I sat looking into space in the changing rooms at half time.
It was one of those team talks that don’t register at all because you’re still trying to decipher what happened out there and you’re wondering where those 30 minutes went and how did they go by so fast. I genuinely couldn’t remember anything I had done. I couldn’t remember one thing I had contributed and now we sat five points adrift, bested in every part of the pitch, and physically bruised.
“You’re letting him f**king hit you.”
It was the first time my attention was grabbed because here I was being singled out and called out in front of 30 people and it wasn’t for a misplaced pass, it was a question of my manhood.
I was at centre forward for most of the game taking some jabs in the lower back from their number six. It was nothing too serious, just him being a twat more than anything, and I didn’t want to get involved in a wrestling match when I was trying to win ball and I certainly didn’t want to get sent off over the head of a bit of prodding.
“You’re f**king letting him hit you and you know you are.”
By the time the ball got thrown in again, the two of us were rolling around on the ground and bodies were piling in and falling on top. Two yellows.
Three minutes later and I had cracked him with a dirty, dirty elbow square in the face. We were niggling around the 45′ as the ball was being brought out of our backline at the far side and, with the ref’s back turned, I swung the arm and ran unmarked into space with him on the ground. Eventually, he’d catch up and beat the shit out of me anyway but I went off the pitch that day having won a bit more respect from the manager and it was nothing to do with football.
A lot of club players now are getting defensive about the mass coverage of mass fighting at GAA games and it doesn’t make them all scumbags. For the most part, it’s probably just realism.
Call it crazy, backward or just sad but there’s a culture there that won’t dissolve overnight so listening to the country pontificate about punches and headlocks does them no good when they’re going to play away at the neighbours on Sunday.
Every player in the country has heard these words in the build-up to a match: ‘you’re going to be hit’.
There are grounds that are pure hostile and, every time you look at the fixture list, you know you’re going to have to be up for this one and that one and the other one. You’ll be told to stand up to it, you’ll be warned not to be bullied and you’ll be fired up to the nineties beforehand because the management team know exactly what the other lot are about to bring to the table and that means 30 men line out with eyes bulging and fists clenched. In a lot of counties, you’d probably be quicker counting the clubs where dealing with physical provocation is not a necessary part of your preparations.
And the hollering about brawls and nasty scenes unfortunately does nothing to change the reality that most games are played with one club referee, no linesmen or umpires, and a passionate, vocal support hammering their car horns and roaring in over the wire.
At a club fundraiser in Derry recently, a well-known local referee told me he was covering a game a few weeks before and heard the commotion behind him as the crowd all reacted in disgust. One of the players in the full forward line was busted open, blood pouring from his nose and the ref himself said it was blatantly obvious he had taken a box but he didn’t see it. The only way he could deal with it was to tell the guy who wasn’t bleeding that he’s going to get one back for that.
He’s only one man trying to look after a game of football and he can’t keep an eye on the behaviour of 30 of them all at once. When that’s the case, and it always will be at that level, it’s going to take a very special club to decide that they will just no longer react or rise to the occasion from now on in the interest of cleaning up the game, knowing full well that the rest can carry on as normal.
What do you do when you’re a player on the pitch and it kicks off? What do you do when you’re a team mate? A friend? A brother? Do you stand back and watch your mates and your family get hit? No, as unhelpful as it is to the overall situation, you go in and help.
Otherwise, you’re playing poker that night after the game and boys can tell you exactly the four players who didn’t go into the brawl. They’re the names that are shamed. They’re the guys who basically abandoned you.
So it’s easy to see why club players would be so paranoid about this outrage and the rise of mobile phone footage in particular because, for them, they’ve been told the whole week they’ll have to stand up to it and, when it all unfolds, they don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t have the back of their team mates.
But this isn’t something that they should want to keep as part of the game or, worse, brush under the carpet and pretend like it didn’t happen. There’s nothing tough or manly about boxing someone who thought he was playing football. There’s actually nothing really that hard about a mass brawl where the majority of lads are just roughing up their jerseys. If two guys wanted to fight, allowing them to do just that without any back-up or respite might sober them up pretty quickly.
Blaming phones for people kicking the shite out of each other is like complaining about getting thrown off the train when you didn’t buy a ticket. You’re doing something wrong and you know you are but you still have the audacity to take it out on someone enforcing the rules. If everyone thought like you did, trying to get away with living outside the law, society would descend into utter chaos.
Using the excuse that there were brawls in the old days is scarier. Imagine – honestly just imagine – the stuff you could let yourself away with because somebody else did it in the past. And I mean from every extreme of stealing a Mars bar because you aren’t the first to do it to the persecution of a whole race of people. Just because someone did it before doesn’t make it right. Just because the world was always a certain way, it doesn’t mean you can’t create a better one.
And phones are actually the only way to bring an end to this nonsense where people are throwing elbows, supporters and subs are running onto the pitch and entire teams are ready to fist fight as part of their football performance. One referee can’t police that. One red card or two yellow cards at the end of a mass brawl does nothing to stamp it out.
But phone footage allows county boards to study what happened, hand out proper retrospective punishments for every single player involved and come down hard on the clubs so that the next time there’s a chance of something like that kicking off, they might think twice and, better yet, the clubs themselves might intervene to make sure a lid is kept on their own players.
Slagging people for whipping out their phones doesn’t make you cool or hard or a purist. It makes you sound like you want people to get away with beating the head off each other on a football pitch. Record the great skill and points, sure – plenty of people do already. But don’t pretend like the other crap doesn’t happen and don’t try to protect those involved when it does.
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