Let’s hear it for hurley, a great game played by the burly Irish
As my learned friend Thackery said: ‘Thirty Irishmen with wooden clubs. What could possibly go wrong?’ I refer of course to the All-Ireland Hurling final between Cork and Clare a weekend ago, one of the greatest shows on earth.
Despite growing up in Co Antrim, I knew nothing of hurling until I watched the final on BBC2. I was mesmerised by the skill and the energy of the 30 players on show in front of 83,000 at Dublin’s Croke Park stadium. And every one of them an amateur.
I was brought up on rugby and cricket, once regarded in the Ireland of old as the English (and therefore the rulers) games whereas Gaelic football and hurling were the sport of the brave Nationalists. Put in the old sectarian shorthand, Gaelic games for Catholics, ‘English’ games for the Prods. (I shall return to this daft classification later.)
In fact there are more than 150 GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) clubs throughout England catering for both codes, football and hurling, with 26 in London alone. And before you make the stereotype joke, no, they are not all in Kilburn; there are branches in Sunbury-on-Thames, Dulwich, Fulham, Wandsworth and Chipping Barnet, none of them known as Paddy Central.
Anyway enough of the stats; a quick lesson on the basics. All players are amateurs so earn money from ‘proper’ jobs, the majority graduates, including Shane O’Donnell of Clare, a PhD fresh from Harvard. There are 15 players-a-side including the goalkeeper and they need to be fit because the pitch is twice the length of the standard soccer and rugby fields. Each half is 35 minutes long.
The ball (sliotar) is about the size of a cricket one and the ‘bat’, the hurley, is made from ash and shaped as a sort of elegant shovel. As in Gaelic football, the aim is to score one point by batting the ball over the crossbar or three points by putting it in the hockey-like goal beneath. Players can handle the ball for no more than four steps and can also throw it to a team mate. They can, and do with tremendous skill, run with the ball balanced on the end of the hurley before slamming it into goal or over the bar.
The big No No is pulling an opponent’s shirt! This in a game where a player regularly loses teeth when the ball hits them in the mouth. This happened in the final 10 days ago with the commentary: ‘Ah, that’s three teeth down but he’ll be back in a few minutes.’ He was...after six minutes.
It is an extraordinary spectacle when played at the highest level, the action is literally non-stop and the skill levels incredible. I came to it after being urged to watch by the Chief of Staff who, despite her childhood in Mayo (two counties up from Clare), had never watched a game either. We came away exhausted by the pace and utterly won over. You will be too.
As for the daft classification of the Gaelic and so-called English sports in Ireland, rugby union and cricket are played by schools north and south, Catholic, Prod and none of the above. That is why Ireland are the current Six Nations champions (two years in a row) and officially the second best team in the world.
And cricket? We won the Test match against Zimbabwe on Sunday, played at the glorious Stormont ground in Belfast where Martin McGuinness could often be found watching his favourite game.
Last word on hurling: CNN rated the All-Ireland final as a ‘must see’ above both the world and Euro soccer finals. The great Kenneth Wolstenholme voted it his second favourite sport and Alex Ferguson motivated his Man U squad with footage of the game. I hope he reminded those prima donnas that nobody in the footage was being paid.
They did it for the love of a truly spectacular game.
PS: The GAA football final on Sunday, also at Croke, was won by Armagh, beating Galway by one point. And if you need further proof that Northern Ireland has changed, watch the video of PSNI squad cars flying the chequered red and white Armagh flags and celebrating as they drove past a jubilant crowd.
For further proof that change has yet to reach the cloth ears of die-hard Unionists, a complaint about the cops’ behaviour was made to the PSNI by MP Jim Allister who sits with the Reform group at Westminster.
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I wrote in the prologue to my biography of British agent Toto Koopman that she was the greatest woman I never met. An addition to that rather long list has to be Edna O’Brien who has died aged 93. Her story embodies the changing island of her birth.
When her first novel was published in 1960 it was immediately banned by the wretched government in Dublin led by Sean Lemass at the beckoning of President De Valera and the Irish bishops. In Limerick the book was burned in the street after mass on the instruction of the priest who no doubt had read it thoroughly first before going on to bugger a choirboy.
Sixty years later O’Brien was feted throughout the world, recognised by her own country as its greatest female writer and made a dame by the late Queen though never a Nobel prize winner.
She was beautiful in that intensely Irish way and could be annoyingly theatrical in interviews. But she was a real game changer and I believe The Country Girls 64 years ago was the first step in changing the Church-led country into the modern place it is today.
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OK, enough of Ireland. I have a postscript to my piece on the letter to recalcitrant students from the Warden of Wadham College, Oxford. My old chum Paddy Coulter emailed me to remind me that the warden was Sir Maurice Bowra, well known for being gay at a time when it was rarely admitted.
Coulter writes: ‘I confess I attended relatively few lectures in my time at Oxford but I did go along to one of Bowra’s out of sheer curiosity about his character.
‘There were a whole host of stories about Bowra but one which is quoted to this day concerns a nude bathing place for men-only on the River Cherwell. Back then women were banned even from sitting on a passing punt at this point of the river.
‘The story goes that when a woman did come past on a punt everyone but Maurice Bowra covered up their privates. Maurice however covered his face, observing to his companions that ‘‘I don't know about you but in Oxford I am known by my face!’’.
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And finally...Dressage queen Charlotte Dujardin is banned from the Olympics over the video showing her whipping a horse while a Dutch beach volleyball team member is allowed to compete despite his conviction for raping a girl of 12.
Put Dujardin in a locked room with Steven van de Velde and allow her and her whip to do their worst. The trouble is, he might not see it as a punishment.
ALAN FRAME
31 July 2024
