Newsletter Number Nine
Wishing you a Merry Christmas, and trying to explain why we all get so carried away by football up here
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Hi all,
So it goes.
A few of you who aren’t from Ireland might have been wondering what Saturday’s email was about, and those of you not from a particular corner of it might have been wondering what all the fuss is about. Those of you from around these parts are all too familiar with the hype and the fuss. And the heartbreak.
There was a football match, a uniquely Irish one, and one in which my team met a familiar fate at the final whistle. Some might call it a fate worse than death. Some don’t get quite so worked up about it.
It’s a funny thing getting so worked up about the fortunes of a football team, though I’m sure everyone understands it from their own perspective, whether for or against it. No culture has ever existed that doesn’t have some sort of competitive physical activity, even if just informally. In Ireland we have our own version of the beautiful game, a strange hybrid between soccer and basketball whose vaguely interpreted rules make it sometimes feel like they came about as arbitrary was to differentiate us from the Brits. There’s worse reasons for doing things, I suppose. There’s also more leeway in Gaelic Football for legally assaulting people, which is surely the purpose of many sports.
Athletic contests exist to display and represent many of the attributes we wish to see displayed throughout any healthy, authentic life, and it is expected that the training of the skills and physical strengths required to compete will in turn make men and women more virtuous outside of the arena. For those who follow the feats of the athletes, it is also a vehicle for emotion.
Sports stir the emotions, and I wonder sometimes why particular sports seem to stir different ones; if the nature of the national sport dictates the emotional state of the citizens and spectators, or if the sports were designed to capture specific sentiments.
Most team sports were codified in the late 19th century, but existed for many years before – sometimes centuries. Our own hurling, it is claimed, has existed for 3,000 years apparently a form of battle training for the Celts. If soccer is the emergent activity that comes from throwing a round object in amongst a bunch of people and seeing what happens, then hurling is what happens when you give everyone a stick.
 Rugby too, appears to mimic taking to the field of battle, as war existed with men charging at each other in large groups and smashing each other to bits, as much war was conducted over history before the days of warfare involving tanks, guerrillas, drones and cyber-attacks. Whether a design feature or a reflection of the deep psychological longing for groups of men to charge together into other groups of men, bound together physically with teammates and tackling men who don’t come from the same town or country as you, rugby and ancient warfare share much in spirit.
What is Gaelic football trying to represent then? Sometimes it seems that the emotion and sentiment it so perfectly captures is one of pain; as if the whole sport evolved around trying to capture the feeling of a wet O’Neill’s ball falling out of the sky and slapping you on the forearm at a training session on a cold wet January morning. An entire sporting culture and organisation organically evolving over centuries to express such a uniquely Irish sense of pathetic misery.
So it feels like at times, anyway.
I’m not an expert at any sport though I do feel it important to write about this one for you. A crucial aspect of sport, of course, is place. Representation of not just yourself but your village, your tribe, your country or your region has always been intrinsic to sport. The fortunes of your land and your people sometimes quite literally rest on your performance on the field. This is something which is still so fundamental to sport in Ireland. We keep it between the lines at least, in public anyway, and rival fans are generally able to mix freely and cordially in and around the stadiums on big game days, though I’m sure on a quieter more local level there is plenty of skull-duggery amongst neighbouring towns and parishes.
But as much as sport is a great excuse to express irrational hatred for strangers who have the neck to inhabit the same space as you and the cheek to breathe your air – the bastards – it also ties people very closely to where they’re from in a way that they often lack by other means. If nothing else you can talk to and embrace your neighbours over your shared love of your team. The GAA’s amateur and localist status means its more like lining up every fella in your county up against a wall and picking the best ones than the money-laundering merry-go-round of professional sports elsewhere. Â
It can be lost sometimes as to why you’d even bother – who cares about where you’re from? Well, it matters a lot to how you see the world. Not just where you’re from but also where you are. I’m not exactly a creature of the land but I do pay attention to where I am, a lot. And whether it’s through conscious ties to a community or to the earth, or simply having an awareness of where you’re standing at a moment in time – life itself is defined by the relationship between yourself and your environment.
And so it’s good to get carried away by it all. To let yourself get high on who you are, and the people you grew up with. Life goes on. Sometimes it’s best not to think too much about it. You’re going to get a cold slap on the forearms with a hard wet ball either way.
Enjoy the Christmas – or today’s winter solstice for the pagans among you. Believe it or not the days will be getting longer again starting this week. The Grand Stretch as we call it here. Christmas might feel like any other week, or just another sad bank holiday. Maybe it’ll be a bit more like Christmases we remember as children, everything closed, nowhere to go, nowhere else you really want to be? All the possibilities of the world shrinking in, before they begin to slowly move outward again. It’s harder than ever to make New Year’s Resolutions or even just to predict how the world will look in the next few weeks and months, survival one day at a time might be enough.
I’m going to take a break for myself until the New year but looking forward to seeing you all back here again. Thanks for reading this far.
Merry Christmas to all,
Gav