Hard and all as it is to believe, there are still Irish people out there who argue over whether our summer starts on the first of May or the first of June, when the better informed among us know it begins the moment The Sunday Game tune fills the air. Not even the strains of grass being mowed, people sneezing violently from hay fever, the jingling of ice-cream vans or couples rowing over barbecue charcoal not being hot enough are as summery.
If you’re a May 1st person, incidentally, you’d have had a tough task convincing Ramiz Raja on Friday that summer was already here, the former Pakistan international telling us that “it was the coldest I’ve ever been at a cricket ground” when he was on duty in Malahide for Sky Sports. “It was 40 when I left Lahore,” he added through chattering teeth.
And then the cameras picked out a woman sitting in the stand with her drenched leprechaun hat swaying in the wind. That was about as much action as we saw on Friday, Sky rerunning Pakistan v England from the Punjab in 2005 to fill the time, meaning late tuner-inners would have thought it was a sizzler of a day in Malahide.
Sensational hurling opener
There were no such problems come Sunday in Parnell Park which, if not Punjab-ish, was at least sunny and dry. And we had a sensational hurling opener when Dublin beat Kilkenny by . . . hold your horses. As Michael Duignan put it, “the Dubs aren’t the first team to find out you never have Kilkenny beaten”.
Brian Cody briefly celebrated like his felines had completed an All-Ireland five-in-a-row when Liam Blanchfield got the winning goal, but then composed himself before doing his “ah sure look” post-match interview.
Earlier in the day RTÉ had made our spines all tingly with a very lovely montage featuring Championship moments of the epic kind from over the years, Colm O’Rourke noting that the only “constant” in the clip was Cody. “He’s been there for 100 years,” he said. It’s not quite that, but when he took on the job, Liam Blanchfield was two. A lengthy auld reign, all right.
What has changed, though, is the RTÉ set, Michael Lyster and his panel in Castlebar sitting around a little table with a large group of people looking over their shoulders, a bit like David Davin-Power used to have at, say, a Fianna Fáil ard fheis when they’d nearly be falling over each other trying to get on the telly.
One of the group was Willie Joe Padden, so it was probably just as well that the panel relocated to its more traditional little corner-of-the-pitch studio for the game in MacHale Park because by full time Colm was declaring this Mayo team to be in “terminal decline”. Willie Joe might have put Colm in terminal decline himself if he’d heard him.
Gallantry
Joe Brolly, who may well be awarded The Victoria Cross for even turning up in Castlebar (it is, after all, awarded for acts of gallantry in the presence of the enemy), feared the worst for Mayo, recalling how they were “bullied” by Galway in the League, reminding us of that time Paul Conroy “trailed Aiden O’Shea along the ground out of a melee like a tranquillised cow”. “He wouldn’t have done it to Gerry McEntee or boys like that,” he said, which is true – if you’d tried, Gerry would have barbecued you and put you in a burger.
The match? “It’s mildly interesting, I suppose,” was all Colm could muster at half-time, although he didn’t get much chance to say anything else because Tomás Ó Sé and Joe were having a squabble, Joe fulminating about the pukiness of the spectacle and how it was doing a disservice to Gaelic football, Tomas’s face suggesting broken records hurt his ears.
But come full time, the general consensus was that the game was complete muck. “It’s been a long, cold, miserable winter,” Colm had said when we kicked off the day, come the end of it he, Joe and Tomas sounded like men who pined for the summer to be over. And it having only started. Unless you’re a June 1st person.
