Football is all the poorer for its loss of innocence
The football boots that Eamonn Mongey wore for Mayo in their 1951 All-Ireland SFC final win and which for many years resided in Killoran's Bar in Tubbercurry.
It is at this time of year, when the grass begins to stir beneath last year’s fallen leaves, that Junior ‘A’ parish teams begin to look towards the year ahead. There is talk of an early training session, to see who is available, and the kit bag that was buried under the stairs – after last year’s semi-final defeat – is exhumed.
Over 40 years ago, I remember the same stirrings taking place. Long before the days of all-weather pitches and hot showers, when football was unsophisticated and people played for fun, I was part of such a team. Back then most rural teams had barely enough players and such teams were formed from a mixture of the ever-enthusiastic and really reluctant. There would be seven or eight at training each Thursday evening and on Sunday afternoon, invariably, someone would have to be picked from the small attendance to make up the numbers.
There would be much talk about the year ahead and who might make up the panel. The panel didn’t mean what it means today; anything from 30 to 35 players who are dedicated to the club’s progress for the year ahead. Back in my day, a panel was the list of people who might be available during the season. They didn’t have to be all that fit, be good footballers or even dedicated to training. No, they just needed to be on the list so that on any given match day, there might be enough to form a makeshift band of warriors. The following pen pics are not unreasonable examples of panel members from that time.
• Bartley is the local mechanic. He smokes and drinks and his hands are always black with grease. He never trains but because numbers are so small, he always gets a game. He makes up for his lack of fitness by staying close to his man and getting his retaliation in first. If a row starts anywhere on the field, he is first in defence of a teammate.
• Andrew is a guard in the town. He won’t play on the town team for some reason but likes his football and so opted for playing with the Junior ‘A’ country mice. He’s friendly but leaves right after matches having first made time to chat to the local girls. He is originally from Tipperary and is seen as a bit of an exotic summer visitor to the parish.
• Alan is a reluctant hero. He attends all the games but is not really part of the regular setup. His mother is the club secretary and makes him bring his boots to every game – just in case. He much prefers soccer and is in fact an ace striker with the local town side.
It was only when he arrived at the field for the game each Sunday that the manager had any idea who might be available. The first hurdle was to see if there was enough to make up the starting fifteen. If there was enough, it generally lifted the mood. If the lads were down from Dublin, that was mighty altogether – now we had some chance, a win might even be on the cards. The manager could at least complete his fifteen-piece jigsaw, even if it did mean cutting off a few corners to make some of the pieces fit.
The field was an all-weather affair; it stood in all weathers, taking all the abuse a long winter and a herd of suckler cows could impose on it. It would only be the occasional farmer that would have the cows off in advance of the coming season and it would be an exceptional man altogether who would have gone to the trouble of rolling the surface. If the cow dung came off on the roller, good and well, if not, it stayed on the field.
The dressing rooms had showers. I remember togging out one time at the boot of a car in an absolute downpour. A cold shower before a game has a certain numbing effect and the player taking to the field stiff and frozen to the point of hypothermia. This carried all sorts of injury risks and it would usually be well into the second-half before a player would be fully thawed out, not to mention warmed up.
Markings on the fields were very simple. A square was marked in front of the goal by a club official with a bucket of dry lime and was applied by hand. Apart from that, no other lines were marked. A set of crude sideline ‘flags’ defined the fourteen, the twenty-one and the fifty-yard lines. These were torn rags nailed to short lengths of 2x2 timber. At best they were barely visible, at worst they were lethal – any player who might fall upon one of them risked sustaining a serious stomach wound.
I played football fairly regularly for about twenty years and I seldom witnessed any of the injuries we hear about today. I thought an ACL was a linkage in the steering mechanism of a tractor. Maybe we just couldn’t jump high enough or run fast enough but that particular injury was never heard of. There was the occasional lad on the team whose knee was ‘gone’ but he could still play. With the necessary strapping applied, this lad played centre field and was frequently our best player.
I hear of big players these days being unavailable for selection because they have a calf injury. In my day if you had a calf injury, it meant that one of your weanlings had ruptured his navel jumping over a stone wall. It would keep a lad out of a game but only if the vet failed to arrive before throw-in time.
Back in the day, we had no quads, glutes or hamstrings. We had no tweaks, niggles or strains. We didn’t train regularly, we never warmed up and we absolutely never warmed down. Maybe we did warm down, now that I think of it… in the pub on the way home. We mostly had two or three pints each and happily drove home. The lads driving to Dublin generally had to forego the third pint.
40 or 50 years ago, Gaelic football was a simple game. Generally, lads played because they liked football. They played for the parish and for each other. There was occasional success but not a lot. Tactics were plain and simple; it was the game of ‘catch and kick’. This meant you caught the ball and you kicked the ball. If in defence, you claimed the ball and got it up the field. If in attack, you gathered the ball and tried to kick it over the bar. It was not a tight possession game like it is today; it was a loose, joyous game where skill and cleverness generally won the day.
Was the game better back then, when facilities were basic and individual skill was more evident? Is the modern game better, a game where fitness and tactics have taken over to such an extent as to make the two games unrecognisable to each other? Despite huge advances in the way we play Gaelic football, I often get the impression that players these days don’t always enjoy the game.
There is no doubt that if the Junior ‘A’ team that I played on was to play our Junior ‘A’ team of today, they would destroy us. We quite simply would not have the ball to play with and we would never stand the pace. But I’ll tell you one thing, we’d be having few ‘hot wans’ on the way home while today’s lads would still be in their ice baths!
