‘BETTER THAN SEX’ was the verdict of Ray ‘Lay Lay’ Burke, the former Waterford goalkeeper, on Passage winning their first county title in 2013.
And just to qualify he said what he said in an interview with Sunday Independent journalist Dermot Crowe in the Covid-ridden summer of 2020, ‘I hope the wife won’t read this on Sunday’.
Now, there’s an opening paragraph or two to help you scroll on.
Whatever it feels like, or indeed trumps, it is reasonable to ask if a couple of days on the beer is the appropriate response to getting the old leg over. I’m trying with all my might not to be a Jim Davidson/Benny Hill tribute act here, but as you can see, it’s not going so well. We’ll soon be well into ‘Suits You Sir’ territory.
All the same, there is a not entirely, but nonetheless little examined factor of how clubs treat the arrival of a county championship, and then go back into the trenches for provincial warfare.
It must be difficult for a management team to, well, manage this. Some are remarkable at this particular skill. Who among the GAA press corps will ever forget Jim Gavin, after managing the Dublin senior team to the 2013 All-Ireland title, remarking in the post-final press conference that other teams had already begun preparations for 2014 and, as a result, Dublin were already playing catch-up?
It could – and some would say should – have been a factor that caught out Edendork last weekend. Think about it. This is a sliver of land four miles wide, with, as we have detailed before, 14 clubs within a ten-mile radius.
Darren McCurry has that winning feeling. Andrew Paton / INPHO
Andrew Paton / INPHO / INPHO
And they won a Tyrone championship. In their very first final, well, after a replay. Against Errigal Ciaran, no less.
There’s a lot said about the Tyrone championship and the appeal of the last (bar Kilkenny, but they can’t wait to get it over with) straight knockout football championship left. The stakes, the passion, the consequences and the streaming costs could hardly be higher.
With 10 different winners over the past 20 seasons and not a single title successfully defended, it has become a means to an end for all clubs apart from Errigal Ciaran, who snapped up their third Ulster title in 2024, and they remain the only club from Tyrone to have landed that crown. Aside from Errigal, the county representatives have won just two games of Ulster club combat in the past decade.
But Edendork have Conleith Gilligan in their backroom, helping out his former Ballinderry Shamrocks teammate, Brian McGuckin. Gilligan has tasted All-Ireland success as a player and as coach of Kilcoo. He knows the contours of the Seamus McFerran Cup.
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Conleith Gilligan. John McVitty / INPHO
John McVitty / INPHO / INPHO
The Tyrone replay was on a Friday night. Edendork got to celebrate that night and for two days after.
But their own Monday club was spent in Coalisland, in The Elysium: a recovery suite jumping from the infra-red sauna into the ice baths. The disco pants were swapped for compression trousers.
It couldn’t have got all the badness out of their systems, but they did enough to get by Clonduff in Newry eight days after their maiden O’Neill Cup.
There’s something in all of this though, if you pan the camera out.
Last Saturday, the main Saturday night entertainment on RTÉ was of two amateur club teams, Edendork and Clonduff. One of them were fresh from partying in a way befitting of a breakthrough championship, or Jack Grealish on a quiet night.
No matter how well you acquit yourself, however, the Celebration Police are never far away.
And celebrations are a different story nowadays. Perhaps there was a moment in 2018 when the wild men of Donegal showed us all what we were missing out on.
Gaoth Dobhair won the Ulster Club final against Scotstown and it was an immensely popular victory for those that admired the brothers McGee, young Daire Ó Baoill, the half-Japanese diminutive playmaker Naoise Ó Baoill, the fluid grace of Odhran MacNiallais and their repurposed All-Star defender Kevin Cassidy enjoying an Indian summer as a battering ram full-forward.
Kevin Cassidy as a full-forward, 2018. Bryan Keane / INPHO
Bryan Keane / INPHO / INPHO
What happened thereafter was the first public Monday Club. Twitter was a different place back then and the numerous clips from their celebrations made it feel like it was practically live-streamed as they set up a boom-box and just let the madness unfold.
It spawned a thousand imitators. But none have done it better. At one point, there was a call put through from a GAA Podcast of the time with captain Niall Friel and MacNiallais on the line.
“We’ll have a few beers today,” said MacNiallais with some understatement. “Possibly tomorrow as well. Possibly Wednesday. We will see what Thursday brings…”
It peaked when Neil McGee and Kevin Cassidy were recorded in wife-beater vests, ‘calling out’ Corofin, their All-Ireland semi-final opponents.
After that game ended in narrow defeat, the former Mayo player and pundit David Brady wondered aloud if they might have over-celebrated their Ulster title. In a Ye Olde Tweet that we have to blow dust off, Brady wrote: ‘They will when the dust settles & time passes in a quiet moment ask did they pass up the opportunity of a lifetime,’ Brady chin-stroked.
The Gaoth Dobhair response to that was, well, less than parliamentary.
It would be a stretch to say that a few days spent drinking at the start of December would have any impact on the result of a game played two months later.
Niall Friel lifts the Seamus McFerran Cup in 2018. Bryan Keane / INPHO
Bryan Keane / INPHO / INPHO
However, when a county final leads into a provincial campaign, it does become a factor.
When Jim McGuinness became the Donegal manager in the late summer of 2010, he brought the players to meet a doctor, who patiently explained the effects of alcohol on the body.
A quick Google search will throw up the statistic that the healing of muscle strains or pulls are slowed down by over a third of the time due to reduced protein synthesis.
Not to be a Boring Dad here, but I can only play the hand I am dealt. I went to a wedding last Friday and drank the whole day through. That’s just me though, I’m an incurable romantic.
And I know your Garmin watch is accurate only up to a point, but most mornings I wake up with a body battery charge of high 80s, low 90s.
On Saturday, my body battery started the day at 20. It read 5 within a few hours and you can’t get lower than 5.
Stack another two days drinking on top of that, and it’s enough to kill a horse.
And yet, who would be the killjoy to throw a dampener on county final celebrations over the past two weekends?
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The art and science of balancing celebration with recalibration
‘BETTER THAN SEX’ was the verdict of Ray ‘Lay Lay’ Burke, the former Waterford goalkeeper, on Passage winning their first county title in 2013.
And just to qualify he said what he said in an interview with Sunday Independent journalist Dermot Crowe in the Covid-ridden summer of 2020, ‘I hope the wife won’t read this on Sunday’.
Now, there’s an opening paragraph or two to help you scroll on.
Whatever it feels like, or indeed trumps, it is reasonable to ask if a couple of days on the beer is the appropriate response to getting the old leg over. I’m trying with all my might not to be a Jim Davidson/Benny Hill tribute act here, but as you can see, it’s not going so well. We’ll soon be well into ‘Suits You Sir’ territory.
All the same, there is a not entirely, but nonetheless little examined factor of how clubs treat the arrival of a county championship, and then go back into the trenches for provincial warfare.
It must be difficult for a management team to, well, manage this. Some are remarkable at this particular skill. Who among the GAA press corps will ever forget Jim Gavin, after managing the Dublin senior team to the 2013 All-Ireland title, remarking in the post-final press conference that other teams had already begun preparations for 2014 and, as a result, Dublin were already playing catch-up?
It could – and some would say should – have been a factor that caught out Edendork last weekend. Think about it. This is a sliver of land four miles wide, with, as we have detailed before, 14 clubs within a ten-mile radius.
And they won a Tyrone championship. In their very first final, well, after a replay. Against Errigal Ciaran, no less.
There’s a lot said about the Tyrone championship and the appeal of the last (bar Kilkenny, but they can’t wait to get it over with) straight knockout football championship left. The stakes, the passion, the consequences and the streaming costs could hardly be higher.
With 10 different winners over the past 20 seasons and not a single title successfully defended, it has become a means to an end for all clubs apart from Errigal Ciaran, who snapped up their third Ulster title in 2024, and they remain the only club from Tyrone to have landed that crown. Aside from Errigal, the county representatives have won just two games of Ulster club combat in the past decade.
But Edendork have Conleith Gilligan in their backroom, helping out his former Ballinderry Shamrocks teammate, Brian McGuckin. Gilligan has tasted All-Ireland success as a player and as coach of Kilcoo. He knows the contours of the Seamus McFerran Cup.
The Tyrone replay was on a Friday night. Edendork got to celebrate that night and for two days after.
But their own Monday club was spent in Coalisland, in The Elysium: a recovery suite jumping from the infra-red sauna into the ice baths. The disco pants were swapped for compression trousers.
It couldn’t have got all the badness out of their systems, but they did enough to get by Clonduff in Newry eight days after their maiden O’Neill Cup.
There’s something in all of this though, if you pan the camera out.
Last Saturday, the main Saturday night entertainment on RTÉ was of two amateur club teams, Edendork and Clonduff. One of them were fresh from partying in a way befitting of a breakthrough championship, or Jack Grealish on a quiet night.
No matter how well you acquit yourself, however, the Celebration Police are never far away.
And celebrations are a different story nowadays. Perhaps there was a moment in 2018 when the wild men of Donegal showed us all what we were missing out on.
Gaoth Dobhair won the Ulster Club final against Scotstown and it was an immensely popular victory for those that admired the brothers McGee, young Daire Ó Baoill, the half-Japanese diminutive playmaker Naoise Ó Baoill, the fluid grace of Odhran MacNiallais and their repurposed All-Star defender Kevin Cassidy enjoying an Indian summer as a battering ram full-forward.
What happened thereafter was the first public Monday Club. Twitter was a different place back then and the numerous clips from their celebrations made it feel like it was practically live-streamed as they set up a boom-box and just let the madness unfold.
It spawned a thousand imitators. But none have done it better. At one point, there was a call put through from a GAA Podcast of the time with captain Niall Friel and MacNiallais on the line.
It peaked when Neil McGee and Kevin Cassidy were recorded in wife-beater vests, ‘calling out’ Corofin, their All-Ireland semi-final opponents.
After that game ended in narrow defeat, the former Mayo player and pundit David Brady wondered aloud if they might have over-celebrated their Ulster title. In a Ye Olde Tweet that we have to blow dust off, Brady wrote: ‘They will when the dust settles & time passes in a quiet moment ask did they pass up the opportunity of a lifetime,’ Brady chin-stroked.
The Gaoth Dobhair response to that was, well, less than parliamentary.
It would be a stretch to say that a few days spent drinking at the start of December would have any impact on the result of a game played two months later.
However, when a county final leads into a provincial campaign, it does become a factor.
When Jim McGuinness became the Donegal manager in the late summer of 2010, he brought the players to meet a doctor, who patiently explained the effects of alcohol on the body.
A quick Google search will throw up the statistic that the healing of muscle strains or pulls are slowed down by over a third of the time due to reduced protein synthesis.
Not to be a Boring Dad here, but I can only play the hand I am dealt. I went to a wedding last Friday and drank the whole day through. That’s just me though, I’m an incurable romantic.
And I know your Garmin watch is accurate only up to a point, but most mornings I wake up with a body battery charge of high 80s, low 90s.
On Saturday, my body battery started the day at 20. It read 5 within a few hours and you can’t get lower than 5.
Stack another two days drinking on top of that, and it’s enough to kill a horse.
And yet, who would be the killjoy to throw a dampener on county final celebrations over the past two weekends?
*****
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Bogue On Wednesday column County Finals GAA