Rebels weep

“You romanticised it for me, ya bollix. I had to come back,” said the Boston exile, standing on home soil for the first time in twenty odd years. Sorry about that. Truly. Because as was patently obvious in the mournful aftermath, all romance was dead. All hope dashed. All dreams left behind in the Upper Cusack. If you’re bold enough to quote the Smiths before the game, you have to be man enough to do the same after it. Because I know it’s over, and it never really began, but in my heart it was so real. And it was. It was so real you could taste it, breathe it, feel it. That giddy, dangerous hope that maybe, just maybe, this was the year. Finally. That thing you’ve ached for suddenly felt like it might actually happen. But of course it didn’t. It never does. Not for us. Love is natural and real, but not for such as you and I.

You’re watching from up high in the Cusack and from the off, you notice Brian O’Meara is playing sweeper. Right ok, don’t think you were expecting this. But no panic, you’re sure Pat Ryan and the boys were, well if not expecting it outright, at least preparing for the possibility. You do the quick sums; if they’ve a spare man back there you infer that we must have a spare man on the other side. It’s still fifteen on fifteen after all, Tipp have managed that much at least. You assume it’ll be Mark Coleman, as it was the last day out against them down the Páirc. You spend the best part of the next half an hour scanning the field, eyes darting, trying and struggling to ascertain who our free man is. Who’s our Brian O’Meara? No one leaps out. There’s no obvious candidate, no spare Cork jersey floating free, pulling strings or taking advantage of the imbalance at our end, inflicting the damage that should result as the trade-off from Cahill’s opening gambit. It feels like we’ve stuck to the same template, still doing what we’ve been doing all year.

You glance at the scoreboard in between bouts of scatty action and while it suggests things aren’t falling apart, your eyes are telling a different story. It’s certainly not a classic like last year. And it’s not a disaster. But it’s not clicking either. Earlier in the year, Jamie Wall of Second Captains provided an old coaching line – to play the way you want to play, you have to be able to do the opposite. Of all teams, Cork should be well able to do the opposite of what they’re doing. For years, you’ve cursed Cork’s blind devotion to the short game, the running game, the playing the ball through the lines game. Under Ryan, things changed for the better and the new approach got us here. But if ever there was a day to hit the red button and revert to factory settings, it was now. The muscle memory is still there you’re sure. But they don’t. Still, Barrett goals before the break and for that blissful fifteen minute interlude, all is right with the world.

But now, you’re watching an implosion. A collapse of unthinkable scale. What in the name of Christ is going on down there? Tipp are popping them over from everywhere, while there’s a hex on our end. The posts have turned into magnets of misery; attracting all efforts, repelling all hope. Like lightning rods, drawing sparks of doom down onto the ground where we’re being savaged all ends up. Then Eoin Downey becomes trapped in McGrath’s snare and is shown the line. Darragh McCarthy, for once, becomes the beneficiary of a such an instance. The tables have turned in every way imaginable. From that point on, it all dissolves into static. You’re watching, yes, but none of it’s registering. The connection between your eyes and brain has short-circuited. You’re stunned, shell-shocked, completely numb. Subs come in, “sent in to look for survivors”, as David Brady put it after Mayo’s own break down in ’04. Chances come and go. Rhys Shelly apparently nails one from play. You were there for all of it, yet you’ve no recollection.

For the second year in a row, you make the long walk back to town with your sister, the Prodigal Rebel, lured home for good this time, you assume in anticipation for the coming Cork renaissance. For a second year in a row, not a word is spoken. She knows too well at this stage. And I know it’s over, still I cling, I don’t know where else I can go. You don’t know where else you can go. So you return to Brannigan’s, back to the family and the old friends and new strangers, the same crowd that only three hours ago you stood with in trembling hope, full of bright imaginings of what it might be like back here after. You haven’t prepared for this though. Not another wake. The sleveen Rudyard Kipling wrote some shite about how you are a man “if you can meet triumph with disaster and treat those two imposters just the same”, but you’ve no meas in that stoic, stiff upper lip bollix of the British Empire. Rebels weep. And so you find yourself, after a few, doing just that into the warm embrace of a some lad called Conor. You’re meant to catch the bus back home that evening but you can’t stomach it. So you call on the kindness of a couple of Good Samaritans out in Raheny to put you up for the night. Cork can wait.

You find yourself in the Boars Head of a rainy Monday afternoon and the playlist is toying with you, laughing at you, gnawing at your fragility. In your disheveled state, Phil Lynott is speaking to you. The system has broke down. Romance has broke down. The boy is crackin’ up. The boy is broke down. You stare into the distance and try not to think of how the system broke down. You peruse through the Irish Times and the Examiner. What did Walsh and McEvoy make of it all you wonder? You know full well that each kernel of analytical insight will be like a punch in the gut. You recall what McEvoy wrote two days previous; “The notion that Cork have to do it should be resisted. It’s not a case of now or never for them. It’s nothing of the sort. They’ll be there again next year and the year after that and the year after that.” Ah Enda. Whatever comfort it failed to offer beforehand, it certainly offers even less now. Not after what just transpired and the way it transpired. The aircoaches come and go but you can’t face the music yet. You still can’t leave this Old Town.

You eventually summon the guts to make for Heuston and head back. Time to go. But somewhere along the way, whether out of some sense of self-flagellation borne out of four hours in the Boars Head or the dawning revelation that old Rudyard might have been onto something after all, you book into the Anner, alight at Thurles and make a beeline for Larry’s Bar on Croke Street. The celebratory din from Semple wafts through you on the way. If you can watch the things you gave your life to, broken. And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools. Aboy Kipling boy. And that’s where you find yourself for the evening, planted in the corner of Larry’s, holding court with the local celebrity TJ Lyons and the rest of the kind and compassionate patrons, good hurling men and women, the kind of people that are just like you only they’re donned in blue and gold. You find yourself arm in arm with them, singing the Galtee Mountain Boy and talking of Sean Treacy. You’re as content as the situation can allow, in Tipperary So Far Away.

It’s Tuesday afternoon now you walk into the Arch Bar in the square, the game on the big screen. And why wouldn’t it be? “I can turn it off if you like”, asks the slightly bemused barman, and you looking fairly worse for wear, still decked in that rain-sodden red jersey. “Not at all”, you respond, sure Darragh Fitz has just picked one off from out the field. The half-time whistle sounds as you finish off the dregs of your pint and make for the door. “We should be home and hosed now”, you remark as you leave, such tired humour the last refuge of the utterly desolate. Homeward bound, at last. Life goes on and all that.

A week has passed, and now you find yourself on a stag in Dingle, the slow, steady churn of time beginning to sand down the sharper edges of it all. Peaks and troughs. Peaks and troughs. The spin around Slea Head brings you, inevitably, to Páidí’s in Ventry. “What happened ye last week?” ask two auld fellas at the bar, grinning away, revelling in it all no doubt. They’re riding high, of course, their own big day still to come. Oh, to be back there again. “Ah sure, look,” is about all you can muster. And that’s enough for them. Your eyes are drawn to a picture on the wall; John B. Keane pulling a pint, with his immortal line: “Drink in moderation is one of the most ridiculous statements ever made.” Whatever about the health implications of such a theory, you can’t help but find a kind of truth in it when you transpose the logic onto your own particular vice.

Because following the Cork hurlers in moderation? That’s one of the most ridiculous statements ever made. You’re either all in or you’re not in at all. You’ve signed this Faustian pact, whether you realised it or not, one where you sell your emotional stability and tether your soul to the team’s fate, ride the ecstatic highs and pay in full when the inevitable heartbreak of defeat comes calling. But unlike Faust, you can’t get out of the deal. There’s no escape clause. This is the life you chose.

And in nine months time, you’ll come back for more. You’ll travel down to Waterford and back up to Thurles. And you’ll see how it goes from there. Maybe even back to Croke Park. And maybe McEvoy will be proven right all along.

Up the Rebels