FROM THE ARCHIVE JUNE 7th, 1999:IT MAKES you old this job, turns young men into cranky whitebeards, bent squinting over their insistent laptops. This job and the people you meet.
About 9.30 yesterday morning and we are at Heuston Station wheeling the car in, only to be advised that the car park is full and those wishing to park their cars and get on the big puff puff are to leave their vehicles down a side alley which looks like the chosen venue for the 1999 Car Burning Olympics. There is a man with a giant shoe horn attempting to get extra people onto the train.
We stuff our tickets into our pockets and decide to hit the road, driving both cars to the Poitín Stil before heading on in one vehicle.
Since the Olympics and the inauguration of the Michelle Smith Room in the Poitín Stil (what do they use as measures by the way?) I have never felt too comfortable being around the place unless I’m in my Lily Savage gear. The reconnaissance goes without difficulty, however, some sniper fire from the hills but its no Béeal na Blath. We think about the old joke about whether or not the pub sells Michael Collins cocktails, one shot, and you hit the road, ha ha, Then we hit the road.
We are on the Portlaoise bypass. My heartbeat is back to normal. My friend, who is reading the papers and hankering after cappuccino and croissants, announces that in the Sunday Tribune Eamon McCann has denounced me as a no good, war -mongering imperialist lapdog cum second-rate sports hack cross-dresser who is keen on obliterating all of Yugoslavia before we play football again.
This would be fine and undeniable if back in Kildare Town I hadn’t given my friend an underplayed but partisan account of the unique meeting of minds which had taken place on Eamon Dunphy’s radio show the previous week when I had been invited to discuss the issues of the day with the grown-ups. Everything but the line about being borne shoulder- high by the masses seemed plausible.
Until we get to Fermoy. I tell my friend that in the Junior Chamber of Commerce I am actually considered slightly left-wing, that I hardly ever find myself on the wrong side of an argument with Eamon McCann. but had been cruelly wrong-footed this time by McCann being on the same side as Shane Ross. Will never show my face again at the young socialists’ golf outings.
In Fermoy I am distracted by the traffic which has ground to a halt some miles outside the town. We all sit there stewing in the June sun. I am reminded of the story by Julio Cortazar where all the people who are sitting in a traffic jam for days form a society. If I could remember the end I would tell my friend. “Never thought McCann would sell out,” I say sadly.
We arrive in Cork and I remember why it is I hate covering matches there. Proponents of the green-field theory of stadium construction should be frogmarched from Cork city centre to Páirc Uí Corky with a bag on their back which contains one laptop computer, one electric lead, one mobile phone, one tape recorder, one GAA records’ book, several tapes, several notebooks, several other leads of indeterminate gender or usefulness, the large chip usually carried on one’s shoulder and several marbles and steel ball-bearings.
I begin to tell my friend about Tim O’Brien’s perfect Vietnam story, The Things They Carried, wherein he details every piece of a foot soldier’s kit. I can’t remember how it ends and engage him briefly on the dialectic materialism of sponsorship in hurling.
Once there, they should be made propel themselves and bag at once through the turnstiles which were specially commissioned by the GAA from Lilliputians. Then they should be made trudge upstairs and find that the table upon which they assumed they would be able to write this column does not exist and they must sit on a bar stool at the back of the press-room, with access to no power points and enjoying a view that doesn’t cover either goalmouth.
A senior colleague in this business has a little fantasy which he sometimes shares wherein he dies in Semple Stadium on the day of the Munster final (Tipp are winning, but it’s only a fantasy) and having expired deliriously in the happy tumult his body is passed over the heads of the happy crowd up the terrace until, at the top, a beautiful woman (politically correct correspondents should note that this is not my fantasy, I am only relating it) pauses by his body, sheds a tear, places a rose in his buttonhole, kisses his proud forehead lovingly and says: “Truly he was the greatest of them all”.
Anyway I know my own death will come in Pairc Ui Corky. I will have fled the press box, terrifyingly suspended from the roof of the stand, fished for my quotes and been cast out into the grimly overcrowded corridor under the main stand which even on a National League afternoon is a vision of Judgment Day.
There I shall pass out while on the mobile phone to the office relating some self-justifying tale. My splendid corpse will be found hours later by officers of the county board. There will be two Alsatians nibbling at it. It being the last big game of the season, they will opt to leave me there. They will play An Alsatian Once Again before the next big game the following summer.
By the time it is 3.30 and Dickie Murphy is throwing the ball in, I have survived the further stresses of spilling half a bottle of complimentary orangeade over the little table provided by the Cork County Board. I have made a game attempt to wipe it only to notice I’m dripping the little orange lake down onto my computer bag. At the back of Paircy Corky press box, I sat down and wept.
When it was all over and the quotes bad been extracted from two slightly surprised dressing -rooms we were faced with a choice; yomp up to the press facilities which the county board had provided a mile away in Ring Park or go back to the hotel and see if they had a room.
We decided that the corpse-nibbling alsatians were too vivid an image to risk any more stress on the property of the Cork County Board. We walked. Strolling back in the June sun, we were surprised to run into clumps of the Clare hurling team, passing quietly through the crowd on the way back to the city for a team dinner.
The bus apparently gets stuck in the crowds so the boys are in the habit of walking when they play big games in ‘The Park’.
In 10 years of covering sports events, I have never seen a sight like it. Some 42,000 people streaming up along the banks of the Lee and the very stars they have paid to watch walking quietly among them, picking up snatches of conversation about themselves.
I wandered over to Brian Lohan. "Did you see what McCann said about me in the Tribunethis morning? Im telling you, Brian, I'm not talking on match weeks in future."
