgiving. Basically it entails being ready to play the game of your life in the first week of January, while the rest of us are refusing to believe the weighing scales aren’t broken.
They may have been part of training groups since November, and through that may have gotten a small taste of what it’s like to be an intercounty player, but the opportunities to make your mark on the field of play will be severely limited.
As you scan the pages of Monday’s sports supplement, you’ll no doubt see somewhere an unfamiliar name with (1-5) in brackets after him, and raise an eyebrow. “Maybe he was taking the frees,” you’ll say to yourself. And that might be the start of a glittering 12-year career . . . or it might be the day he is reminded of for the next 10 years when he gets a little misty-eyed for the good old days.
Even after that, our man will need to back that up with another big day before the league starts, and after that then it’s a scramble to earn some game-time in the early rounds before the aging veterans return from their winter hibernation, or the college students come back into contention. So it’s uphill all the way, but this weekend is base-camp.
It doesn’t work out for everyone, of course – pure mathematics takes care of that. The day you kicked 1-5 against Clare in the McGrath Cup might be the best day of your career. “Pfft, the McGrath Cup,” will be the refrain, and of course you don’t have a ready-made answer for this. But it will have mattered greatly to you while it was happening.
Hop-ball
The GAA world is constructed in such a way as to ensure that vast swathes of our playing population get the chance to measure up against the best players we have, however briefly – I played with a man who dined out for years on having beaten Galway's midfield non pareil Kevin Walsh to a hop-ball, for instance. Lots of us can think of days when we gave a county man plenty of it in a club league game, or an inter-firms game, or whatever.
But wearing the county jersey is a different level. And those of us who are quick to roll our eyes at the lads who didn’t quite take the chance that will be presented to dozens of young players this weekend, would no doubt have grasped at even one day in the county colours in January.
Dressing-rooms are hierarchical places, and the more seasoned campaigners will be easing their way back into the swing of things, so even the greenest of green-horns will try to keep a lid on the excitement of playing in Enniscrone, or Meelick, or Crettyard, this weekend.
But for those chosen few, regardless of whether this weekend is the starting point or the destination, round one of the FBD League might as well be the All-Ireland final itself.
