Foul Play: The Boys (In Blue) Are Back In Town

Not every day is perfect in this life, but Sunday was one of them, from start to finish. An accursed quirk of the sporting calendar ensured that the season’s first Manchester derby, a monumentally massive occasion, clashed with the All-Ireland football final, an occasion so enormous as to defy description.

Frantic phone-calls to the GAA and to the Premier League, begging them to rearrange their showpiece events to suit Foul Play’s whims, came to naught (don’t you know who I am??), so tough decisions had to be made.
The hardest part was staying in on Saturday night, while the usual deafening drunken revelry from the pub downstairs seemed to scream “If you can’t shut ‘em up, join ‘em”. The easiest part, after bouncing out of bed bright-eyed on Sunday morning, was lashing down a confident lump sum on Dublin to win, City to win and (to maximise revenue) a large double on Dublin and City to win.

Not for the first time, I had cause to be grateful that my workplace is equipped with two large screens capable of screening two different matches at the same time, but it doesn’t alter the fundamental reality that watching two matches at once is an extraordinarily difficult task, and will eventually lead to a situation where you need to prioritise one over the other, which is a bit like being asked to choose your favourite child.
After some deliberation, the Dubs got the nod, on the basis that a Final is a wonderfully simple do-or-die, win-or-bust, death-or-glory affair, whereas the Mancunian derby — however seismic — is merely one League fixture out of 38 and wasn’t going to definitively settle the race.
The pattern was set, then: perched eagerly in front of Mayo-Dublin, kicking or hand-passing every ball, while tilting my head sideways every few seconds to inspect events at the Emirates. A trio of native Dubliners, of whom I was one, kept up a steady rhythm of impassioned, erudite and insightful commentary, while the reaction of every non-Dub in the office served to emphatically confirm Enda Kenny’s pre-match declaration that the other 31 counties were rooting for Mayo. I don’t claim to fully understand the reasoning behind this indisputably pathetic attitude evident among people who seem more than happy to live and work in Dublin, but I take it as a back-handed compliment.
By rights, Mayo should have been out of sight and cracking the champagne by half-time. Dublin will have been mightily relieved to have stayed in touch, Bernard Brogan’s opportunistic 16th-minute goal just about maintaining a foothold. Our full-back line, a little wobbly all season, was creaking to an alarming extent, and a one-point Mayo lead at the break was undeniably poor reward for their general dominance, raising the spectre that 62 years of horrific baggage was beginning to play on the Westerners’ minds. It was about this time that City fired themselves ahead with an absolute peach from the mighty Aguero.
Every time I looked to my right, City were rampaging down the wings, cutting United to shreds at will, carving out chance after chance, andusing the full width of the pitch in a manner that never really seemed part of the plan when Roberto Mancini was in charge. United looked utterly devoid of attacking ideas on the rare occasions they managed to get hold of the ball. From Foul Play’s perspective, it was going perfectly according to plan. But the ticker was thumping furiously, even before the fifth coffee, in view of United’s time-honoured habit of extricating themselves from such situations.
And there was the small matter of an All-Ireland final to attend to.
Back to Croker, and within a few minutes of the restart, the suspicion was beginning to harden that if Mayo were to ever find themselves in an All-Ireland final against fifteen motionless statues, they would still find a way to lose. The old demons must surely have made their malign presence felt during the half-time break: it was a more hesitant, tentative Mayo who re-emerged.
Not all of these Dublin players are lavishly gifted, but by Christ they’re whole-hearted and gutsy above and beyond the call of duty, with apparently lost causes being chased all over the field. A cavalry charge from the bench had the desired effect: younger heads (Mannion and Kilkenny) hadn’t quite seized the day, but the introduction of O’Gara, Bastick and Rock injected considerable sharpness, Michael Darragh Macauley was busting a gut in midfield, Stephen Cluxton’s kickouts were finding their targets, and the fluency Mayo had shown all year was beginning to desert them.
Then, just when a three-point lead had been established and the momentum had visibly shifted, a Mayo equalising goal out of absolutely nowhere, which can only be blamed on a senseless rush of blood to the head on Cluxton’s part, charging into no-man’s land, possibly distracted by the glare of the sun. We will absolve him here: the man is indisputably the greatest goalkeeper of the modern age, and this was the first mistake he’s made in six years (the ‘07 semi-final against Kerry). Level again: twenty minutes to go.
Over in Manchester, City were by now running rings, squares, triangles and figure eights around an absolutely anaemic United. 2-0 at the break. 3-0 two minutes after the break. 4-0 five minutes after the break. It was joyous stuff, and on any other day, I might have been able to just sit back and luxuriate in it. But relaxation wasn’t an option on this of all Sundays.
I needn’t have panicked. Before long, the ever-predatory Brogan had somehow palmed another lessthan- pristine strike to the net, reestablishing a three-point advantage with 15 minutes to go.
But it wasn’t plain sailing from that point. With Dublin having emptied their bench, Rory O’Carroll(concussion) and Eoghan O’Gara (hamstring) had effectively been rendered passengers and the game had become more or less a case of 13 men against 15. Or, if you examine the performance of Cavan ref Joe McQuillan, 13 against 16. McQuillan was awarding Mayo frees like a hyperactive kid with a whistle: by full-time, the free count stood at a shocking 32 to 12 in Mayo’s favour, after a reasonably clean match between two teams with no innate inclination towards the black arts.
Mayo never threw in the towel, and it would be only fair to commend Cillian O’Connor for his unerring accuracy from the many, many, many free-kicks awarded to him. However, he wasted so much time taking them that it beggared belief. The sands of time were rapidly running out on Mayo’s chances, and O’Connor appeared to be possibly unaware of the game situation vis-a-vis the scoreboard and the clock. The poor fella (whose contribution this season has been immense) would probably be better off not watching a re-run of stoppage time, wherein he took it into his head to dawdle endlessly over two free-kicks at a time when a goal was urgently needed.
And then....all over. Cue an explosion of unadulterated jubilation from the three hacks in sky blue, while the ‘neutrals’ reacted in a variety of ways: magnanimous congratulations along the lines of ‘Fair play to ye, ye deserved it’ at one end of the spectrum, miserable scowling at the other, interspersed with dark mutterings about how Mayo should have been given at least another five hours of stoppage time until such time as they took the lead, and how the Dubs have a horribly unfair advantage by virtue of the county’s population size (the thought occurs that it wouldn’t be half the size it is if it wasn’t for the zillions of non-Dubs who freely elect to live here and raise their kids here).
Did it compare to Dublin’s 2011 triumph in terms of pure euphoria? Yes and no. The manner of the achievement was slightly less dramatic this time around, the victims weren’t Kerry, the match itself was strangely scrappy and error-ridden. But nonetheless, it feels absolutely wonderful, and not even Wayne Rooney’s ‘consolation’ goal (ensuring that United escaped with a semi-respectable 4-1 loss rather than the 7-0 shellacking they deserved) could dampen the spirits.
By the time I’d finished watching my adopted Detroit Lions demolish Washington that evening, I was another few hundred squid in profit for the day, my county had just won its second All-Ireland in three years, Alex Ferguson was no longer around to thwart City’s quest for world domination, and God was well and truly in his heaven.
Sport. How could I live without it?