I ran into Paul Finlay in the Croke Park press box on Saturday night. In years to come, Finlay will be one of those players of whom it will be required that you start wistful sentences with, "For those of us of a certain age…" County players come and go and all but the best of them bleed into each other a little bit. But even now you know that Paul Finlay will be, when we all reach said certain age, a name to conjure with.
He was stylish in a way that footballers from small counties aren’t supposed to be, with a full-body kicking style that looked like an ampersand sorting itself out and a left foot from fiction. In an era when Monaghan teams were all about energy and graft and putting you on your ass, Finlay sometimes looked like a kid practising his cello in the corner while the rest of the class terrorised a substitute teacher.
But at half time the other night, with Monaghan damn lucky to be going in level against Down, none of that amounted to a hill of beans. He looked like he wanted to get out there and plant someone. “Not good,” he grimaced, as the teams went in. “Not good at all.” And we stood and we cranked and we shook our heads in disbelief at everything that was going on down on the pitch.
It was only when we met again after full time that we caught a little perspective for ourselves. Monaghan had just scored 1-24, by a distance their biggest ever total in Croke Park. They had just won in the stadium for only the second time since 1930 – and the first inside 70 minutes. By defeating Down, they had put together their fifth win of the summer, the first Monaghan team ever to do that since the foundation of the GAA. Maybe we owed them a little more than bitching about how they ought to be pushing up on kick-outs.
Getting notions
This is the thing when you follow a small county. You never bump your head off the ceiling until it’s too late. And when you do, it hurts. As Dublin will almost certainly remind us next weekend.
Still, because you’re not used to it, it takes very little to get notions. A friend texted after Monaghan drew Carlow in the third round of the qualifiers, annoyed that it wasn’t Tipperary that came out of the hat. His gripe was that a game against Carlow would be no use to Monaghan and that they needed a real test now. Of course, when Carlow led with 59 minutes on the clock the following Saturday, his cough had long since been softened.
To follow a small county is to know that September belongs to other folk. It’s to see the beauty in a turnover where five of your lads surround one of theirs, even if it’s 80 metres and a Milton poem away from the posts at the other end. It’s looking at the subs list in the programme 10 minutes into the second half to see if there’s anyone you had forgotten and then looking again five minutes later just to be sure. It’s knowing there never is.
Frontier town
It's mining small and half-imagined slights for all they're worth. Yesterday in the Mayo v Roscommon game, Andy Moran was booed relentlessly every time he came into possession. His crime was apparently an overly enthusiastic celebration of a goal for Mayo against the Rossies in an FBD game. Moran is from the frontier town of Ballaghaderreen and thus was seen has having dirtied his bib in a manner equivalent to the time Paul Gascoigne did his flute-playing thing in an Old Firm game way back when.
Now, Andy Moran is no Gazza and the Rossies probably, in all honesty, have little to be giving out about. But to anyone from a small county who knows the backstory of Ballaghaderreen and the Mayo/Rossie rivalry, it will seem fair enough. Moran was held to two points before departing the scene just short of the hour mark. Job done.
We’re into August now and Monaghan and Roscommon are still standing. That’s the fourth and sixth least-populated counties in Ireland still making plans for the championship long after bigger and richer teams have slid away. If you don’t spend much time in any of these places, it would be easy to underestimate the heft of something like that.
In John McGahern’s last novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, there’s a running joke between two couples who live by the lake. “Any news?” one asks when they come visiting the other. “No news, came looking for news,” is the reply. In the treacle days of an Irish country summer, a small county’s team going on a run that lasts this long is precious stuff.
For those of us who moved away, it’s no hardship to be reminded of that every once in a while.
