TV VIEW:JASON McATEER admitted he doesn't like change, that he's infinitely happier when things stay just as they always were. Like Lansdowne Road.
“It was a kip, but it was home,” he said wistfully, as he was driven towards Ballsbridge for his first glimpse of the new stadium. His eyes widened, his jaw plummeted. “It looks like, eh, a greenhouse.”
The greenhouse effect was, after the initial shock, a positive one, McAteer conceding the new home of football and rugby was a bit special, a view shared by all the guests on RTÉ's rather lovely On Hallowed Ground.
Jack Kyle and Ken Maginnis climbed the steps in to the stand and stood, like kids in a sweet shop, cooing and purring at the sight of the new place, as did Donal Lenihan.
And Paul McGrath, who really should have had it named after him.
Like McAteer, Lenihan had a certain affection, in hindsight at least, for the old place’s valiant battle against modernity, recalling that day in 1991 when Ireland played Australia in the World Cup quarter-final. “Nick Farr-Jones’ wife came in looking for the creche facilities for her babies. In those days we were lucky to have showers and toilets,” he laughed.
Jacqui Hurley gave us the facts and figures on the stadium, some of them a bit mind-boggling – although the one about it containing 185 kilometres of cable is hardly a big deal, there’s at least that much under the desk of this computer.
Croke Park, then, has got rid of its poor relations after they finally found a place to call their own, although Pat Spillane seems hell-bent on bringing rugby back to headquarters, so convinced is he he could coach a team from that particular code to All-Ireland success.
“The foot has gone out of football, it’s now a bastardised game of basketball,” he complained yesterday, adding yet another code to this muddled hybrid.
This declaration prompted Colm O’Rourke to sit up in his chair – always an ominous sign – turn to Pat and say: “I love when you go off on this rant. I remember when you were playing with your team back in the 70s, you were the Harlem Globetrotters in disguise – if they’d painted you black you wouldn’t have known if you were basketball or football players.”
Yes, The Sunday Game Liveis back, and, inevitably enough, Joe Brolly is carrying an injury, an irresistible force meeting his movable collarbone in a club match.
He played down his suffering, though, telling us there were seven other players from games around Antrim in the hospital when he arrived.
“Two had been knocked out, one was in a neck brace and another had stitches in his head,” he said. And they were just friendlies. (No, no, it was the Antrim league).
Pat feared the opening game on the day’s menu, Armagh v Derry, would have a similar casualty toll, but by half-time, as he searched for something positive to say about this “absolutely abysmal stuff”, he settled for: “At least it’s not a bloodbath.”
Joe was somewhat less upbeat, describing the game as “a near death experience”, while Colm just shrugged and said it was “more or less as we expected: awful.”
An encouraging start, then, could Kerry v Tipperary maintain the momentum? Well, the panel was happy enough, although Pat set off again on his thing about blanket defences, recalling an article he read during the week “about a 63-year-old man in India who didn’t brush his teeth or have a shower for 35 years because he believed that ritual would provide him with a baby”.
“Not brushing your teeth for 35 years would be a fairly good guarantee of not conceiving anything,” said Michael Lyster, an observation that had Colm and Joe nodding, while wondering where on earth Pat’s analogy was heading.
Well, the gist was that Pat reckons there are managers “the length and breadth of the country” who firmly believe that “the ritual of parking a load of fellas behind the ball will bring them the title”.
His view is that these tactics are not only as alluring as halitosis, they are as unproductive as that Indian man. The Colgate smile of, say, the intrepid Kerry attack is, he reckons, the only way forward.
We sensed Colm and Joe felt the analogy was as overstretched as Armstrong, the greatest of all action figures until Gooch Cooper came along, but Pat was content with his point. And in fairness to him, our Googling proved his analogy was almost a half decent one.
The man in question is Kailash Singh and one of the unfortunate upshots of his aversion to hygiene is he had to close his grocery store because the aroma scared off his customers.
And as Pat would tell any overly negative manager who’d listen, shutting up shop gets you nowhere.
