Cold turkey in the cyber cafe

How was it for you? Sweet, crisp and kingly? Don't make me sick.

At throw-in time I'm walking on Clark Street feeling like a fool and sweating like a pig. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Being in America for the month of September means dismantling the circadian rhythms of the GAA person, going out to pubs to watch games over Sunday breakfast (when any decent man is just throwing up) and other perversions. I had decided that cold turkey was the sensible option. I would spend All-Ireland hurling final day playing softball with guys called Chip, Skip and Todd.

"Nice job, Skip."

"Way to go, Chip."

"Enough already, Todd."

Then we'd brunch and then we'd drink beers and watch the Bears lose at football and I wouldn't think of being in Croke Park at all.

The sports editor is a sadistic pervert, of course. "You can run slow, but fatso you sure can't hide," he harrumphs down the phone, fresh from his Irish Times Human Relations refresher course. "Give us 600 words on watching the match in Chicago." I explain that 600 words about watching a match on a big screen in a pub is scarcely going to break any new ground. He says it's been nine years, suddenly you want to break new ground? I hang up.

It is 8:45 a.m. on All-Ireland hurling Sunday. I am on Sedgwick Street and I have my nose pressed against the window of Sedwick's Bar like a little boy looking into a toy store at Christmas. There are lights on. A man tells me that there will be no All-Ireland hurling shown here today, but if I stick around till 10.0 I can see Spurs play Bradford. Sick bastard.

I sprint to the River Shannon pub 50 yards away. Lights on. Fans whirring. Guy mopping the floor. No Cork jerseys. No Kilkenny jerseys. No customers. No match.

I try the Gamekeeper Tavern on the off-chance. Hurling? He looks at me as if I had inquired about the possibility of them showing live badger baiting.

I am fully awake know and every cell in my body is yearning to see the game. My brain shuts itself down and switches into boring old fart mode. I pace Clark Street thinking of every All-Ireland final I have seen since 1970 or so, all the big afternoons in Croke Park filled with the knowledge given only to the righteous that I had been there too on all the small afternoons also.

Distraught, I feel my brain slipping into a comatose freeze. I forget about the matches I merely saw and regress to boring old hack mode. The time I interviewed DJ Carey in 1991 had been such a breakthrough. I hadn't eaten since the previous September when my freelance coverage of the hurling final had caused me to almost libel - and certainly offend - Ger Canning.

I thought about Sean Og O hAilpin, my favourite interview of this year, and of Jimmy Barry-Murphy, who I last saw after the semi-final and, in reference to an old story, I told him that if Cork won the final I'd be into the dressing-room looking for his hurley. JBM looked at me pitifully. If that story was a horse and you were a jockey you'd be banned for excessive use of the whip, said the look. Ah, good times.

The sweat isn't content to merely run down my back at this stage. It explodes forth and heads for my waistband, darkening the light-coloured trousers which I would never wear in Ireland. I look as if I have been hung upside down and forced to wet myself. I am thinking irrationally, peering into gay bars and taco joints hungry for hurling. Eventually I make a decision and bolt for the internet cafe. I shall see no hurling, but I shall keep track of the cyberscores.

I arrive tear-stained and sweaty at the Screenz Internet Cafe and boldly intrude where no GAA man has ever intruded before. The RTE teletext pages bear as much relation to being at an All-Ireland hurling final as the explanatory diagrams of ovaries in the old science text by na Braithri Chriostai bore to having sex.

Sitting down, I find an email telling me that for hurling games I should go to a certain pub on the westside. Gee thanks.

Finally, gathering cybernerve, I locate the Setanta Sports website and the mellifluous, victorious and vindicated tones of Jimmy Barry-Murphy fill Screenz on Clark Street. Give us your hurley Jimmy boy, I roar hilariously. Then Marty Morrissey is all over Seanie McGrath before I can get the volume turned down. Still hurtling through cyberspace, I find an RTE site with blow-by-blow, minute-by-minute updates. Too late. Sickeningly tantalising.

I settle with the cyberdudes. Outside it is raining. I go out and get the rest of my trousers wet. Huddled and poor, I start making phone calls to find out where I can see a tape of the game later. Sad, sick and lonely, with only a bagel inside me.

Are ya an Irishman at all? the voice in my head is saying . . .