It is Sunday morning and, is customary by now, I am fussing to get a 1,100-word column done before I hit the road for a GAA match. There are things about being a sports journalist which make Sunday a little different. I seldom get to see my daughters swimming. In a major breakthrough, they have abandoned armbands this winter. Do you hear me Michelle and Eric? No armbands.

I seldom get to see soccer on the TV. Leeds United, the most intoxicating team on the planet, are on today. Such sacrifice will surely be rewarded amply in the next life. I seldom get to read the Sunday papers until Monday and therefore don't really know what I think about anything until then. Regular readers will have gathered that. Almost every Sunday in the year is offered up to the job, the only reward being the occasional big hug from the editor and a steady stream of bonuses which I am told are being kept for me in a trust fund for when I grow up.

There are less-wordly compensations, though. I like the thought that as I shut the door behind me in an hour's time to head for Atlantis (or Waterford as the locals call it), there are thousands of other people all over the country at some point in their progress towards a GAA game. They might be playing, officiating, watching or reporting, but they are in some way involved in a mass activity that is in some way Irish, uniquely Irish.

Living away from Ireland, or contemplating living away from Ireland, has always involved for me some consideration of that cultural difference. I like writing about the GAA because, of all sports, it has the most intrinsic impact on the society in which I live. To write about soccer in England, for instance, is in no way comparable. Enjoyable and challenging, perhaps, but vastly different.

This morning I know that the lads from Clarecastle are gathering somewhere around the green in their town, strolling up from Madden's Terrace and parts less well known, and staring at the sky and wondering, like me, if there will be a match at all. Somebody will ring the Munster Council or somebody in Waterford and be told that at present it looks good.

I know that part of GAA Sunday mornings - the way teams gather, their latecomers always bearing the same faces, the chatter and division into little conversation groups always falling the same way. The endless recycling of slagging themes and good nicknames. The infuriating knowledge that if the team agrees to meet at 10.30 half the team will take in 10.30 mass under the auspices of the rule that "they'd never leave without us". The less patient are left banging the butts of their hurleys gently off the ground. Standing around on Sunday mornings is part of what we are.

The GAA, love it or loathe it, is part of what we are. For a little island on the edge of Europe our culture has proved surprisingly permeable. Often this is a good thing, but sometimes you gaze at the landscape from the mid-European schlockfest that is Dublin city centre, to the nightmare of derivative programming that is RTE (and the platter being offered by the Ginger people at radio Ireland), and you wonder if we do not absorb too much too readily.

Travelling in Europe you realise what a cultural filter language is. You seldom come across a foreign shoreline which, like Ireland's, is strewn with every bit of flotsam and jetsam which Britain and America casts onto the sea of mass communications. What cruel irony that less than a century after independence we are so susceptible to Spice Girls imperialism and Tellytubbies aggression.

We have all but lost the language and gained the Riverdance franchise instead. We have lost the music and gained Enya. Pretty soon we might lose the GAA and gain the Wimbledon FC franchise.

As a sports journalist, it is hard not to be furtively excited about Wimbledon FC. In 10 years' time of a Wednesday evening, I might be pointing the car towards Clondalkin and heading for what we'll term "one of the great European soccer nights". Seventy-five thousand people there to see Barcelona and Dublin. There is a thrill in the thought of that.

There is a price, too. On Sundays, we might not be heading to Tullamore or Newbridge or Castlebar. Dublin might be playing a key Euro league game against Manchester United or Bayern Munich or Benfica that afternoon and a large army of writers will be dispatched to Clondalkin, or parts further afield, to provide copy for a massive and transfixed Irish audience.

And transfixed we will be. Not because bigtime soccer is a part of the way we are, but because as the world views us, we are a market for big-time soccer. They will put it on our plates and we will eat it because that's the type of people we are.

If the people involved in the great Wimbledon switch get their sums and their marketing right (and this column firmly believes that they will), their club will dominate the sporting landscape as surely as the Empire State building would dominate College Green.

Having a huge professional soccer club landed on Dublin will change so many things. It will alter the dreams of youngsters, change the practice of sports journalism, shoulder-charge the GAA. Saw what you like now, our heads will be turned. The League of Ireland (or National League as some marketing whizz ingeniously renamed it) will be shunted to the summer and the clubs will take whatever compensatory hand-out Sky and Wimbledon can spare.

It would be difficult to argue that, on a commercial basis, the League of Ireland has earned the right to be insulated from such a trauma. It hasn't attracted a mass market and in all likelihood never will. Yet, when commerce bulldozes everything out of the way so comprehensively, it is impossible not to despair for sport.

There is an argument that Wimbledon's arrival in Dublin will be good for football in Ireland. It will no more be better for football in Ireland than the Dallas Cowboys were good for gridiron in Dallas. Wimbledon will exert the tyranny of the modern professional sports organisation.

In other words it might be nice to buy seven or eight Irish players, but the responsibility is to our shareholders. It would be good to have 20 or 30 Irish youngsters in our youth set-up, but our shareholders require success and we owe it to them to bring the best young talent from all over Britain . . . . .

Wimbledon took a step closer to Dublin last week. The world shrunk a size. Remember the sense of wonder getting off the boat train in Euston Station and wandering out. Boots chemists? Marks and Spencer's? Rum and Raisin ice Cream? Galaxy chocolate? No such thing as red lemonade? A world without Tayto?

Word from Waterford is that the rain is a falling heavy and the game is even money to be cancelled. Have to hit the road in hope anyway. Sundays like this might be lost soon.