Colin Sheridan: GAA not making the most of cultural goldmines that is the All-Ireland finals
COULD BE DOING MORE: Young Donegal supporters reach for the Sam Maguire cup as it is brought out onto the pitch by Kerry jubilee team captain Seamus Moynihan, not pictured. Pic: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
All-Ireland final Sunday. Kerry versus Donegal. Tradition versus turf. Colm Cooper’s ghost versus Michael Murphy’s shadow. One hundred thousand pilgrims in polyester descend upon Dublin, each clutching a flag, a hip flask, and the faint hope of finding a toilet somewhere north of the Gresham that isn’t decorated like a Francis Bacon painting.
It should be a weekend of national significance. It should stop the country. But instead, it sneaks in like a tummy bug and leaves just as quickly, a cultural blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, gone before the spilled pints on Dorset Street have a chance to dry.
Where is the build-up? Where is the spectacle? Where is the sense that this, this, is the glittering apex of our national sport, and not a skidmark on the toilet of Irish sport?
The Americans, bless their loud and adderall-addled hearts, would turn this into a week-long bacchanal. The NFL gives you an entire fortnight of preposterous hype, culminating in a Super Bowl that features military flyovers, $70 nachos, and a halftime show where Shakira's hips make grown men cry. Even the English—who still think gravy is a personality trait—manage to make the FA Cup final feel like a coronation. The French have Le Grand Tour. And what do we get?
Up for the Match.
A fever dream of a television programme that feels like watching a parish disco while on an ayahuasca trip. It’s part Paddywhackery, part Colin Barrett short story, with occasional musical interruptions by lads who play the fiddle like they’re trying to summon livestock. The panel is a Who’s Who of “Sure didn’t he play minor in ’83” types and showband veterans who’ve been released from cryogenic stasis specifically for this night.
It’s as if someone in Montrose was handed the brief: “Capture the essence of the Irish nation at its most vibrant,” and responded with “What if we booked Philomena Begley and built a set that looks like a Centra deli counter?”
And as for the city itself, on All-Ireland weekend it gives off all the carnival atmosphere of a wet Tuesday in Portlaoise. Dublin should be buzzing. It should be bouncing. There should be fan zones in Smithfield, light shows on the Liffey, Kerry and Donegal flags projected onto Leinster House while Simon Harris pretends he gets it. Instead, you get two stray brass bands in Temple Bar and some poor lad from the Glenbeigh-Glencar U12s trying to eat a kebab in peace while being heckled by a stag party dressed as Sexy Nuns.
Imagine what Barcelona would do if the Catalan football final meant this much to them. Imagine the NBA letting their finals pass without a street event, an airshow, a hologram of Larry Bird shooting threes from the International Space Station. The GAA, meanwhile, has seemingly decided that any expression of joy must be limited to a two-hour window on Sunday—and even that will be ruined by some div in the Cusack Stand shouting “Give it to Clifford!” every seven seconds.
It’s not like there isn’t precedent. The GAA already has the bones of something special. The colour, the tribalism, the rivalries that stretch back to times when lads fought over cattle and grain instead of ball possession. The raw passion is there. The pageantry just isn’t. It’s like baking a beautiful cake and then serving it on a bin lid.
You'd think the GAA might want to, I dunno, monetise and market the one thing it does better than anyone else. Sell it to tourists. Turn it into the kind of cultural cornerstone that gets Liam Neeson giving a voiceover to a montage celebrating the unifying power of a well-timed shoulder. Instead, it treats the final like a logistics problem. Get them in, get them out, and for God’s sake don’t let anyone enjoy themselves too much or they might come back.
There should be live music in Merrion Square. Open training sessions in Phoenix Park. Kids' skill zones on Grafton Street. A Hall of Fame pop-up on O’Connell Bridge. Have Joe Brolly doing laps of the quays in a tuk-tuk, flinging sliotars at bystanders and quoting Peig. Make a show of it. Because at the moment, the GAA is sitting on a cultural goldmine and insisting it’s just a bit of muck with notions.
Instead, what we get is a glorious occasion stuffed into a narrow, grey corridor of a weekend. A soggy sandwich of missed opportunity. The All-Ireland final should be the emerald in the crown. Instead, it feels like a footnote written in biro on the back of a Ladbrokes docket.
By Monday morning, it’s all over. The flags are limp, the pubs are empty, and the lads from Donegal are halfway back to Letterkenny, trying to remember what pseudonym they gave to the girl in the Sunnybank the night before. And Dublin? Dublin just shrugs, rolls its eyes, and gets back to pretending it’s not from Ireland anyway.
In Commander in Cheat, writer Rick Reilly meticulously documents Donald Trump’s love affair with golf—a game he plays often, and dishonestly, which is a fitting metaphor for everything else he does. Reilly’s book is less a biography than a forensic audit of Trump’s scorecards, each chapter a reminder that if integrity were a fairway, Donald would be teeing it up in the car park.
So when the 45th president waltzed into Scotland to “inspect” his golf courses—which appear to have all the charm of a Bond villain’s lair crossed with a cash-and-carry—it wasn’t so much a state visit as a poorly-scripted reboot of Brigadoon, if Brigadoon had been designed by a Vegas property developer on meth. Locals watched in baffled silence as Trump trudged around Turnberry, flanked by Secret Service agents and a swing that resembled a man trying to swat midges with a baguette. According to Reilly, Trump once took a “gimme” from eight feet out, which in golf terms is the equivalent of robbing a bank and calling it a withdrawal.
Even the wind seemed disgusted, whipping his MAGA cap across the dunes like it had developed a conscience. The Scottish press, never ones for subtlety, labelled the visit “crass,” “pointless,” and “a threat to seagulls everywhere.” Meanwhile, Trump called it “tremendous” and “the best golf ever played,” which might be true—if he was the only one playing and the scorecard had been pre-filled by a Mar-a-Lago intern. Reilly was right. The man cheats at golf because it’s the only place where the truth is written down, and the last thing he wants anybody to know is the truth.
Galway man Alex Murphy started his second successive pre-season game for Newcastle against Arsenal yesterday, and it’s fair to say, it was a mixed afternoon for the lad. Impressive by all accounts against Celtic earlier in the week, the 21-year-old seemed to do his prospects no harm as he faced off Bukayo Saka and Arsenal.
Sadly for him, a miss-timed intervention from Murphy saw him score a second half own goal, and Newcastle went on to lose 2-1. Assuming scouts and statisticians watch the actual games and not social media, however, things appear to be looking up for the left-sided player.
Another loan move (he was at Bolton since January) or constructive time understudying first choice Lewis Hall should hopefully bring him more into our eyeline this season.
Tadej Pogačar has won the Tour de France again, which is wonderful news for him, his physiotherapist, and maybe Slovenia’s tourism board—but not so much for the rest of us. Cycling, at its best, is pure drama. Suffering. Suspense. Men in lycra having existential breakdowns on Alpine climbs. But with Pogačar? It’s become a 21-day formality, like watching someone with a PhD sit the Leaving Cert. Sure, he’s a phenomenon.
But the sport - all sport - needs jeopardy. This isn’t domination, it’s euthanasia on two wheels. You know a race is in trouble when the only thing Sean Kelly is debating on Eurosport is whether the second-place rider cried a bit too much. The Tour de France shouldn't feel like a three-week press release from Team UAE. At this rate, they'll rename the Champs-Élysées after him. Or just cancel the last stage altogether and let Tadej parade around in yellow like cycling’s answer to Napoleon (without the weight).
