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Thursday, July 22, 2010
The death of hurling
MATTERS OF gravity quite rightly absorb the minds of our readers in these most difficult of times.
The arguments range across and along, bitterly in many cases, over political management, banking debacles, fear of road and environment disruption along with funding famine, many with severe pain.
It seems mad to equate sport with the same degree of urgency yet it would be ridiculous for me to occupy the same theme route that pack our national and provincial papers with depression, even if we do have to take it on the chin.
So I want, today, to touch on a matter of deep concern to a substantial segment of the sport-loving readership. It’s only a game they say, merely a pastime, not a matter of grave attention.
That may be logical, indeed a basic truth. Unfortunately, the proven facts deny that sport is a trivial matter.
The recent world cup soccer loss demonstrated that nightly. Nations’ populations wept piteously or went into delirium.
The media venom heaped on individual England players, on French players, on Italian players became hysteria for a full week or more. In short, since Nicaragua declared war on Honduras (I think it was) over a soccer defeat, it’s hardly necessary to make a point at all.
I quote from the saintly and sincere Martin Codd of Rathnure, deceased: “It would be better for the county to lose its religion than to lose its hurling.”
He didn’t mean that literally of course but it’s an indication of the passion which boiled over about a quarter of a century ago at a mass meeting in Murphy Flood’s, Enniscorthy. It was summoned to resuscitate Wexford hurling which was, or seemed to be, perilously fragile at the time.
Wexford has shipped heavy beatings from Tipperary in the past. Tipperary has shipped heavy and unexpected beatings from Wexford in the past, not only in Croke Park but on their stadium’s sod in Thurles. No whiff of humiliation attached itself to any of those results. In my recollection, they were all treated as passing sports’ phenomena.
The overwhelming defeat of Wexford’s senior hurlers by Tipperary a few weeks back has been judged by those who were at Thurles, colleagues for example, and those at home watching on TV, as not only a severe beating but a self-imposed humiliation.
From the numerous arguments, most heated, in which I have been involved, the consensus is that there is much seriously wrong with the greatest game in County Wexford, with its heart, with its administration.
This is in contrast with the senior footballers who gave a display full of heart and guts in the City of the Tribes’ own cauldron where they played as underdogs.
Saturated with volunteered solutions to the hurling, I find it difficult as a Sean Ghael to make a positive suggestion. After all we lived through and saw years of unforeseen and sensational glory.
However, since the greatest hurling county of all time is just across the river, I feel it time to ask club and county committees to sit down, alone, and in company. I would beseech them to make an examination of conscience, personally.
There are questions to be asked which MUST be above club and personal politics. Club and smart-arse politics will kill the spirit and heart from the top to the bottom.
Sport is for everybody, boy and girl. Everybody can play, even if useless, as I was. I never rose above junior club hurling level to the chagrin of the old boy.
When, however, it comes to team selections and the bigger scene, we must ask if, in conscience, the really best talent is being nourished and promoted.
Is Wexford’s purple and gold being scrupulously made the only talent focus when, even at club level, there is string-pulling where Daddy’s sonny boy and Daddy’s little girl are pushed, despite other, but less prominent, talents being marginalised? Are the best Wexford-orientated people or brains put forward to club positions, or put forward to the county board?
Are chuckers being advanced to simply be got out of the way?
Is leadership quality no less than real potential being rewarded?
Do the bullies or the locally-influential thwart the unobtrusive but better sorts?
We had better talk now because we can’t be much worse if we sing dumb.
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