Last weekend provided the autumn climacteric with the first of the all-Ireland finals. This, says Kevin Myers, is the evensong of summer, our September Vespers, and the great glories of hurling, with comparable sporting-cultural events occurring at the Oval in London, prompt certain questions.
Because for all the mythology of Cúchulain and hurling, the truth is that hurling is not played where Irish is spoken: it is associated largely with areas of Anglo-Norman settlement, and with the exception of Antrim, is essentially confined to semi-rural areas south of a line running from Tullamore to Gort.
Even this simplification doesn't convey the full truth. In Leinster, the Wicklow-Kildare-Carlow quadrant is virtually free of hurling. Whether this is any way related to the fact that those counties were so deeply involved in the '98 Rising might be purely coincidental. After all, Wexford was the home of the Rising and is the quintessential home of hurling. On the other hand, it is possible that the manner of landlordism in the hurling-free quadrant did not encourage the sport, even as it provoked insurgency.
Landlordism was certainly a key to the agrarian success of both cricket and hurling - and in Ireland for a while both sports overlapped. Where landlords encouraged the games, the sports flourished. Yet questions remain. Why should Lincolnshire, alongside Yorkshire, be relatively cricket-free? Why should Westmeath, alongside Offaly, be almost hurlingless? The two sports have come to stand for their countries - and though I dislike the concept of "national character" (what has a Louth man in common with a Kerryman?), each manages to convey something of that elusive abstraction. Hurling requires three-dimensional, multi-faceted, intuitive genius.
Cricket requires patience and stolidity. Hurling is certainly the fastest field game in the world, but cricket achieves astonishing speeds also. Just 0.3 of a second elapsed between the ball leaving the bat and it being caught in the slips during the Test match at the Oval last week.
Balls from "slow" bowlers move at over 40 miles an hour; from fast bowlers, at well over 90mph, which means that half a second elapses between delivery and bat.
The two sports have something else in common. They are based on counties, and their culture is still fundamentally amateur. They celebrate local loyalties, local identities, local traditions, in sporting, team-based ways that are unknown in the rest of Europe. For we in these islands, probably driven by the example of the English, invent team sports; and wherever
English is spoken, indigenous team sports flourish. In the US, baseball, football, basketball; in Australia, Australian rules; in Canada, ice-hockey; in Ireland, Gaelic and hurling; in England, two rugbies, cricket, hockey, soccer.
The entire Latin world over two continents, the Slavic world covering two-thirds of the Eurasian landmass, the Indians and the Chinese with their heaving billions, have not invented a single such sport - though let us not forget the Afghans, and the chukka with the head of the defeated chieftain: however, hardly cricket, old fellow.
Last weekend saw public enactments of different forms of the same rituals of comradely hostility in the two islands. In London, the most mesmerising cricket series that has ever been played for the Ashes drew to an enthralling close. In Dublin, the hurling season came to a nail-biting, helter-skelter conclusion; but perhaps we had already feasted too well at that banquet of extravagance in the Galway-Kilkenny match.
These encounters are celebrations of kindred rivalry: of kith and kin and cousinhood, vindications of the sporting spirit which grew in English schools, and which Ireland then consciously emulated, if only to show the English that anything they could do, we could do better. This is precisely why the Australians feel such passion about the Ashes: it is the post-colonial Oedipal urge, but tamed so that the ocular orbs become merely objects of contention.
Was I the only person in Ireland who last Sunday was fretting over the rival attractions of the All-Ireland Hurling Final and the final test at the Oval? Probably not, though as it happens, needlessly: rain in London made the choice simple. We might pretend as a people to be indifferent to the fortunes of the England cricket team, but ours is the only European country outside the UK whose media feature major coverage of the Ashes match. When this newspaper recently carried an interview with the great Ian Botham, it felt no need to explain who he was.
For decades, the GAA cringed behind the barriers of exclusion and hostility, convinced, in a very typically post-colonial way, that if it let down its guard for a moment, it would be overwhelmed by the game of the imperial master. The truth was otherwise. This summer has proved to be one of the most glorious in the history of the association, as it has been for cricket.
And so it goes; sunset moves north each eventide and the sun at noon daily lies a little lower in the sky. We learn a little, and forget more. Yet this much is obvious, as autumn seeps through our trees. The largely synchronous political and sporting cultures of Britain and Ireland are like similar emotions and desires, but possessing different ciphers. One is encoded in cricket: the other in hurling. They are two beautiful expressions of similar yearnings, similar civilities, similar loyalties.
Indeed, there is perhaps no finer venue in Ireland for cricket than Croke Park: for the willow and the ash both prosper on the same riverbank of common sporting decency.