Gentlemen, he said
I don’t need your organisation, I’ve shined your shoes
I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards
But Eden is burning, either get ready for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards
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Bob Dylan, “Changing Of The Guards”
I
By the third reading of Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, I still had no real idea what was going on.
“Great writing,” he broadly posited, “is always at work strongly (or weakly) misreading previous writing.” No matter a writer’s sensational talent (Bloom’s attention was set firmly on greatness alone), their work was intrinsically engaged with all that had come before it.
As the book’s title implied, this exchange cultivated an uneasiness on the writer’s part as they contended with what had come before them and strived to create something original.
If that much seems clear, Bloom nevertheless felt cause to lament “how weakly misread The Anxiety of Influence has been, and continues to be” in the preface to his book’s second edition printing. An audacious stance given the complexities of his theorising, on the uncertain footing of one Bloom would have regarded as a dope, no doubt, let’s take the anxiety of influence elsewhere.
II
Fans don’t really exist within the GAA. There comes with that term an allusion of choice that is at odds with the county or counties you’re ultimately left supporting.
However appealing it may have been for the 10-year-old me to, say, cheer Galway’s footballers on to All-Ireland success in 2001, I was born in Sligo. Throwing my lot in with a county I had no connection to on the basis of success would have been preposterous, really. It wouldn’t enter your mind.
No adherent to GAA exceptionalism, I am nevertheless bound by its assignment of allegiances in Ireland. Be it through birthplace (Sligo) or inheritance (Limerick), you take what you’re given and hope for the best.
III
In an article welcoming the West Indies team of 1957 E. W. Swanton has written in the Daily Telegraph that in the West Indies the cricket ethic has shaped not only the cricketers but social life as a whole. It is an understatement. There is a whole generation of us, and perhaps two generations, who have been formed by it not only in social attitudes but in our most intimate personal lives, in fact there more than anywhere else. For the inner self the die was cast.
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C. L. R. James, Beyond A Boundary
IV
What can Bloom’s theory tell us about the GAA then?
Within the creative process of writing, Bloom argued that the writer is only ever responding to what has been written previously – in one way or another (that’s where things get difficult). He found it implausible that anything could be considered truly original; without some trace of influence that has been passed along.
Something similar is at play within the GAA community. Assumptions abound regarding the characteristics of counties, handed down matter-of-factly as the colours of the jersey, or the heroes who wore it.
Young Kerry footballers do not need to be schooled in the nonchalant arrogance that their county’s historical success permits. Cork’s hurlers could go many more years without All-Ireland success and Marty Morrissey would still proclaim, “The Rebels are back” following a one-point win on the opening weekend of the league.
For better or worse, supporters (while avoiding the absurdity of “patrons”, say, “supporter” feels more appropriate than “fan”) contend with such expectations too. The very act of supporting your county is not carried out in a vacuum, and the stories told cannot be conveniently disregarded.
If you’re from a big, successful county, you come to assume that success is always nearby. In smaller, less heralded or beaten down counties, your expectations of what can be achieved are more humble. Like Bloom’s encumbered writer, your thinking is bound by generational experience and you work within the framework of what you know to be capable.
More often than not this is the case, anyway. Last weekend’s inter-county games provided a few interesting case studies, however.
V
Limerick defeated Kilkenny by 11 points while shooting 20 wides in a somewhat predictably one-sided National Hurling League final.
For the second time in four years, Roscommon defeated Mayo in the Connacht Senior Football Championship. In the same competition in the early hours of Sunday morning, New York delivered on what they have previously threatened to do and finally won a provincial match; defeating Leitrim on penalties in the Bronx.
Although nothing is guaranteed, the Clare footballers put themselves within a favourable semi-final against Limerick of a place in the Munster final after beating Cork on Sunday afternoon.
Historically speaking, each one of those four winners bucked a trend.
Limerick may have won four of the last five All-Irelands, but at any time before 2018 such a result in a national final (or any match between both counties, really) would have been unthinkable.
Roscommon have been threatening the provincial hegemony of Galway and Mayo for some time now, but they’ve still won less than a quarter of the Connacht championships that both counties have racked up.
Most people agree that New York’s first championship win has been coming, but they had to hold their nerve as Leitrim spurned chance after chance and somehow failed to score four successive penalties in the shoot-out.
And Clare, with their two Munster final wins (only one in living memory), got the better of Cork with their 18 appearances in provincial deciders across this nascent century alone.
To varying degrees, wins for Limerick, Roscommon, New York and Clare were not shocking, but they were unusual. For the supporters, anyway.
VI
We’ve played Kilkenny in matches, and they’ve beaten us well. Tipperary… oh hold God, Tipperary… they love beating you. This is what I grew up with. We were always the underdogs.
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Éamonn Cregan, All-Ireland winning Limerick hurler
VII
From my standpoint as a Limerick supporter (a paternal inheritance that has blossomed in recent years), it is clear now that recent success has not been a flash in the pan. Although nothing is taken for granted in sport, I am confident that one or two trips will be taken to Croke Park this summer in support of this team.
And yet, these last few years are so far removed from the first 16 or 17 seasons I spent watching Limerick as to still feel somewhat ephemeral.
In all manner of matches, John Kiely’s team have proven themselves capable of handling whatever scenario arises. But when Kilkenny raced out to a three-point lead on Sunday afternoon, my heart ever so slightly sank.
Is this it then? They’re going to do what Kilkenny did in ’07 – run up an unassailable lead and hold Limerick at arm’s length thereafter. F*** it anyway. What’s Marty Morrissey going to say about this?
To my eyes, those black-and-amber jerseys, along with the red of Cork or blue-and-yellow of Tipperary, continue to inspire dread. Too often have I seen the green of Limerick dissolve into the surrounding pitch as those counties ran amok without what seemed an opponent to trouble them.
Although the footballers of Clare, New York or Roscommon are not at Limerick’s respective level, for all the progress they’ve made I would wager that each team’s supporters succumbed to their worst fears at some point across the weekend.
However good we’ve become, we’ll surely not be better than them.
VIII
Look where we are now, we’re on the f****** cusp of it. Another goal and they’re f*****. They think we’re going to back off, that we’re going to be frightened, that we’re 22 and 23 and we haven’t done this s*** before. Well I’ve f****** done it loads of times, and those boys have done it loads of times. We’ll f****** take it to them!
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Roscommon manager Kevin McStay, half-time in the 2017 Connacht final
IX
Which brings us back to Harold Bloom and his theory.
If the great writer is caught in an inescapable exchange with her forebearers, and each GAA community is bound by its understanding of past experience, what is one to do with a team like these Limerick hurlers?
But for a brief spell in the 1930s and the occasional good year before and after, Limerick’s general lot in life fell somewhere between heroic and shambolic defeat. Then, without much warning, five or six years passed and there emerged a team that is vying with Brian Cody’s Kilkenny to be considered the greatest of hurling’s modern age.
Perhaps then it is the supporters who are most closely aligned with Bloom’s theoretical writer. It is in the supporters’ collective outlook that experience and expectation are believed to possess some determinative quality about where a county stands and what it should hope to achieve.
The source of so much anxiety, what Limerick’s hurlers and the footballers of Roscommon, New York and Clare demonstrated last weekend is that what occurs on a GAA pitch need not necessarily resemble what is written on the page.
If Bloom is correct, great writing is ultimately bound to the great writing which preceded it. But great hurling and Gaelic football can as fruitfully emerge when its practitioners dispense with the notion that what happened before will have any bearing on what happens today.
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