The roads went quiet 20 minutes before the throw-in. Apart from us, rushing to the pub for a place where we could get a view of the game on the telly. Everyone else was already in place, sitting shoulder to shoulder on their sofas or jostling for space in the bars and boozers of the Kingdom of Kerry.
It seems impossible to find out exactly how many Kerry folk had made the five-hour journey to Dublin and Croke Park, the basilica of Gaelic sports. Let’s say it was 20,000, which is on the conservative side. That would represent around one in eight of the county’s population.
You’d think people might be getting a bit tired of it. After all, since it was first held in 1887, this was the 64th time that Kerry had been in “The Game”, or to give it its proper title, the All-Ireland Senior Football Cup Final. Of the 137 finals, Kerry had, until this latest edition of The Game, against Donegal, won 38.
You might say Kerry was the Manchester United of Gaelic football. Except that you would have to say that they are the Manchester United and the Liverpool of Gaelic football. Because it takes the combined achievements of both those titans, with 40 First Division/Premier League titles between them, to top Kerry’s dominance.
The next most successful county is Dublin (if we have to mention them), which has won 31 times – but then they do have 10 times the number of people to choose from.
Population size matters in Gaelic football, because it is very much a county-based sport. While there are also club leagues and cup competitions, when it comes to The Game, it’s county that counts. Not club, or city, or province.
And, because it is entirely amateur – in as much as anything is entirely amateur these days – the people who play for the county are of the county. I don’t know of any other truly national sport where every county competes. (All 32 counties of the island of Ireland participate, not just the Republic.)
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Gaelic football, like all other brands of football that have emerged from centuries of sporting evolution, is a refined form of organised violence. It has the skills and speed of soccer, with a light dusting of rugby’s ruffianship: when a young debutant Kerry substitute came on to the pitch, within seconds not one but two Donegal players had pushed him, hard, in the chest with the flats of their hands. The referee wagged a finger at them, and on went the game.
Down here in the south of the county, we would like to think that the team went to The Game to win one in memory of Micko, our local legend, who died in April aged 88. Mick O’Dwyer had four winner’s medals as a player and captain of Kerry in the 1950s as well as an unmatched eight titles during a 15-year period from 1974-89 as manager, when the county dominated the game as no side before or since.
A sort of combination of Bobby Moore and Sir Alex Ferguson, but more so, Micko was a modest giant. His death saw Kerry truly grind to a halt. For his funeral in our village church, the Taoiseach turned up.
That’s what (Gaelic) football means in Ireland, where people love their sport in a way British people no longer quite do. It is a classless passion. Men and women both play and watch sport in huge numbers. Every garden had a Kerry flag flying on the morning of the game. Local businesses display billboards wishing the team luck.
In Ireland, and especially in Kerry, sport embodies a sense of identity and self-confidence that foreigners don’t understand. The Irish love of sport is both sane and irrational, both calm and maniacal. I suppose it may come from a drive to beat the bigger bully down the road or over the sea. To stand up, take the field and show what you’re made of.
And when you consider that the Kerryman used to be the butt of jokes by the rest of Ireland just as the Irish did to the English, in less sensitive times, you can maybe guess why the county is made of what it is made of.
And The Game? Who won? Do you have to ask? 39 medals now. Ciarraí Abú!
Ben Fenton has worked for the FT and the Daily Telegraph
