THERE IS NOTHING as scorching hot as your burning hot takes in the middle of the championship summer.
These takes will burn your fingers and singe your skin. They come along and burst into Supernova before the end of two news cycles.
The latest ones come at the fag-end of a weekend that centred around events in Killarney, where too many people are taking themselves very seriously indeed.
Did you know, or had you heard, the Munster hurling championship now is, indeed, well, shite?
Munster hurling: You must be joking? Tom O'Hanlon / INPHO
Tom O'Hanlon / INPHO / INPHO
You don’t have to be as coarse as a hardy-handed man of the soil such as myself. You may prefer to couch it in the Irishmanwoman’s gift of understatement.
Go ahead and try it out for size. Suck your teeth when the subject of the Munster hurling championship is brought up and say, ‘Ah now, it’s gone back a fair bit.’
Mention that the crowds attending games saves it. That’s a doozy. Stadiums packing out because everyone is engaged in some clandestine PR war.
Or just say that it’s putrid or dung or cat. Whatever. Explain away that the All-Ireland champions are gone and somehow we are meant to feel bad about it.
Either way, it’s summer and this is Hot Take Central. Scorching your very eyeballs as you doomscroll.
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The natural development of TMHCISGA (The Munster Hurling Championship Is Gone Altogether) vibe is the bigging up of something else.
And here’s where we come in. The lads of Parnell Park that were there the day the Cats ran out of their nine lives.
The Leinster hurling championship is the new cool, the new funk. It is postmodern and it is knowingly ironic. It farms all the aura.
It arches an eyebrow. It lifts a hem. It’s got Old Skool Adidas and it’s sucking in its paunch.
It’s so freakin’ cool that the Lions rugby team, in town before playing Leinster next Saturday night, even showed up in Parnell Park to get a look at TJ and see if his eye was ‘in’ as much as ever.
The Golden Lions: Hurling Hipsters. Bryan Keane / INPHO
Bryan Keane / INPHO / INPHO
Us tastemakers of the press box drive all this stuff, of course. We mould and we poke and we bend the narrative to our will.
And we dragged in Niall Ó Ceallacháin into it too.
High on his own supply of Dublin beating Kilkenny for only the second time in 70 years in championship, he was, ahem, invited to tell us that Munster hurling ain’t nothing special and that in order to farm some aura, your head needed to be in the Leinster championship. Man.
“Yeah, there’s a lot said about Munster Hurling and a lot of it with merit,” Ó Ceallacháin began.
“I think, though, if you look at what’s actually happening day-to-day and week-to-week, the likes of Kilkenny, they have seven (sic) Leinster titles, there’s no Munster team that have taken them for granted over the last six, seven, eight years.
“You saw last year, the two semi-finals, two Munster teams and two Leinster teams. The Munster championship is a brilliant competition, but I also think maybe a bit too much is read into that too with regard to the days and the crowds and all that kind of thing.
“Ourselves, the likes of Kilkenny, the likes of Galway, the likes of Wexford, Offaly, we all stand on our own two feet. Also, if it’s not us in the middle of July in the All-Ireland final, I certainly hope it’s Galway or Offaly who are driving it forward.”
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If we can recruit a man like that, then there’s no stopping us.
This week, there will be hot weather. That brings the possibility of a barbecue. It can be a tricky social engagement, the old barbecue. Men at the grill, women at the Pino Grigio, children acting mental. Blood and snotters inevitable.
Such afternoons can be painful. Many a barbecue was sidetracked by long and incredibly tedious conversations over lawnmowers, strimmers and diversions into whether it might be better to buy a robot and be done with it all.
It’s not quite a cut-out and keep guide to keeping the conversation moving along, but this is a World Cup year and when that comes up, there’s always a hipster team to follow. For a decade or so, this was Belgium.
But then Lukaku got even slower and Eden Hazard ate all the pies and they went the way of the Munster hurling championship: shite.
It’s best to steer this conversation around the World Cup. Bring it back to the GAA, and declare your admiration for the Hipster’s Choice this summer.
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Dublin hurling: The Hipster's Choice around the barbecue grill for summer
THERE IS NOTHING as scorching hot as your burning hot takes in the middle of the championship summer.
These takes will burn your fingers and singe your skin. They come along and burst into Supernova before the end of two news cycles.
The latest ones come at the fag-end of a weekend that centred around events in Killarney, where too many people are taking themselves very seriously indeed.
Did you know, or had you heard, the Munster hurling championship now is, indeed, well, shite?
You don’t have to be as coarse as a hardy-handed man of the soil such as myself. You may prefer to couch it in the Irishmanwoman’s gift of understatement.
Go ahead and try it out for size. Suck your teeth when the subject of the Munster hurling championship is brought up and say, ‘Ah now, it’s gone back a fair bit.’
Mention that the crowds attending games saves it. That’s a doozy. Stadiums packing out because everyone is engaged in some clandestine PR war.
Or just say that it’s putrid or dung or cat. Whatever. Explain away that the All-Ireland champions are gone and somehow we are meant to feel bad about it.
Either way, it’s summer and this is Hot Take Central. Scorching your very eyeballs as you doomscroll.
The natural development of TMHCISGA (The Munster Hurling Championship Is Gone Altogether) vibe is the bigging up of something else.
And here’s where we come in. The lads of Parnell Park that were there the day the Cats ran out of their nine lives.
The Leinster hurling championship is the new cool, the new funk. It is postmodern and it is knowingly ironic. It farms all the aura.
It’s so freakin’ cool that the Lions rugby team, in town before playing Leinster next Saturday night, even showed up in Parnell Park to get a look at TJ and see if his eye was ‘in’ as much as ever.
Us tastemakers of the press box drive all this stuff, of course. We mould and we poke and we bend the narrative to our will.
And we dragged in Niall Ó Ceallacháin into it too.
High on his own supply of Dublin beating Kilkenny for only the second time in 70 years in championship, he was, ahem, invited to tell us that Munster hurling ain’t nothing special and that in order to farm some aura, your head needed to be in the Leinster championship. Man.
“Yeah, there’s a lot said about Munster Hurling and a lot of it with merit,” Ó Ceallacháin began.
“I think, though, if you look at what’s actually happening day-to-day and week-to-week, the likes of Kilkenny, they have seven (sic) Leinster titles, there’s no Munster team that have taken them for granted over the last six, seven, eight years.
“You saw last year, the two semi-finals, two Munster teams and two Leinster teams. The Munster championship is a brilliant competition, but I also think maybe a bit too much is read into that too with regard to the days and the crowds and all that kind of thing.
“Ourselves, the likes of Kilkenny, the likes of Galway, the likes of Wexford, Offaly, we all stand on our own two feet. Also, if it’s not us in the middle of July in the All-Ireland final, I certainly hope it’s Galway or Offaly who are driving it forward.”
If we can recruit a man like that, then there’s no stopping us.
This week, there will be hot weather. That brings the possibility of a barbecue. It can be a tricky social engagement, the old barbecue. Men at the grill, women at the Pino Grigio, children acting mental. Blood and snotters inevitable.
Such afternoons can be painful. Many a barbecue was sidetracked by long and incredibly tedious conversations over lawnmowers, strimmers and diversions into whether it might be better to buy a robot and be done with it all.
It’s not quite a cut-out and keep guide to keeping the conversation moving along, but this is a World Cup year and when that comes up, there’s always a hipster team to follow. For a decade or so, this was Belgium.
But then Lukaku got even slower and Eden Hazard ate all the pies and they went the way of the Munster hurling championship: shite.
It’s best to steer this conversation around the World Cup. Bring it back to the GAA, and declare your admiration for the Hipster’s Choice this summer.
Dublin hurling.
You heard it here first.
*****
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