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Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Lessons from Louth
By Fr Brendan Hoban
IN A different life I was chairman of a GAA club.
It was a rural club so underage success was difficult to achieve. However, during one glorious summer, we achieved the impossible when the U14s won the county championship.
Celebrations were held, speeches made, tributes paid and we all basked in what was regarded as an exceptional success.
Then word seeped out that one of our main players was over-age. An objection was lodged with the county board. Embarrassment all round as the club was stripped of the title.
When we came to discuss it at club level, I suggested – naively, as it turned out – that as we had also won the divisional final under false pretences, we should voluntarily surrender that trophy too. The consensus was that, as the time for objecting at divisional level had run out, under the rules no-one could take that trophy from us.
The rules, you see, were sacrosanct. If it was within ‘The Rules’, no other imperative, moral or otherwise, mattered. I suggested – again naively, as it turned out – that, in the interests of indicating to the team members that cheating should not be rewarded, we should still return the trophy. A loud voice from the back of the room bellowed out the consensus: “What we have, we hold”. In the event, just one person in the room supported my position.
It wasn’t a question of doing or not doing the right thing. It was about scavenging for what you could get in a division famous for playing over-age players. (“They’re all doing it!”) It was (peculiarly) about the honour of the parish. It was about ‘not letting down the lads’. Community, togetherness, solidarity.
That ethos runs through the GAA. Unlike other sporting associations, its life is stitched into parish and county, part of our understanding of who we are.
And part of it too is the long wait for that glory day in the sun on the hallowed turf of Croke Park on the third Sunday in September.
I remember attending the annual GAA convention for some years in a county where footballing success was effectively non-existent. And every year someone would give an impassioned speech to the effect that ‘this could be our year’ when the Sam Maguire Cup would be brought home to the county for the first time.
Invariably the speech was greeted with a hopeful cheer. The message was that, despite the failures of more than a century, the dream lived on.
Here in Mayo we struggle to hold on to the dream, reliving memories of more than half a century as we console ourselves by accepting defeat after defeat with as much grace as we can muster.
After the Mayo-Meath All-Ireland finals some years ago, it was said that Mayo didn’t win because they weren’t Meath.
The point was that to get over the winning line, you had to have a will to win that brooked no compromise.
Nice people finished last. Cynics would say that being more used to defeat than victory, Mayo had more experience handling defeat than victory. Taking kudos from honourable defeats was part of Mayo’s problem. We weren’t used to winning. Indeed we almost seemed constitutionally incapable of subsuming every ounce of energy and ability into a will to win. We weren’t Meath.
But winning at all costs defeats the whole purpose of sport. Would we be happy if Mayo won the All-Ireland in the manner Meath won the Leinster final? Of course, we would, I hear many say. But what kind of a victory would it be? Hollow at the very least. And imagine how we might try and justify it to youngsters? Have we really arrived at a point, with the effective connivance of the GAA, where we can use the rules to justify a position that is the clear equivalent of cheating?
In the Louth/Meath match, almost everyone was supporting Louth: unexpected giant-killers this year in Leinster, first time in a Leinster final for half a century, a fairy-tale season. I was supporting them until the Louth fans unsportingly started jeering Meath free-takers. The wisdom of my swift change of allegiance was more than confirmed when disgruntled Louth supporters ran on to the pitch and made several game efforts to assault the hapless referee.
Everyone accepts that an injustice has been perpetrated on Louth. The action replay on television forensically dissected the failure of the referee and umpires. The goal that won the match should not have counted. Louth should be Leinster champions. And, in fairness to the referee, his report upheld that view.
While the GAA rules do not allow the association to award the match to Louth or at least to insist on a replay, there’s no question but that something needs to be done. Meath decided not to offer a replay – what could have been an honourable and gracious solution – and they won’t get many brownie points for that limp and self-serving decision. Louth have indicated that they do not intend to appeal. And the GAA has once again washed its hands in public, as if it has nothing to do with them. When will the GAA get around to the simple task of putting in place a few wise men and women to adjudicate in such cases and save the GAA the embarrassment of allowing cheating to be rewarded?
The background to the acceptance of cheating in sport is the current belief that high achievers in life can make their own rules. In business, in politics, in sport, there is a regard for the gung-ho individual who breaks all the rules, pushes people around, cuts every corner so that he (or she) can win the great prize.
And graciousness, respect, even morality are regarded as the currency of wimps who will never make it in the big time. So the boundaries are pushed out: Thierry Henry’s hand ball brought France to the World Cup; Maradona’s ‘hand of God’ cheated England in another World Cup; and Joe Sheridan’s foul won the Leinster title for Meath.
The question remains for Meath and the GAA: if victory is all that matters, what message is being sent to the legions of young children who participate in GAA competitions when cheating goes unpunished and justice is so badly served?
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