The Trib (47 page)

Gifted, successful and attractive, Sligo-born Dearbhla Walsh, the Emmy-winning director of
Little Dorrit
, represents everything a young gay woman might aspire to. Donal Óg Cusack, a similar high achiever in an adult world, may just be Walsh's male equivalent. What's more, he could if he so wishes become a powerful voice for the gay community on certain issues in future. And if he doesn't wish it, that will be his perogative. Cusack is a hurler who happens to be gay as much as he's a gay person who happens to hurl.

So the sky didn't fall in this past week, just as the roof of Citywest will not collapse if Cusack ever brings a fella with him to the All Stars. Did anyone seriously anticipate otherwise? If there's one encouraging discovery we've made about ourselves as a nation these last few years it's that in some respects we're more mature about sex and sexuality than we might have imagined. Do all that many people really care about what others are getting up to in the bedroom provided they don't make a song and dance about it?

Exhibit A: the opening last year of a lapdancing club near this writer's domicile sparked fear, loathing and public protests. When the venture closed due to lack of interest and reopened as a gay bar, nobody took a blind bit of notice. As long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses, etc. Anyway, there are enough GAA folk of a certain age out there with gay sons or daughters, nieces or nephews – whether they know it, or choose to know it, or not – for finger-pointing to represent an uncomfortable exercise.

Two years ago John Amaechi, formerly of the Orlando Magic and Utah Jazz, came out in his autobiography following retirement. All was well that ended well for Amaechi; having feared ‘the wrath of a nation' on making his announcement, he was forced to admit a few months later that he had ‘underestimated America'. There's always one, naturally, in this case the commentator and former player Tim Hardaway. ‘I wouldn't want him on my team,' quoth Hardaway. ‘If he was I'd really distance myself from him because I don't think that's right and I don't think he should be in the locker room when we're in the locker room.'

One cannot imagine the inhabitants of the Cork and Cloyne dressing rooms being quite so precious, and not merely on the grounds that none of them is likely to be mistaken for George Clooney any day soon. Any individual seen running for the far end of the room will be doing so in response to Cusack claiming that they're not training hard enough and suggesting a 4 a.m. start for their next session, not out of some adolescent imperative to keep his back to the wall for fear of homosexual wiles. Are hurlers that vain as to reckon a teammate fancies them? Scarcely.

The issue of the abuse he can expect from opponents is a different matter. Verbals can be as vicious issuing from the field of play as from the terraces. The 1990s may have seen a low water mark in this regard, with players abused by opponents over their colour (Seán Óg Ó hAilpín), failed marriages (Davy Fitzgerald), the suicide of a sibling (‘Nice day for a hanging ...') and alleged Traveller antecedents (‘Go home, the caravan's on fire!'). In the event of hearing Cusack being called a big gay f**ker, or whatever, by the opposition full-forward, will referees book yer man for using ‘abusive or provocative language' under Rule 5.17 or will they turn a deaf ear? No less relevantly, what will the reader do if standing at a match next year alongside some troglodyte calling Cusack a big gay f**ker? Sometimes all it takes for ignorance to flourish is for right-thinking people to say nothing.

On that point, it is heartening to discover from
Come What May
that the Semplegate fracas two years ago wasn't sparked by a homophobic slur by a Clare player after all, and it is to Cusack's credit that he now deplores the silly, self-indulgent statement bemoaning their hard lot released by him, Diarmuid O'Sullivan and Ó hAilpín following their suspension.

But he doth protest too much about Kilkenny's lack of support for the GPA in 2002 and thereafter. It wasn't up to Kilkenny, or anyone else, to march in lockstep with Cork in their struggle with the County Board; that was their battle and their battle alone. And the ‘Stepford Wives' jibe, taken in conjunction with the ‘Our world/ their world' episode about Waterford in Brian Corcoran's autobiography, implies an attitude towards opponents that is both disquieting and, in view of the Cork panel's constant preaching of the gospel of respect, surprising. The depiction of Frank Murphy as a far more warm and engaging person than the Dark Lord of stereotype, however, suggests Cusack has discovered that the spectrum contains shades of grey between the black and the white.

May Donal Óg live as happy and fulfilled a life as a person can. And no harm if along the way he discovers that moderation doesn't always have to be a sign of weakness.

The Cats don't have to win five in a row to cement their place in hurling folklore because they have already done enough.

But this could be the year when they are finally caught.

23 May 2010

D
e mortuis nil nisi bonum
and all of that. Rather than writing their obituary after they've shuffled off this mortal coil, then, let's pay tribute to Brian Cody's Kilkenny – the operative phrase indeed – while they're still alive and well and living among us. One knows not the day nor the hour, but it's coming ever closer.

Seven All-Irelands in a decade. Six All-Irelands in eight years. The first All-Ireland four-in-a-row since the 1940s and the first asterisk-free All-Ireland four-in-a-row in history. Eighteen championship wins on the trot. An All-Ireland final performance that yielded two wides and thirty-three scores from thirty-seven shots. Two All-Ireland/National League doubles, with a couple of ritual springtime Nowlan Park disembowellings of Tipperary (eighteen points) and Cork (twenty-seven points) thrown in for good measure, as if
pour discourager les autres
. Eleven scorers from play in last year's All-Ireland final. The inspiration for the county's quartet of All-Ireland triumphs in 2008. And on and on and on.

For backers of favourites they've been a dream, shattering the spread match after match. They have not so much rewritten the record books as torn them up, set fire to them, thrown away the ashes and sat down to write their own volumes. There has never been a team like them before. There will never be a team like them in our lifetime again.

They have had their detractors and that was understandable too. Various grounds for criticism merit contemplation here and now.

Kilkenny were bad for the game? Nonsense; it's the bad teams who are bad for the game. If Tipperary or Galway win the All-Ireland this year, moreover, it will be largely because they have responded to the standards set by the champions.

They introduced Gaelic football defensive tactics to hurling? To a point. Then again, hurling teams that adopt a new approach to manipulating space are never regarded as prophets within their own sport (think of the horror engendered by Cork's possession game), and the Kilkenny yin of closing off room in their half was complemented by the yang of opening it up in the other crowd's half, defending in depth while unleashing hell down the other end of the field. To the dynamics of colonising space they brought an updated reading.

They were faceless and lacking charisma? Yes. That said, it wasn't their job to teach the world to sing and it's to their enduring credit that they didn't become entangled in hype and hoopla despite all the triumphal processions and civic receptions.

They had it easier doing a four-in-row from Leinster than they would have had starting out in Munster? Yes again, but one reason most of those provincial games turned into turkey shoots is that Kilkenny never took their eye off the ball or treated their opponents with less than respect, a respect that extended to beating them out the gate when they got a run on them. A respect that they would go on to extend to Munster teams.

They overdid the fouling and were sometimes downright gratuitously physical? Perfectly true. Certain moments from the 2007 All-Ireland final, the 2008 Leinster final and – even if Tipp gave as good as they got on the day – last year's National League final do not make for edifying viewing. Yet it seems to have gone unnoticed, or at any rate uncommented on, that the two players sent off for bad pulls in Kilkenny matches last summer were members of the opposition. It may be stating the obvious to add that most consistently successful sides in every sport have had occasional recourse to the knuckleduster and, furthermore, that none of those folk who like to sing ‘Hosannas' to the intensity of the Munster championship can possibly condemn Kilkenny for their physicality.

Their manager was unnecessarily petty once or twice? Clearly. There's a line in Cody's autobiography where he grumbles about the team being written off (yawn) at the end of 2005 and adds: ‘We'd show them!' It's a sentence, uncharacteristically shrill of the man, that jars on a number of levels. Whatever happened to trying to be successful for its own sake, Brian? Why some managers get worked up about the media rather than accepting them for the necessary evil they are never fails to amaze. Perhaps Cody is so tired of saying the correct and politic thing so often that it's cathartic for him to let loose – at Marty Morrissey, at the
Tribune
, at the All Star selectors – every now and then. If it makes him happy, so be it.

But the biggest gripe the world has with Cody's Kilkenny is that they've been too successful. To say they were respected rather than adored misses the point. For one thing they wouldn't wanna be adored; for another, serial champions never are. The one outfit in the annals of hurling that were truly loved were loved as much for the romance they brought to the game and for their sportsmanship as for their victories. Counties like Kilkenny do not bring romance to the game. Great stories are written about farmhands and, ahem, gamekeepers, not about landed gentry. (‘Ah yes, who could have believed that I'd be part of my county's thirty-second All-Ireland victory ...')

One compliment that hasn't been paid to them, and should be, is that they were good and gracious winners. There was no dissing of outclassed opponents, no taunting them with ball tricks when the result was safely in the bag. Kilkenny won four consecutive All-Irelands without making the rest of the country despise them. Not every county could manage the same.

Points, not goals, were their daily bread. The goals helped kill off opponents, the points set them up for the kill in the first place. Time and again Kilkenny reached for and struck a register of ruthlessness like no team before them had. Against Clare in the 2006 All-Ireland semi-final they were a point ahead with ten minutes left and looking edgy; cue a barrage that led to seven points from eight attempts. Against Galway in the quarter-final they'd gone from leading by 1-6 to 0-5 after twenty-three minutes to leading by 2-19 to 0-8 after forty-five minutes. Against the same opponents at the same stage in 2007 they were level eight minutes from time before rattling an unanswered 2-4. Up to last year, Cork in the 2006 All-Ireland final were the only team to get within three points of them in terms of white flags.

But Dublin would hit as many points in last year's Leinster final and Tipperary would hit more in the All-Ireland final, the first occasion Kilkenny had been outpointed in the championship since the 2004 All-Ireland final, twenty-two games earlier. Even in their last championship defeat versus Galway in 2005 – a game that could have been scripted by Raymond Chandler: when in doubt, have a man with a gun in his hand walk through the door – they landed as many points as their opponents. Which is another reason why last September marked the end of their natural lifespan as a team. After four years on the road, bread alone could no longer feed them.

Among their greatest strengths has been to have one or two others, usually Eoin Larkin with points and Eddie Brennan with goals, supplementing their staple diet of Henry Shefflin scores. Martin Comerford always had his regular-occasional days and Aidan Fogarty chipped in more often than is realised. But Larkin, who has averaged three points per game since 2007, has been wildly out of form this year, Comerford is likely to have to be content with the role of impact sub and Fogarty lacks the craft to magic something out of nothing when Kilkenny are on the back foot. The time has come for TJ Reid and Richie Hogan to step up, not least because this is a team getting old together.

The average age of the side that won the 2006 All-Ireland was bang on twenty-five, with two twenty-one-year-olds and a twenty-year-old therein. The average age of the side that won the 2009 All-Ireland was a little more than twenty-seven, with only one twenty-one-year-old therein. And that does matter and will matter, for it was experience and nothing else – it was categorically not the vigour of youth – that saw them through against Galway and Tipp last year. The line that separates experience from old age is a fine one, and Kilkenny are no longer the right side of it. The lion in winter, or at any rate in late autumn.