As de facto starts to a championship season go, Sunday’s fare in Celtic Park was a little like a cyclist getting a puncture on the way to the starting line on day one of the Tour De France – deflating.
The Championship buzz had stirred in me more than ever this year. You know what I mean: you wake early, devour the Sunday papers over breakfast and do just about anything – pair the orphan socks, watch the farming forecast - to pass time before the big throw-in. I turned off the television after 20 minutes. As a spectacle, it was better on the radio.
As the fallout was debated over the radio waves that evening, my mind wandered back to Congress at the start of April in Cork, for that is where the Derry-Monaghan match was lent its ugly tenor. The GAA’s experimental rules were shelved that day, when they failed to get the two-thirds majority required to be enshrined in rule.
It is common – even populist – to have a go at the GAA these days; they are easy targets, the common perception being that the Association is run by a bunch of conservative “backwoodsmen” hell-bent on anchoring our games in a bygone time.
While it is true that there are some who do little to debunk that myth, anyone at Congress that Saturday afternoon will recognise that if you look beyond the Farrah trousers and the dodgy combovers, there was a real desire amongst GAA members for the disciplinary problems that sully hurling and football to be addressed.
The motion to permanently implement the new rules, which included the controversial yellow card, was defeated by eight votes. It was defeated because some inter-county players and the more influential and vociferous managers were happy to continue as before – rendering referees hapless and powerless interlopers as they played the game the way they saw fit.
It is important to remember that 82 percent of players polled by the GPA wanted the rules shelved and a reversion to the old ways. The managers were the same, although some went against the grain and probably risked the ire of their peers by speaking out in their favour.
It is hardly surprising to hear that Seamus McEnaney and Damian Cassidy were amongst the biggest detractors. Three days after Congress, at a press conference to promote the Allianz NFL finals, Cassidy, Derry’s charismatic manager, gave a unique insight into the world of a manager, where the expediency of results trump any other cause.
“The managers are irrelevant,” he said, when asked by a journalist if their influence had decided the outcome of the vote.
“The managers will come on the TV and they will gurn and they will cry and they will complain.
“Every manager is in the business of looking after their team and getting results. They don’t care about how another team does or how a referee does. I’m not interested in that.
“All I am interested in is how my team gets on. If that means I can persuade or intimidate or work somebody else’s side to my advantage, we’ll do it. That’s the nature of the game.”
The notion that they have a duty to entertain or uphold any standards is anathema to some managers. The return to the old rules was a carte blanche invitation to revert to the old ways, warts and all. It manifested in one of the most shameful games of football witnessed in some time. It was hardly surprising. It was always going to be this way – and probably worse after they felt they had been put in leg-irons throughout the league.
Seamus McEnaney was as indignant as ever after the match. As expected, Banty wasn’t outraged by what went on. There had been no epiphanies, no change of mind; in fact the game had crystallised his warped mantra.
“Absolutely no change in my mind at all,” he said as obstinately as ever. “If there are decisions to be made by linesmen or umpires, then they need to make them.
“It would bring the physicality out of the game; we need to keep the physicality in the game.”
That’s where Banty and I will never agree. “Physicality” is his favourite buzzword, along with “manliness,” which he appears to have a different definition of than any dictionary I have. Manliness: having qualities traditionally ascribed to men, as strength or bravery.
There is nothing manly about kicking someone in the ankle, less still in kneeing an opponent in the groin. These lofty ideals that Ulster footballers are guardians of the flame of the traditional values of masculinity were rubbished with every grubby foul, every needless altercation and all the off-the-ball incidents. Banty and company will continue to spout their nonsense as long as they are given an audience, and as long as people buy into their ludicrously self-serving assertions.
The physical and manly elements that once made Gaelic football great are being devalued by such cheap talk. How many fair shoulder-on-shoulder collisions did we see in Celtic Park? How many examples of players putting their bodies on the line to make those Marc O Se-style full-length blocks lit up the gloom? None. Or none that I can remember. The players were too busy exacting petty revenge, settling old scores and generally not letting the football get in the way of their tribal war.
And it all comes back to the rules. Under the system trialled in the National League, Fergal Doherty and Dick Clerkin would have been yellow carded for their wrestling match after 23 minutes. In retrospect it seems so obvious that a couple of early bookings would have diffused all the sulphur in the Derry air.
Instead the referee, Jimmy White, hamstrung by the rules and fearful of causing a scene, flashed yellow and the boys were allowed go at it again. And again. Six minutes later, Doherty rugby-tackled Gary McQuaid and wasn’t admonished for the foul. Another yellow would have meant red and an early shower, so White opted to let the matter slide, which allowed the Derry midfielder to stay on the pitch. He was then caught on camera kicking Clerkin across the ankles, a sneaky move that was somehow missed by White, his two linesmen and the four umpires.
The meter is now well and truly ticking for Doherty. Ironically, he finally got what he deserved after 57 minutes for the least dangerous of a series of shameful infractions. His late shoulder charge alone was enough to merit a yellow card and an early shower under the experimental rules, but was merely the foul that tipped him over the edge on Sunday.
The rules that we have trusted for so long play into the hands of Monaghan and Derry, the teams that choose not to play football. The changes the GAA so desperately wanted to introduce were designed to protect the best footballers from the bruisers who are encouraged to go out on the field with one goal: to seek and destroy.
Ironically, Monaghan have some of the best footballers in the country, but their contribution is shackled by managerial orders and the maniacal approach that is now de rigueur in Ulster. Tommy Freeman has treated us to many wonderful moments in a Monaghan jersey; on Sunday he lowered himself to a benchmark that had been set at ankle height. His late tackle, for which he received nothing more than a yellow card, was symptomatic of the rot that was allowed to fester from the first whistle.
The reaction over the last few days has been interesting: from the craw thumping opprobrium of the footballing purists to the misguided apologists, everyone has had their say.
As expected, the old “sure it’s part and parcel of Ulster football” chestnut was given a roasting. Speaking on RTE’s Take Your Point, Jimmy Magee proved once again that the “Memory Man” should be consigned to just that. Listening to his self-righteous ramblings confirmed that he is as deluded as those Munster fans who turned up at the Heineken Cup final on Saturday in their red jerseys.
We, the lay people, were talked down, as if there was no way we could understand fabled rivalries that run deep in football’s Bible belt. Magee and his sidekick, former Dublin footballer Keith Barr, wheeled out all the old clichés: the “hurly burly” of Ulster football, the “rough and tumble” of a manly game. “It’s a man’s game,” Magee retorted when admonished by GOAL chief John O’Shea.
All these grubby little euphemisms are just shorthand for violence that, somehow, has come to be accepted as the norm. If the Ryan Report into institutional child abuse last week taught us anything it is, that as a nation, we have a dangerous tendency to sweep what is unsavoury under the carpet.
We the media have a responsibility, too. We portray Ulster Championship games as mystical border battles that are beyond the comprehension of the civilised denizens of the three other provinces. The players are depicted as warriors and matches are talked about in marshal vernacular. Then we fulminate when things turn ugly.
Without wishing to slip into Tommy Gorman mode it is hard to deny that allowing this kind of behaviour to continue is jeopardising the future of our games. It is almost a cliché at this stage but the GAA is being left in rugby’s wake. It is lazily argued that children won’t want to play games with rules that encourage violent behaviour and don’t punish disrespect to officials. Kids get a kick out of watching grown men leather eachother around a pitch; to them it’s like WWE with referees who don't bother making any floor-thumping interventions.
Ultimately, it is parents who decide where their kids will take their first steps in the sporting world. When placed against the shiny backdrop of Leinster’s Heineken Cup win over Leicester, the Monaghan-Derry match was a PR nightmare for the GAA.
At a time when the economic migrants of the Celtic Tiger have decamped to the rural commuter towns of Ireland and people are drifting back towards the more traditional values of a simpler time, the GAA should have little trouble winning over the hearts and minds of the next generation. And yet, it is rugby that will make hay as the GAA’s reputation gets dragged through the mud ahead of another summer of discontent.
However, all is not lost. If the GAA shows it has the will to defeat the self-serving few, the experimental rules can be re-introduced next year and Ulster’s days of shame will be quickly consigned to bitter memory.