Hurling final in July: Shame on GAA for ending proud tradition

I MISSED the 2013 All Ireland Hurling Final replay. It was played in Croke Park of a Saturday evening and Clare won their fourth ever Senior title.

Traditionally, the Hurling Final was played on the first Sunday of September. In 2013, that actually fell on the first day of September, so the decider went ahead a week later than normal.

There was a full three weeks between the draw and the replay, so the build-up in both counties and around the country was massive. The national and secondary schools ‘were back’ so it was nothing only talk of hurling, hurling all the way -what a change from this week - you’d hardly know the final is on next Sunday!

Anyway, the week of the replay was also the week of the Ploughing Championships in Ratheneska in Laois - I was there on the Thursday, all ready in giddy anticipation of a Saturday evening replay under lights in Croke Park.

What do they say about the ‘best laid plans of mice and men’? So it turned out for me that weekend. A close family relative died and after the removal on the Friday night, I was asked to go under the coffin at the burial on Saturday morning.

I suppose I could still have made the game by tearing off up to Dublin immediately after the interment, but no, I stayed on with family and friends and watched the game on television alone, all alone at home that night.

Clare won a high-scoring game and all Cork fans thought back to the drawn game. We should have seen that out, only for Clare to get a late equaliser. 

I didn’t begrudge Clare the win, but now, a decade later, memories of Cork’s last win in 2005 seem a lifetime away.

Later in that autumn of 2013, we visited Clare for a few days and took the advice of the great Seamus Heaney.

And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,

In September or October, when the wind

And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild

With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

Indeed, it was just as the poet had written, exactly as he so perfectly described the Flaggy Shore in his poem Epilogue. Heaney was a proud Ulsterman but his weaving of wonderful words was and still remains like a great artist painting, a never to be forgotten scene.

That magical afternoon near the wild ocean was in October, 2013. In February that year I’d lost a great friend, a great Clareman, and by all accounts one of the best hurlers ever seen. I speak of Jimmy Smyth.

For 19 seasons from 1948, he wore the Clare Senior jersey - all he won was an Oireachtas medal and a Thomond Feis Medal, but with Munster he won eight Railway Cup medals.

He worked for years in Croke Park. After he retired in 1988, he went back to college and got an MA with a thesis about the songs, poems and recitations of Gaelic games in Munster.

Through that passion, I got to know Jimmy. Along with the late Jim Cronin and Brendan Barry and Jimmy, I worked on producing The GAA Ballads Of Rebel Cork in 2001. Jimmy called here a few times and I just loved his company and ability to sing and recite poems celebrating our native games.

In the Spring of 2013, I was unable to make it to Ruan where Jimmy was buried. Now, a month after Clare were once more crowned All Ireland champions, I stood by his graveside in his beloved village of Ruan. I prayed a bit and cried a bit and then recited a few verses from Bryan McMahon’s Lament For Dr Tommy Daly.

On the wind’swept Hill of Tulla,

Where the Claremen place their dead,

Four solemn yews stand sentinel

Above a hurler’s head,

And from the broken north lands

From Burren bleak and bare,

The dirge of Thomas Daly

Goes surging on through Clare.

Beyond this place of toil and tears

Beyond this plain of woe,

There is a bourne in Paradise

Where all the hurlers go,

And there in prime they’re goaling

And race across the sod

And thrill our dead forefathers

On the level lawns of God.

Since I first made my way to Croke Park on a September Sunday in 1972 -Kilkenny beat us that day - I’ve been luck to have only missed a handful of Hurling Finals. The end of summer, the schools opening, and the year beginning to wind down, meant always glorious September Sundays.

They were more than Sundays in reality - they were weeks of looking forward to and anticipating great games and seeing our heroes, our stars of our games.

You know, I loved to see Cork wining as anyone with Rebel blood in ’em would, but oh, how I loved to see hurling from players all across the country. How I wish I’d seen Waterford and Antrim and Laois and Dublin win, but hope springs eternal in every county where the clash of the ash is revered.

A week after the Hurling Final, the talk about the football would begin, and to tell ye the truth, those great September Sundays left a glorious after-glow right into October.

I recall Bryan McMahon talking to me at Listowel Races after we drew with Meath in the Football Final in 1988. “Wisha,” he said, “t’will shorten the winter for ye waiting for the replay”!

In a biography of Jimmy Smyth published just last year, there’s a quote from a beautiful letter written by him in 1996: “The essence of the game is the friendships built up rather than the antagonisms on the field of play, I have the fondest memories with whom I held some stern moments on the field of play, we now meet and we don’t have to be introduced, we know each other and have forged a friendship that will last a lifetime, we are at ease with one another and we don’t have to go through any artificial ritual,”.

Yes, that sums up the essence of hurling for me, and to tell the truth I’m so sad and forlorn this week coming up to Sunday. It used to be a festival celebrating our national, ancient game each September. On the Saturday in Kilmacud and at St Jude’s, 7 a side hurling teams from every county would gather on the eve of the final. Dublin can be heaven on a final morning as we all try and get in early to see the Minor Final - the young men of the future. 

That’s gone too in the GAA rush to throw away everything that’s traditional and great about hurling.

I say shame on them for downgrading the biggest day in Irish sport.

Truly, 2023 has been a public relations fiasco for the GAA. Starting with the Glen v Kilmacud Crokes Club Final debacle, the GAA refusing cash at turnstiles, and the GAAgo unmitigated disaster - and now, to cap it all, the GAA must appear before the Competition Authority - all self-grown, self-imposed, shambolic cock-ups.

Limerick or Kilkenny on Sunday? Not sure really. Kilkenny have heaps of titles but always want more, and Limerick have come to hurling’s top table and are determined to stay there.

Sport with dash in it

Clatter and clash in it

Something with ash in it

Surely a game.