When he turned up on the Late Late Show on Friday evening, Pat Spillane, still a little shaken by the fact that he’d just had a grandson born in, of all places, Cork, admitted that when he and Joe Brolly were on The Sunday Game they began to resemble the Muppet Show’s Statler and Waldorf. Permanently cranky, always moaning.
“And sometimes you’d be saying to yourself, ‘is it me or is it the game?’ But eventually it ****ing dawned on me that the game was shite. It was getting soul-destroying.”
Last year’s All-Ireland final was the last straw. “There were 97 kick passes and 592 hand passes – 592! This is not FOOTball, it’s Gaelic HANDball.” So vexed was he, he was tempted to take to the pitch with that Fr Ted sign, “Down with this sort of thing”.
“Careful now,” Errigal Ciarán and Cuala might have replied ahead of their club All-Ireland final when they would get the chance to prove that Gaelic football can still be a bit of a pleasant watch even under the old rules, even if Pat was thanking the heavens that the news ones are coming in any day soon.
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That second half? Can we keep the old rules?
No, no, jesting, and Pat would still want the hand-passing cut by in or around 98 per cent, considerably fewer bodies deployed behind the ball and less sideways tippy-tappying. But after Cuala’s first half masterclass, which gave them a slight 3-9 to 0-5 half-time lead, Errigal Ciarán treated us to the joy of watching a side littered with the sparkliest of talent but with nothing left to lose. It was mighty stuff.
A measure of how mighty was that during their comeback our TG4 commentator Brian Tyers reached nigh on falsetto levels, his sidekick Coman Goggins a bit excited himself, even if it was a Tyrone bunch closing in on a shower of Dubs.
A sublime Peter Harte goal, some otherworldly points, a sprinkling of delicious KICK-passing, Pat, and that was 60 minutes plus added time very well spent on the couch.
“It raises my heart and soul to the heavens,” Cuala manager Austin O’Malley told TG4 after the trim, emulating Cork’s St Finbarr’s feat of winning both senior hurling and football titles. And O’Malley also saluted “King Con” O’Callaghan who will now need to hire Croke Park to store all the honours he’s won in the game.
Speaking of kings. Match of the Day paid a very lovely tribute to Denis Law on Saturday night following his death, at the age of 84, the day before.
“If you had to send a man out to score a goal to save your life, there’s only man you’d send – you’d send the Law man,” said the very great Hugh McIlvanney in a clip from the archives. We were then shown a montage of his goals, and oh my. “Farewell to the king, Denis Law was one of the true greats,” said Gary Lineker, and that he was.
It was funny, before the women’s Manchester derby on Sunday evening, shown by Sky Sports, tributes were paid to both Tony Book, the former City player and manager who died last Monday, and to Law. As soon as Law’s face appeared on the big screen the stadium was filled with high-pitched roars from, evidently, the young girls filling the stands. Their parents would barely have been alive when he was playing, never mind them, but such is his legend around the city.
A Ballon d’Or winner, his first job after retiring was selling carpets door-to-door, just to try to keep the wolf from the door. He’d have been forgiven for feeling bitter when he heard about these days’ pay packages, but he never seemed to be. A humble, self-deprecating gentleman, fun-filled too, as learnt when having the honour to meet him many years back when he was in Dublin to promote his autobiography.
United’s lads marked his passing by only losing 3-1 to Brighton at home, Sky Sports News nigh on combusting on hearing Ruben Amorim’s post-match comments. “We are the worst team maybe in the history of Manchester United.” That rolling breaking news thingie at the bottom of the screen had flames coming out of it.
But as that Homer Simpson meme doing the rounds pointed out, “the worst team in the history of Manchester United . . . so far”.
