I had forgotten it was former Northern Ireland international Iain Dowie who coined the term “bouncebackability”. When he first used it during the 2003-2004 English football season, it was the source of much hilarity – by 2005 it had entered the Oxford English Dictionary.
He was managing Crystal Palace in the Championship at the time, and in that division a certain resilience, an ability to recover from setbacks, is pretty much essential over 46 games. If you happened to lose a game on Wednesday, there’s probably a game on Saturday. If you lose that one, there will be two more games the following week.
It was not a phrase, or a mindset, that really had much currency in Gaelic football at the time. If you lost your first game in the provincial championships, you often had five or six weeks to dream it all up again – as Galway did so successfully in winning the first backdoor All-Ireland of 2001.
For 20 years, we saw how hard it was for losing provincial finalists to expend all that energy, lose their showpiece occasion, and then try to recover in seven days to win a round four qualifier. It proved fiendishly difficult for even the best teams. In the GAA, defeats were supposed to be fatal – teams often had difficulty handling their second chance.
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Now there might be no greater skill in a team’s armoury than a capacity to ride the dips and swells of a summer of football. In fact, the relatively serene sailing conditions for the likes of Dublin and Derry up to this point could be looked on as a major disadvantage going into this weekend.
It should surprise absolutely no one of course to discover that the market leaders in this area are Mayo. They were riding high in April, as the old song goes, but couldn’t even wait until May to get shot down by Roscommon.
They reassembled, marched on Killarney and gave Kerry their first home championship defeat since 1995. Then they lost to Cork, and finished third in a group they were in pole position to top. Their reward for that was a trip to Salthill seven days later, which, being Mayo, was no problem to them whatsoever.
All year Galway resembled nothing more than the enthusiastic kayaker negotiating their way through a few bumps and spills, serenely keeping their head above water ... little knowing that the 200-foot fall lay just at the horizon line. They couldn’t extricate themselves from the rapids in Carrick-on-Shannon last Sunday week, and by the time they’d righted the ship, they were over the top of the waterfall.
Monaghan have hit two last-minute winners, and a last-minute equaliser already this summer, and no team seems more suited to a season that necessitates keeping your head on an even keel, even while your own performance level fluctuates wildly.
We all sang their praises after their last-gasp heroics against Tyrone in the Ulster championship ... except their own supporters, arch-pessimists that they are, who told us they’d probably go out the next day and blow up.
They persevered through that spirit-crushing hammering to Derry, and by the time the group stages came around, they saw fit to draw with Derry while sacrificing all their flair players, brought back Jack McCarron to hit eight points from play to beat Clare, lost to Donegal, and then beat Kildare away from home.
How on earth do you make any sense of that? Finer, more bony-arsed minds than mine have pondered such questions. Armagh won’t have been too upset to draw them – but the feeling, one suspects, is mutual.
If you closed one eye, and looked at it in a certain light, you could say that Kildare have taken a step forward this year. Finally there was a creditable performance against the Dubs in the Leinster Championship. They qualified out of their All-Ireland group after a stirring win over Roscommon that showed a ton of character and resilience. But the season ended in calamitous defeat, rancour and bitterness. The suspicion remains that no ghosts were exorcised, no questions definitively answered, and for all the spirit shown at various stages, no real progress made.
Cork started the year with a loss to Clare, lost a game they could have won against Kerry, and yet are still there, and finally on the upstroke ahead of this weekend.
Kerry have had to recover from that defeat to Mayo in Killarney. Tyrone were caught on the hop unforgivably by Monaghan, played poorly against Galway, nearly lost to Division Three side Westmeath, and yet bizarrely still look like a team trending in the right direction (this may have much to do with Darragh Canavan’s startling impersonation of his dad.)
Armagh have taken a woeful hammering from their own fans, lost an Ulster final on penalties, and still managed to secure a week off for themselves. Dublin and Derry’s wobble, if or when it comes, will now be fatal – and that simple fact must be weighing on them, ever so slightly.
Alongside bouncebackability, a second phrase made it all the way from English football to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2005 – and that was “squeaky-bum time”. Teams have had to show plenty of the first to get this far, they’ll have to endure a healthy portion of the second in the next four weeks.
