SIDELINE CUT:IT IS one of the peculiar glories of the GAA that the great cathedrals in Clones or Thurles or Limerick are pencilled in to host the last games of the season, when the best Gaelic clubs bring the curtain down on the year. These famous venues look terrific in summer, when tens of thousands of supporters take their places in the stands and the colourful flags are flying. The field looks immaculate, the brass band is suited and booted and playing the popular classics and in panorama, the ground looks fabulous. But in winter, these old grounds are different worlds entirely.
In winter, they feel like museums and show their age on the Sundays that the big club matches take place. It is a funny thing about club teams: they never complain. The basic fate of club teams is they train like dogs in the blue cold of January and February and the best two football and hurling teams in Ireland play for their great prize on St Patrick's Day. League promotion and relegation duties are taken care of through the April showers.
Then, the sun comes out in May and the clubs are told to run laps until late September, when it is getting dark and rainy and the glories of the All-Ireland are finished with. It means most clubs worth their salt are training for practically every month of the year and that the truly great club franchises, like Crossmaglen Rangers, can go a full decade without taking a break from training.
We tend to see November and December as slumber months for the GAA.
But even last week, when the All Stars and assorted Gaels are enjoying tours of Alcatraz prison, lining up with the hurleys for amusing photo calls in front of Al Capone's cell and enjoying wine tours of the Napa valley, their club brethren were reaching the boiling point of their season. It has become clear that for all the skill and excitement offered by the All-Ireland senior championship, the summer GAA festivals are just exercises in frivolity in comparison to the trials that the clubs must endure in order to win the major honours. And the fact that the big grounds are so dark and cold when the club teams get to play in them somehow suits the atmosphere of club football.
Most of the turnstiles remain closed. One shop can easily deal with the required volume of Fanta's and Tayto crisps. The corridors underneath the stands have an Arctic chill about them. Sound carries further.
In summer, when a child gets separated from its parents on Ulster final day, the emergency demands repeated announcements on the loudspeaker and hasty searches by stewards already stressed out by the demands on the car park and by latecomers and by fans seeking autographs.
If the same things happen in winter, when the club showpiece is played, then a few loud shouts carry around the ground and in no time, the youngster is safely returned. At club matches, family and friends sit snugly together in the damp underneath the hoods of the stands. They use Sunday newspapers for cushions and carry flasks. Sometimes, entire parishes can be accommodated in two rows of the stand.
One or two people will invariably opt to stand in the terraces, sometime in gale force winds or absolutely relentless rain. They will insist that they prefer to watch the match from behind the goal, no matter what the consequences. Occasionally, during televised games, the camera will focus in on them. They might look like mariners in the early stages of hypothermia, decked out in oilskins and the club scarf, their teeth chattering mercilessly but they are still game enough to offer a cheery wave or a valiant fist if they realise they are on the television.
When the teams take the field, the cheers of the crowd echo around the ground and the calls of the players can easily be heard from the field. When the ground is frozen, you can all but hear the coin hit the clay after the toss-up. Hurling and football played in winter are different games. They are feats of endurance as much as skill.
The best club teams tend to have one or two big summer names in their ranks in winter. But even those stars are made look mortal by the wintry conditions often as they skate along glassy surfaces or struggle to keep their feet in the heavy mud around the goalmouth. The great thing about the club championships is the brightest names of summer can come across an unknown and obdurate corner back of little renown but plenty smarts. And the unknown can come out better.
Either way, the big players are content to slog it out with their school friends and neighbours and to contribute to a cause that is more personal and at least as deep as that which commits them to their county colours. Club finals are frequently low scoring and foul-ridden and ill-tempered. They are hazardous games for referees as the fine line between a malicious foul and pure clumsiness is often obscured by the prevailing weather conditions.
At club matches, the supporters are usually louder and fiercer. During the gala days of summer, when the big All-Ireland games attract crowds comparable to any sporting occasion in the world, people tend to get carried along on a generally PG rated atmosphere of excitement. The club atmosphere is more frantic and solemn and because they are among family and friends, the more excitable members have no inhibitions when it comes to venting their frustration at officials or opposition teams.
From time to time, reports circulate about county finals or provincial games between bitter border rivals where order breaks down entirely, resulting in a general free-for-all on the side of the field involving everyone from team mascots to the team mascot's grandmothers, with failing light restoring order as much as the officials. At club matches, mugs of tea taste better than at any other time or in any other place in the world.
The press box is always the last place lit in the big summer stadiums on press box Sunday nights. Around tea-time, the caretaker will land in, jangling his bunch of keys. The presidents may have their names etched in marble in the foyer at Croke Park and the players alone hear the great cheer from the crowds in September. But it is an open secret in the GAA that the true saviours and bosses of the association are the tea ladies and the caretakers. They are the keepers of the gate.
"Twenty minutes more all right lads?" he will ask and disappear after a general mumble of assent. When he reappears, he will survey the row of heads bent close to computer screens and explain that the green metal door at the back of the stand will be left open. "Turn the light out when ye leave," he will say cheerily. "I am off for me tea."
The sound of keyboards clattering faster is the last sound in these great stadiums in the GAA year. Nobody particularly wants to be the last person left in Clones or the Gaelic Grounds because there is nothing to match the eeriness of walking through an empty sports ground in late December. And finding the promised green gate can be a perilous task. All lights are off in the stadium and the wind whistles through the tunnels and corridors and outside you can hear the sound of early evening traffic.
But the stadium, all but closed for the year, stands outside of time, a place of ghosts.
