I’M NEITHER A cultured nor a practical man. It has taken me until my mid-40s to buy a painting, yet I lack the skills to drill a hole in the wall without removing a dinner plate’s worth of plaster, so there it sits, Going to the Match by LS Lowry, propped up under the bedroom window.
Yeah . . . my one painting is not an original piece of work, is not avant garde, it’s not even on the kitchen wall like it’s meant to be – but I look at it every day and it makes me happy. Especially at this time of year.
It appears to be winter in the picture. The fans flocking from the industrial background to the stadium are hunched against the cold and the light is washed out, the sun not strong enough to burn off the mist and smoke.
Thousands are drawn towards the ground, the turnstiles bang at the middle of the picture their gateway of escape from the toil and cold of the season. Another season is in full blossom behind those walls, and they need what it has to offer to get them through these months of darkness.
There were many sound reasons to move the League of Ireland season towards the summer months back in 2002: better pitches, an advantage in European competition, more comfort for supporters. Yet as unlikely as it is to happen, I wish the season could be put back to where it’s supposed to be.
Football has many purposes, but none is greater than its way of seeing us through the cold. To move the game to another time of year is to mess with the circadian rhythm of life – it’s strawberries in November and mandarins in May type stuff. They might look ok, taste just about ok, but you know this isn’t as nature intended, just as you know intuitively when something is right.
I was a late convert to the League of Ireland, 13 years old by the time I started going regularly. I’d been to see Cork City a couple of times when I was younger but left indifferent to the experience. It was grand, like, but nothing you’d want to go out of your way for. One day it clicked.
That day was new year’s day in 1991, home to Derry City and I went along with my Dad for the want of something to do. The rain was constant and sharp. The entire crowd bar a couple of people in yellow, old-school fisherman waterproofs were huddled in The Shed. That was the only shelter in Turner’s Cross then; three grass banks formed the rest of the arena.
The details of the game are sketchy, as in I can barely recall one thing, but I remember the feeling. Whatever was going on outside on the Curragh Road and in the rest of the world became irrelevant as the players wellied into each other, every sliding tackle met with equal fervour from the one populated corner of the ground.
The zeal only increased after Derry took the lead, their opener greeted with a few roars from those who had travelled the length of the country on new year’s day on pre EU-intervention roads. Even then you could tell theirs was a madness worthy of the respect of being allowed into the home end and out of the storm.
City attacked the St Anne’s End in the second half so the view of their attempts to save the game weren’t fantastic. Still, there was a mesmerising quality to the exchanges, every challenge thunderous, loads of up and unders and the odd bit of football breaking out.
The awful weather did not detract from the game. In fact it elevated the contest to a place it could not have inhabited had the match been played out on a balmy July evening with the crowd languid and dispersed around the grass slopes.
You need a bit of inclemency in this game and some others. This is explained in The Rules, The Way of the Cycling Disciple by the Velominati.
“Nothing epic ever happens on a sunny day. The legendary battles of Earth’s Great Wars were all fought in rain, sleet or snow. The treks of the greatest explorers were undertaken in horrific conditions. When humans finally set foot on another planet, you can bet the weather will suck.”
When City equalised late on the sense of release was profound; a joyous moment that could only have been experienced by fans who had shaken off their hangovers, stepped into the cascading rain and roared their team on to parity while the players on both sides came to revel in the conditions and do what is their utmost duty: put on a show for the hard-working people of their town. Ok, I was in school at the time and not working at all hard but, as with Lowry, I think I got the picture.
This week, like many other weeks since the season was reorientated, I will pine for days like that 1-1 draw, or the 4-4 City-Shelbourne thriller from late December in ’97. The lament of a middle aged bloke who wants things to go back to the way they were? Yeah, perhaps, but there is merit beyond nostalgia in believing that to everything there is a season.
As rugby goes from strength to strength as a spectator sport in this country, you’d have to wonder, is part of its appeal the game’s capacity to stick to its calendar – at least more faithfully than other codes?
There are huge inter-provincial games this week, with their importance going far beyond the points on offer. They will give people the chance to be part of a crowd that walks together until they see the floodlights through the gloom.
