Gavin Cooney

LISTEN, YOU’VE CLICKED in to a column so you’re already pricing in some indulgence. 

Granted we might be laying it on thick this week, but nonetheless, you’re here now so you may as well stick with us. This correspondent recently did his first-ever hurling liveblog for these digital pages and, lads, have ye heard about this Munster championship? 

If you are a regular reader, you’ll know this column has been a long attempt to repress its torturous forced adolescent marriage with Gaelic football by writing about soccer, golf, and Economic Impact Reports, all leavened with a bit of Oedipal snark toward the Gah. But our half-baked thoughts have never encroached upon hurling, as it was an alien activity to most of us growing up in Longford. We grew up considering hurling a bit like Riverdance: a high-quality televised choreography whose claims to encapsulate Irishness was at odds with the fact that access to it felt remote and unfathomable.

But now that we have proved our hurling bona fides by successfully completing a live-blog of Waterford v Tipperary, we feel a measure of acceptance within Hurling Country; granted, if not a passport, then at least a temporary visa.

And so it feels I have been given non-immigrant access to some kind of secret garden, where the sun shines in golden shafts through leafy shrubs while the fountains lightly gurgle and the chirping of the birds is punctuated by distant, disembodied roars of PULLONIT. Its denizens are a set of serene grandees who wear a pair of O’Neill’s shorts beneath a toga, floating easily about while clasping their scarred and battle-gnarled hands, greeting one another with a knowing nod of the head and a sure look, y’know. They also run a horse syndicate.  

I have earned my access to this innermost sanctum of Irishness, given I successfully completed a liveblog of Sunday’s meeting between Waterford and Tipperary. This is the ultimate entrance exam, given trying to liveblog every score and demented churn of a Munster hurling match is like trying to chronicle every single falling raindrop in a hailstorm. And that’s before you add in the further complications: everyone is wearing a helmet and so is hard to identify; half the players are named either Bennett, McGrath, or Mahony.

Anyway, now that I’m a hurling man, I’ve learned a few things which I am deigning to share with the rest of you outsiders. 

First of all, I’ve discovered my liveblogging style is best described as wristy. 

Secondly, I know it’s not correct to describe the secret garden as the land of milk and honey, because cows are infrequently milked in hurling country. 

Thirdly, what have I been doing with my life to date? Trying to figure out the methodology underpinning Expected Goals and wondering whether Troy Parrott would actually be better suited to playing in a false nine role between the lines so as to better link with team-mates under relationist tactical principles, when I could have been out there making punditry coin by using phrases like: Tipp are Tipp. 

What are Tipp? Listen, I don’t really know, other than the fact they are ultimately Tipp. 

In much the same way that Cork are Cork, and Kilkenny are Kilkenny. 

But in spite of their modern dominance, Limerick do not appear to have been elevated to the rhetorical status of being Limerick, while Clare are not Clare and Waterford are not Waterford. Clare may not be Clare but they won’t fear Limerick, while this group of Limerick players won’t fear anyone. If you’re Tipp, Cork, or Kilkenny, everything appears to be expressed on your terms. If you’re anyone else, you’re defined in relation to another. 

Don’t blame me if you don’t like this, I am only reading the stone tablets handing to new arrivals in the secret garden.

This may strike you as simplistic talk, but the men of the secret garden have long since figured out that the only nonsensical act in the world is to try and make sense of it. Each morning in the secret garden, for instance, begins with a brief recital of the motto handed down by Elder Dalo: Sure look it’s hurling, a thousand mad things and someone comes out on top. 

In the secret garden, they understand that the world is nothing but a chaotic succession of extreme events and so you’re best just to sit back and enjoy it, rather than try and sit down to rationalise it with your analysis and laws and supply chains. What’s that, the rules-based international order? Sure you can’t enforce all the rules, nobody would want to see that. 

There are obviously no referees admitted to the secret garden, given they are a black-clad affectation copied from football whose purpose is to prevent the outbreak of a good manly game of hurling, and so will spoil utopia with their inclination toward authoritarianism. No, this is an aristocracy that can rule itself, given it is an egalitarian group united by their reverence for the great game of hurling. 

I write this envoy shortly after an encounter with one of the members of the secret garden. He glided over, and we exchanged a sure look, y’know as he shook my hand with a grip that broke three of my fingers, which happily made me feel more at ease as I suddenly looked like I was another man around here who had hurled in the 90s. “Sure look,” I said in reply, before asking him to smash my front teeth. 

Instead he said he realised I was new around here, but that he had read my liveblog and that while it was riddled with outrageous errors – there are no free-kicks in hurling, teams defend their square and not their box, and that I had let myself down by giving the referee the dignity of printing his name – that sure look, y,know it had been done, telling me that the measure of success in hurling, be it the coach, player, or liveblogger, is not that anything is done well, but merely that it is done at all. 

Sports journalism is very rarely a vehicle for self-esteem – most of this job involves hanging around somewhere to get three minutes’ of grudging banality from a sportsperson who is richer, more popular, better looking, and even more loathing of you than you are of yourself – but being granted this sense of achievement for the mere association with hurling was a heady rush. This has been my ultimate lesson, that I have been wrong to accuse hurling people of an incorrigible self-regard.

It’s not that we hurling people are better than you, it’s just that this thing we are doing is so much better than whatever thing you are doing. 

Excited by my sense of acceptance, I was eager to contribute even more and continue chronicling our great game in frantic and misspelt 75-word updates. And so I pulled out my fixture list and told the hurling man I could liveblog the Leinster clash between Offaly and Kilkenny at which point he grimaced awkwardly and said oh, sure look, y’know, I think maybe you’ve come to the wrong place and told me to leave.