Late kick-off

The Last Straw: A famous doctor whose name I've forgotten once said that for every hour you exercise, you add two hours to your life. No doubt his theory had small print.

There must be a cut-off point somewhere, as with voluntary pension contributions. Otherwise, given the right fitness programme and freedom from injuries, you could achieve immortality.

Either way, one of my long-term contributions to the scheme has been a weekly football match in the YMCA. For 12 years, I've joined a number of other time-savers every Thursday at 6pm for an hour-long game in a hall rented from the Young Men's Christian Association.

Ours is a disparate group. We're not all young. We're definitely not all Christian. But after 12 years of showering together, I can say without fear of contradiction that we are all men.

Looking back, it's sobering to recall that 12 years ago, I still had many role-models in professional football, players who were older than me but still performing at the highest level.

Now I have to scour the history books for someone still playing at my age. Arise Sir Stanley Matthews.

Even so, I was not a founder member of the Thursday game. The fixture already had a rich oral history when I joined. Pioneer members such as Harry and Andy (I use the term "pioneer" in its original sense - most of our lads like a drink) claim it goes back to the 1980s: a grim time when the prospect of extending your life unnecessarily, through exercise, was not as attractive as it is today.

The Thursday game has since become a metaphor for the development of modern Ireland.

From its sometimes violent past, it has evolved into a peaceful and increasingly multicultural entity, in which we often need to get foreign lads from the gym to fill vacancies created by the Celtic Tiger, which keeps regular members too busy to play.

More than anything, though, the Thursday game has always been about fun. It was fun to play at the YMCA, even if you weren't one of the Village People. And thanks to the time slot, there was an almost spiritual element too. You'd hear church bells ringing at 6pm on a Thursday and you'd look up from your computer, gaze reflectively into the distance like the people in the Angelus video, and think: "Damn! I forgot about the football."

A mad dash to the Y and an hour of frenzied activity later, you'd re-emerge into the city evening, feeling that all was well with the world. It would be late-night opening, so there'd still be time to hit the shops, if need be. And you could do so in the satisfaction of knowing that your own closing time had been postponed by another two hours.

I write in the past tense because last week, our long tradition came to an abrupt end when we were summarily ousted from the 6pm slot by something called a "samba dance class". We should have seen it coming. For years the smaller rooms around the Y's main hall have throbbed to the rhythm of aerobic classes with names like "bums and tums" and "red hot fat burner".

The investigative journalists among us had long ago spotted that while most of the aerobics people were young, and many may even have been Christian, very few were men. If we'd had accountants in our number, we might also have noticed that their classes were much more densely populated (and potentially profitable) than our football game, where anything greater than four-a-side left us no room to express ourselves.

We were like Bewleys cafes before the restructuring: occupying a prime city-centre location, with a turnover that couldn't justify the rent. We don't blame the YMCA. We don't blame Rodrigo (the samba instructor). We don't blame anyone, except maybe Dublin City Council for not giving our game protected status in the city plan. But the end, when it came, was like a cold shower. In fact, in a poetic turn, the boilers weren't working, so it really was a cold shower.

In the brave new Y, the only slot now available to us was 9pm. We thought about protesting the marginalisation of men in Irish society, with a march to the Dáil or something. Then the stoicism for which our gender is famous took over, and we opted to cave in instead.

Henceforward, the fragrant perspiration of the samba dancers will have settled like dew on the pitch by the time we kick off on Thursdays. By the time we finish, the shops will be long closed. And even if we've gained a couple of hours in the process, we'll probably still go home haunted by the feeling that it's later than we thought.