EXAM DIARY:I was just starting to believe that perhaps I could combine rugby and poetry when the phone rang . . .

THE LIONS were ripping holes in the home defence. Jones’s conversion brought the score to 39-10 and I could see my side slipping out of contention. I felt guilty watching the Lions game when I was supposed to be studying Michael Longley. Couldn’t the lads at least make it worth my while?

I grabbed a quick look at Badger as Bowe registered his second try and the home side started to fall apart (“limbs dragging after them, so many stones turned over”) but I couldn’t focus on the old earth-dog digging with the Lions tearing shreds out of each other. Or could I?

Stephen Ferris and the 75m sprint (“his path straight and narrow, and not like the fox’s zig-zags”), Hook diving to the ground for the try in the dying minutes (“manages the earth with his paws, returns underground to die”). I was just starting to believe that perhaps I could combine rugby and poetry when the phone rang. It was my brother and mentor Seán. “English is off,” says he. “Yeah, right,” says I. “No seriously. There’s been a cock-up in Drogheda and they’ve moved it to Saturday.”

So Seán goes on to explain in great detail how some man opened the wrong paper and gave the game away to a bunch of lucky Leaving Certs just as they were about to sit their first exam.

Not that lucky, as it turns out. Not only did they lose precious minutes of Paper 1 while the culprit got the wrong papers back and the right papers out on the desk, but they also got their brains scrambled with the stuff of dreams, right before kicking off the first paper of the Leaving Cert. Heavy. Then they spent the afternoon blogging and twittering and writing on Funwalls, infecting the nation with hysteria, and swotting up on deception in Macbeth when they should have been, I don’t know, watching the Lions?

It’s a big drag for me, too. All the poets I thought were coming up came up on yesterday’s doomed paper. Does that mean I have to study all the others now? As soon as I believed my brother, I ditched the Badger and the Lions and hit the books again. After a modest amount of Larkin and Rich I decided that inaction was the best action.

I’ve got geography and maths to worry about tonight. Tomorrow night I’m going to vote and then play a match.

Yeah, I know I said I wouldn’t, but the Leaving Cert business is starting to drag on now, you know what I mean? The exams will come and go, but the price of democracy, and elite sport, is eternal vigilance.

Aidan O’Shea is an intercounty footballer for Mayo and a student of St Gerald’s College, Castlebar