Given the vogue for end of the millennium navel-gazing, there is probably someone somewhere on this great sporting planet beavering away on a coffee table book chronicling the great venues of the modern era. Debate is likely to be fierce but there are some stadiums guaranteed to make the cut. The Nou Camp in Barcelona. Boston's Fenway Park. The Stade de France in Paris. The Sydney Cricket Ground. All places that started off as steel, wood and concrete but which have become imbued with so many memories and so much tradition.
But, however exhaustive the list becomes, Plunkett Park in Pomeroy, Co Tyrone is unlikely to figure. This is to take nothing away from the efforts of everyone associated with the local club which have transformed it from the bare field on which we took some of our first faltering footballing steps on freezing cold Saturday mornings almost 20 years ago. It is just that Plunkett Park is unlikely to be a name that sets pulses racing among the great global sporting public.
Unless, that is, you have any association with Drumragh Sarsfields GFC because last Sunday evening in the sun-kissed environs of Plunkett Park the club doubled its number of county titles to two with a 3-6 to 0-11 win over Stewartstown in the Tyrone Junior Championship final. The previous title was wrested from the grasp of Urney 12 years ago at the same venue and so there are now members of the Drumragh club who would now quite happily have their ashes scattered over this sacred Pomeroy turf.
In the great scheme of things a junior football title is probably not something to get over-excited about. For those of us who had been man and boy with the club last Sunday's final was a lot of things and could be described in many ways but "pretty" would not be one of them. The football was tough to the point of simplicity. Only 26 players finished the hour, with two from each side making the long walk.
Drumragh were buoyed by an early goal and spent the rest of the time defending the early lead they had plundered with increasing degrees of nervousness. But forwards and goals win matches and their three provided enough of a comfort zone to withstand some late pressure.
It was a strange yet enervating thing for us to watch. Drumragh is a club which was founded in and around the margins of Omagh less than 30 years ago and there were players on Sunday's team who were among the first crop of under 10s who slopped and shivered through the mud of St Pat's Park on those winter weekend mornings all those years ago. This was about a club which had been first created and then nurtured by a small group of dedicated men who gave of their time to try to set us on the way to football righteousness. That most of us slipped up along the way is hardly any fault of theirs.
We didn't know it, but life as an under-age Drumragh player was a tremendous finishing school for everything that modern life would later throw at us. The way that nine or 10 of us would be packed unceremoniously into the back of a car to be transported to some far-flung part of Tyrone taught us that you cannot always expect to travel in comfort. Even now there are Drumragh men who find the sardine crush of the London Tube at rush-hour a most luxurious way to travel.
THE fact that those same journeys to games were undertaken in a frenzied rush because we were invariably 10 minutes late for every fixture taught us all the value of good timekeeping. No Drumragh man is ever late for a job interview. Some of the more colourful antics of the mothers as we delivered yet another footballing lesson to their hapless sons taught us always to be wary of women with umbrellas. And the sheer terror of the cold showers in the St Pat's Park dressing-rooms did more to promote clean living and banish all impure thoughts than a hundred transcendental prayer sessions ever could have. After all those early introductions to stoicism and piety, expect a Drumragh old boy to be Pope at some stage in the next century.
They probably don't realise it and would no doubt be more than a little embarrassed to hear it but everyone who played on Sunday and all those of us who have gone before them owe people like Pat McGlone, Dermot O'Kane, Ciaran McGlone, Paul Doris and Paddy Mullan tremendous debts of gratitude. Without them and without others like them throughout the length and breadth of this GAA country the games would not have survived and developed into the vibrant life-force they now are.
The zeitgeist in the GAA seems to be all about media bans, punishing training weekends and corporate boxes in the new Hogan Stand. In its obsession with these lofty themes the national media in particular has lost sight of some of the fundamental GAA building blocks. In the small rural clubs of counties like Tyrone nobody really cares about what happened at the Cork press night or about how inadequate the media facilities may be at this or that inter-county venue.
That is why on the concrete terraces of Plunkett Park last Sunday the All-Ireland football semi-final between Cork and Mayo which had just finished merited only marginal interest. Everyone knew what had happened but after a few minutes of absent-minded discussion, attention turned to the more important matters in hand. Who was going to mark Stewartstown's former county player, Fergal Logan? And was Adrian O'Kane, Drumragh's water-carrier for the afternoon, up to the job after a hectic week celebrating a reserve championship win the previous Monday? These were the important things because in the GAA, as in life, all politics is local.
After the final whistle and the presentation of the Tyrone Junior Football Championship trophy for 1999 we drifted towards the clubrooms hanging on the coat-tails of the players who had represented our club so proudly for us. Inside the dressing-room the celebration meal was being organised and the older players were being told not to think about retirement because they would be needed next year in the maelstrom of Intermediate football.
By now some of the players had towels around their waists and were making for the showers. Others stayed togged out for a few more precious minutes. They sat quietly on the benches smiling tired smiles and slowly shaking their heads in half-disbelief. A few of us stood at the door slightly detached from what was going on, looking wistfully in as the steam from the showers drifted out into the hallway. It was great to have been there and it was a privilege to have been a part of it. But wouldn't it have been brilliant to have played?
