The GAA now has the World Cup threat down pat, writes Tom Humphries. It will be a classic summer

Some people say that the most distressing thing they have ever witnessed was the frank footage beamed without warning from the Irish team hotel during the last World Cup. Readers of a delicate disposition should skip a few paragraphs right now, but those still with us will shiver and perhaps vomit as they recall the horrific images of those tubby FAI officials jiggling around the lobby of their plush Japanese hotel wearing naught but their skimpy bathing costumes.

A friend of mine, more articulate than I and more tuned to the zeitgeist of the nation, neatly captured the feelings of an entire people when he said, "Ugh, jaysus, get those wackjobs off the telly".

Now, every hell is personal, and I'm not saying that soccer's voluptuous alickadoos shouldn't be required to keep their Pammy-style manboobs beneath their blazers as nature intended - I'm just saying I have seen worse. I have been to that floor in Beelzebub's mansion where you would gladly fork over your last euro for the distraction of a saucy table-dance from a fuller-figured FAI official.

Yep. Once, in the bad old days during the cold war, I had the misfortune to be on the team plane after Ireland's soccer team had qualified for the 1994 World Cup.

I say misfortune, because as we landed amid much mirth and jollity, a roseate crew of soccer blazers sashayed as they crooned a cappella version of their favourite hymn, You Can Stick Your GAA Up Your Ass. It was a display offered up in a spirit of craven lasciviousness. Human decency was offended, but too shy to say anything.

Yes, into a night of genuine national unity and celebration such as was that dreamy evening in Windsor Park, the FAI managed to insert, well, the crude suggestion of insertion. For those of us who regularly worship in the Cathedral by the Canal, it was an alarming moment. Were events to unfold as expected, we would soon be following the lyrical instructions of our new lords and masters. Croker would become the Cathedral by the Colon, and Irish summers would be longer than arctic winters, but shorter than Frank Murphy speeches.

In my sleep, I had uneasy dreams. I heard wild talk of interning GAA members, talk stirred up by the sort of paid guttersnipes who deemed the words BogBall and StickBall to be the greatest witticism every uttered outside the confines of a Bernard Manning gig. In my sleep, I became a well-paid informer to these people, but when I awoke I was still poor. No, pure.

It's strange to reflect on this now, but at that moment Ireland's second successive World Cup qualification could easily have delivered the GAA into a palsy from which it might never have recovered.

For Gaels, reared in the belief that inappropriate contact with soccer is the root cause of most major illnesses (and possibly the Famine), it was a bitter pill to swallow.

But swallow it they would. The response was slow and weak. You will remember the summer of Italia '90 when, to mark Ireland's first venture on to the stage of world soccer, the GAA obligingly coughed up one of the most stunningly tedious championship seasons in living memory.

To make matters worse, they topped the metagloom with a bizarre act of hara-kiri when Cork were permitted to win the double. Only the sight of Dr Tony O'Reilly winning the lottery would have brought more joy to our little nation.

It was Jack Charlton's world and we were destined to live in it (or, to use the vernacular, to "fanny aboot" in it). The GAA might as well have scraped together a delegation to travel to Switzerland to officially hand the other 31 counties over to soccer, or Ground Ball, as many of us still called soccer with our merciless wit.

Once again (as in 1974, the time of the Dutch Total Football scare), it took Dublin to rescue the nation from the quicksands of global homogeneity. The following summer, 1991, Dublin toyed with Meath like a cat pawing a petrified mouse. During an incredible series of four games which gripped the imagination of the entire country, Dublin saved civilisation.

Their work done, the noble Dubs gallantly permitted the mouse to devour them, knowing that the clawed and scarred Meath team would stagger onwards to September when they would be exterminated by Down.

And lo, it came to pass.

And the night after it had come to pass Paddy O'Rourke walked the Sam Maguire across an invisible line which the GAA delicately described as the historic border between Leinster and Ulster, but every Gael knew that the GAA had gotten an international dimension for itself.

Grown men, hardened stoics who had seen dark deeds performed at junior football games and had said nothing when questioned in A&E later, were moved to weep.

Since then, the GAA has been a little livelier on its feet anytime a World Cup comes around. In 1998, with characteristic graciousness and noble self-sacrifice, Dublin permitted Kildare to beat them in a replayed game in an early round of the Leinster championship.

Historians will recall that the arrangement actually required Kildare to win on the first day, but Kildare bottled it and many Dublin players had to cancel holidays for the replay.

The Lily Whites took the replay by a point, and thus pumped full of confidence went on to claim their first Leinster title since 1956, a novelty which completely overshadowed France's World Cup win, even for the French.

Better was to come, as Galway managed to squeeze out their first All-Ireland in 32 years that September, and as they made their historic journey carrying Sam in the vanguard back across the Corrib, the bonfires blazed and the western night was cut with a beautiful and haunting rendition of You Can Stick Your Zinedine Zidane Up Your Ass.

By 2002, the GAA had the World Cup threat down pat and the quadrennial international series took another twist. The football championship was as choreographed as a pro-wrestling bout, but UK favourites Armagh, the self-described Cinderella County, were crowned All-Ireland champions, having turned the tables on the Republic's traditional ugly sisters, Dublin and Kerry, along the way.

World Cups come and go now, and the GAA, remarkably, is insulated against even the severest weather fronts of global hype. The rural-based amateur organisation which depends on volunteerism to promote and preserve our indigenous games is preparing to become landlord to the FAI.

The realms of BogBall and StickBall absorb great oceans of corporate cash every year, and whatever joys and spectacles a World Cup brings, the GAA has learned to have confidence in the appeal of its own joys and spectacles.

There was no need for triumphalism on the plane from Belfast in 1994 and no call for GAA triumphalism now. The World Cup has been good to the GAA. Since 1966, Croke Park has been responding and reacting and adapting to the challenge.

This summer promises a feast of sport, and the World Cup people have wisely kept the best of the first round ties away from Sunday afternoons in June; in fact, clever timing by Fifa means that it should be possible to watch Dublin and Laois on June 25th and get home for England's second-round exit later that evening.

So accustomed is the GAA by now to responding to the threat offered by soccer that news of Wayne Rooney's broken toe had no sooner surfaced than the GAA responded with Brian McGuigan's unfortunate leg break.

It's going to be a great World Cup and it's going to be a great football summer. Surely, after all they have done to make the games safe for ordinary people, it's Dublin's turn to win in September?

No?

Italy and Kerry then, in a season for resurgent traditionalists.