Ciarán Murphy: Kerry have pointed us to Gaelic football's bright future

Irish Times

3 days ago

All-Ireland football final morning, and as I sit in my car, I think 'isn't it lovely not to have your own county involved, waking up with a knot in your stomach, up to high doh trying to arrange a last-minute ticket collection'. And then the feeling comes, a half-second after that. No, that's absolutely wrong. I'd kill to be from
Donegal
or
Kerry
right now ... or more accurately, I'd kill for
Galway
to be involved again this year.
I was a non-combatant last Sunday, so I didn't have any of those intense emotions churning away. But the All-Ireland final purports to be a celebration of the sport that everyone can take part in. This is reflected in the ticketing system, which is obviously a key point of discussion before every hurling and football final. Where do all the tickets go?
There will always be a few that end up in the hands of the spivs and bluffers of the nation, to channel my inner Eamon Dunphy. But every club in Ireland gets a couple, so they have a chance to have a presence at the Big Show.
Nothing established Paul Mescal's GAA bona fides quite like the moment during the All-Ireland hurling final when he admitted on the BBC to feeling guilty at taking two tickets in a corporate box for his dad and himself, swiping them from fans much more deserving than he.
I don't think that two bucks from Puckaun were going to get into the corporate box if Paul had said he couldn't make it, but even this generosity of spirit didn't insulate him from some social media brickbats. I always find that sort of reaction intensely amusing.
In any case, I may not have been nervous on Sunday morning, but I was excited. This was an All-Ireland final with a lot on the line. There were Kerry and Donegal's very specific motivations, obviously, but more generally there was a feeling that we needed to see something to round off the summer in a style that befitted that which had preceded it.
Was the entire sport on trial? That would be both a rampant overstatement of the facts, and also a vague feeling those of us who care about the sport had bubbling along under the surface.
In the same way that the desire for change was based on far more than just a terrible All-Ireland last year, the enthusiasm and outright joy at how the early stages of the championship had gone would not have dissipated after a poor final this year.
Kerry fans can claim vindication after the All-Ireland final. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho
But it would nevertheless be useful to give everyone a cracker before the intercounty action ends. That was my main emotion as I walked into the ground, silently bemoaning the colour clash that led to the vague sense that we were walking into a sporting event with only one team playing.
I took my seat in the upper Hogan, and with five minutes to go before throw-in, the seat beside me was still unused. This would hardly last much longer ... and it duly didn't. Striding up the steps, towards my seat with a sense of inevitability, was a former Galway All-Ireland winner. Having sourced my ticket a long way from Galway, I was a little bowled over by the coincidence.
Pádraic Boyce was a breakout, scene-stealing star of A Year 'Til Sunday, Pat Comer's groundbreaking documentary following Galway's All-Ireland final win in 1998. I remembered him more as the funniest player and the biggest talker on the Galway under-21 teams that my dad was a selector with in the early 1990s.
Within seconds we were talking about the All-Ireland final Galway had lost to Tyrone in 1992, trying to remember if Peter Canavan had gone bald before he'd even reached 21. Pádraic's father is a Donegal man, and he had grown up in Gweedore, so he was by no means a neutral.
The woman on the other side of me was from Offaly, teaching in Limerick, and about to get married to a man from Castleisland in Kerry. She was wearing a Kerry jersey, which to Pádraic and I seemed a little like she was trying too hard to impress the in-laws. But she may have felt like throwing her lot in with Kerry would be easier and more productive in the long run.
You could hardly blame her. That the game wasn't a classic had nothing to do with Kerry. Instead of a battle of wills, we got a clinic in how to play Gaelic football 2.0. They were quite simply exceptional, and
David Clifford
was otherworldly.
The entire day was one of those occasions in Croker where it was a pleasure to be there, a reminder of what's important, and a vindication of what makes it a day for everyone, not just the hardcore support from both counties. Support is a fluid concept – something you're born into before being taken away from, or something you marry into. We don't need to gatekeep these things.
The sandbox games continue. The passage of play before half-time as Kerry held on to the ball waiting for the hooter may have had
Jim Gavin
shifting uneasily in his seat, but the answer to that is a style issue, not a rule issue. The tinkering may not be done just yet, but all of a sudden the sport's future is something to look forward to.