A slightly stereotypical article from The Guardian today. I’m expecting more of these over the next week and a half from all the English papers:
Croke is made to put lumps in rugby throats
There couldn’t be a finer venue than Croke Park to host Ireland’s rugby matches, but the founders of Gaelic football would beg to differ.
Frank KeatingFebruary 6, 2007 12:10 AM
Early in this inordinate span of mine here in the back basement of the toy department I would waste, enchanted, no end of time inhaling the aura (and the whiff of liniment) in that sweaty emporium of wham-bam, snort and shuffle down London’s Old Kent Road, namely the Thomas Becket gymnasium where such decent flat-nosed prizefighters as Henry Cooper and Joe Lucy would sock it, in turn, to the heavy bag and brother pros. It was the first sporting haunt I frequented named after an archbishop. Second time was more than a quarter of a century ago when I watched a European football qualifier in Cyprus at Nicosia’s low-slung sun-baked Archbishop Makarios Stadium.
Third and most auspicious occasion at a sports centre dedicated to a Right Rev ecclesiastical Eminence was in 1984 when I was detailed to Dublin to report on the Gaelic football All-Ireland final - the very centenary match of the sport itself, no less - contested by the classic them-and-us rivals Dublin and Kerry. The Dubs v The Kingdom. Even then it was vast, roomy, sheer-faced Croke Park which most took the breath away, used as I had been to watching rugby across town at rickety, rackety, run-down old Lansdowne Road. Ireland should play its rugby here, I remember saying - a sacrilege met with freezy silence; and you don’t get many of those over there.
But so it has come to pass: Ireland v France this Sunday; and glory be, in even more of a primeval convulsion, Ireland v England two Saturdays later. Yer man, that eminently good soul in heaven, I fancy, won’t be tickled over-pink about it - ie the Rt Rev Dr Tom Croke, the late Archbishop of Cashel, onlie begetter and fidei defensor himself of the two great games of the Gaels.
The Gaelic Athletic Association was born out of the lamentable British colonial philosophy which banned indigenous sports in conquered lands on the assumption they were cover for freedom fighters’ training. In 1884 two Fenian patriots, the champion Tipperary athlete Maurice Davin and political firebrand from Clare, Michael Cusack, called a clandestine meeting in Thurles, Tipperary, to demand restoration of native Irish sports. Only five turned up, including two local journalists, and when the Archbish read their reports he preached an ardent sermon of support.
Propelled by such passion from the pontifical pulpit, the fledgling GAA at once gathered an ever larger and bonny following all over. By 1913 it had bought the freehold of the north Dublin field where All-Ireland finals had been staged since 1895. Obviously it christened the field after its late holy father inspiration Archbishop Tom.
History will pervade every pore of Croke on Sunday. Can there possibly be a more clamorously dramatic lifting of “The Ban”? We shall read in all the public prints this week how a GAA battalion fought shoulder to shoulder with rebel-poet Patrick Pearse at the Dublin GPO over Easter 1916; how rubble from that fight built Croke’s northern terrace (sacred Hill 16); and how, five Novembers later on Bloody Sunday, vengeful Black and Tans machine-gunned a dozen innocents in the crowd (including the visiting captain Mick Hogan) when the Dubs played Tipperary. The Hogan Stand is still a shrine at Croke; there’s another, too, named for 1884’s founding father Cusack.
A century later, on the eve of my first Croke experience, Dublin’s latest famed poet and sport, Ulick O’Connor, took me to a select party at Scruffy Murphy’s upstairs bar just off Mount Street. Simply everyone was there, my dears, all up for the match: JP Donleavy, Con Houlihan, Norman Rodway, Cyril Cusack, green-eyed Abbey actresses, the captains and the kings and two past and future Taoiseachs, too: Jack Lynch, a true-great Gael of the 1940s (five All-Irelands, four of them for hurling), and raffish Charlie Haughey, who claimed he’d been a dual demon at UCD.
It was one of the best parties I can ever (just about) remember. Out of the blue Lynch softly asked me: “Frank, are you by any chance related to ‘Babs’ Keating?” (Tipperary’s “Babs”, I later learned, was a dual-Gael luminary with three All-Ireland hurling medals in the 1960s, then a football one in 1972). “Most assuredly I am, sir,” I blatantly lied in my convivial cups.
Ever since, down the years whenever I met O’Connor, Houlihan or Rodway, they’d reproachingly address me, to my shame, as “Babs.” No one else knew why. Ah, no worries, to be sure, and I’ll be proud to answer to “Babs” on either of these coming weekends.