The indomitable Lyons

For some years now, Foul Play has kept in his head a list of the grisliest sporting events it has ever been his misfortune to witness during his 37 years in the journalism business.

When I say “grisliest”, I am not talking about particularly boring games, or events of especially excruciating dreariness. I mean “grisly” in the sense of how much actual nausea can be induced in the viewer by the result, and how loudly he or she yelps with dismay at the outcome.

I have to give top place on this list to the last-minute equaliser that Ireland let in against Macedonia in 1999, which stopped us taking our rightful place at Euro 2000, the best and most exciting tournament of all time. They don’t come any worse than that, or at least they don’t come any worse without involving corpses, or genocide, or paedophilia.

A close second is the spectacular collapse of Jean Van De Velde at the British Open earlier the same year, in which he had about a 25-stroke lead going into the final day’s play, and then suffered some kind of brain-storm which concluded with him wading about in a lake, trying to play a shot from the bottom of the waterline.

More recently, there was the Scottish Cup final a couple of months ago, in which Rangers chose the last few seconds of the final minute of stoppage time to score a freakish winning goal and deny Celtic a second successive domestic double; and Liverpool’s win over Man United at Old Trafford, when they scored an 89th-minute winner during their second or third excursion into the United half.

The Dublin v Kildare championship game of 2000 has also occupied a place fairly high up that list, for reasons that will need no further elaboration if you happen to be one of the unfortunate wretches who watched it.

Foul Play can handle the Dubs blowing a Leinster final (just as well, I hear you cry, given their results since ’95). He can even handle them losing to (slightly) inferior opponents, as they did that day.

What he cannot stomach is the sight of them blowing a Leinster final against slightly inferior opponents after being six points up at the interval, and then managing a grand total of one point in the entire second half (from the boot of Collie Moran).

For the uninformed, Dublin began that second half by handing Kildare two of the most infuriatingly avoidable goals in championship history, and then stumbled around like drunks for the rest of the afternoon, eventually being outscored 2-6 to 0-1 in the second half.

The best one can say about that fiasco of a match is that at least the Dubs didn’t choose the occasion of a needle match with Meath to fuck up in such wonderful fashion.

You will understand, then, why I went ever so slightly apeshit at the sight of Tommy Lyons’ rejuvenated team giving the Lilywhites the exact same treatment last Sunday, trailing for most of the match and then scoring two goals in quick succession to give themselves a lead they would not relinquish.

First, Alan Brogan turns his marker with a body-swerve worthy of a belly-dancer in an Istanbul speakeasy (“He done him like a kipper!” ejaculated the fellow next to me in the pub) and sees his shot bounce lazily in off the far post. Then, with RTE still showing replays of that one, Ray Cosgrove is given the freedom of Jones’s Road to walk through the still-traumatised Kildare defence and slot home another.

The Dubs subsequently did their best to fuck it up, of course, hitting plenty of atrocious wides from good positions and needlessly squandering a lot of ball. That, though, was to be expected from a team many of whose core members are little more than adolescents, and who hadn’t won a Leinster final for the best part of a decade before Sunday.

They still have loads of problems to iron out, particularly at the back, where Coman Goggins’ form has gone decidedly brown since he was made skipper. Later on, sub midfielder Darren Magee committed a

war-crime of a hand-pass to gift a second goal to the ever-dangerous Tadhg Fennin.

But now that they have deservedly beaten Kildare and Meath, two of the top seven or eight teams in the country, Dublin will feel they can whack anybody (except Galway, who look as mean as ever).

It has been a strange championship so far. Cork have been decidedly anaemic, Kerry are temporarily deflated as a result of a well-publicised bereavement, and Meath haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory either. Meanwhile Tyrone, many people’s pre-championship tip for the Sam Maguire, are doing a pretty decent impersonation of Cavan at the moment.

The slightly haphazard manner of Dublin’s last two wins have added to the growing weight of evidence that Tommy Lyons is a lucky manager. It is also worth pointing out that both of these victories have coincided with two of the sunniest afternoons of an admittedly foul June and July.

So, if it rains on the day of the next match, the Dubs are probably screwed. But if it’s sitting-out weather, the next stage of Lyons’ imminent canonisation will proceed apace. Ah, the joys of the summer…