Pitching the tent, but not for the quiet life

DUBLIN-MONAGHAN AFFAIR:Parsing the Parnell Park playbook demands insight into a culture to which we have all contributed, writes Tom Humphries

THE AUTHOR Ray Blount jnr spent a year with the Pittsburgh Steelers gridiron team of the early 1970s and wrote a fine and entertaining book about the entire experience.

Very early on in the narrative he presages and frames his subsequent description of life with the team with a quote from a player: "There was no other world outside it. There was nothing."

So it is with serious teams everywhere. The community of the team creates its own moral universe.

The weave of relationships within the dressing-room delineates that universe. The metabolism of the team is all-consuming; all effort goes to feed its needs. In short the world looks very different from inside the tent than from outside the tent.

We who stand weekly delivering homilies from the penny pulpits of the media carnival have a right to expect that some sort of moral and uplifting imperative informs the deeds of our sportspeople.

We have a duty to stand up for ethics and principles and the need to do the right thing, at least on the field of play. We shouldn't be surprised though when we don't get what we ask for. We shouldn't be shy of recognising our own distorting influence on proceedings. There are virtually irreconcilable cultures chafing off each other here.

This week Dublin's footballers, ever (and unreasonably) hopeful of creeping through a season without the klieg lights of media attention falling on them, stood, fidgeting impatiently, at centre stage again. The city's marquee team, passably successful and, by dint of location and tradition, persistently charismatic, draw as much media attention as the rest of the GAA world combined. At least that is how it feels inside the tent they live in.

Inside that tent most prerogatives are different. The group dynamic for Dublin is bent toward winning an All-Ireland, not toward being role models or inspirations. The collective mentality, as with many teams, is one where the wagons are circled and the players do what they have to do. There is no other world outside of this. You give to the team and do for the team and that makes you part of the team.

So? It should be said from the start that Mark Vaughan was wrong to deliver a punch to the face of his opponent. Paul Caffrey was wrong to appear to almost congratulate Vaughan on his latest misdemeanour. The Dublin backroomer (who, by way of full journalistic disclosure, was known to this journalist as a good and decent fella and even a friend in another professional existence) was egregiously wrong if, as alleged, he landed a headbutt on the face of a Monaghan player.

It needs to be said, too, that the Dubs and the county board were quicker (quicker even than Thursday night's statement would suggest) in putting up their hands on the last issue, first to Monaghan and then to the powers that be within the GAA.

Sometimes wrong is wrong and a mistake is a mistake and even within the strange culture of the modern GAA the right thing gets done in the aftermath.

We should note also that within the Dublin team tent the messages of last Sunday are likely to be less clear than they are to the world outside. It is that way with any team. Players on several occasions last Sunday "stepped in" for each other.

Caffrey's salutation to Vaughan as he left the pitch looks from where we stand like the condoning of another outbreak of indiscipline on the field by a notable recidivist. To Caffrey, living and breathing within the biosphere of his team, it represented standing by a young player in trouble again.

There is only that world. Caffrey doesn't stand on the sideline with his bainisteoir's bib wondering how he should act as a guard in these circumstances. He is thinking of how he will proceed with the job of getting the most of his young star.

Within the tent getting sent off is more plain stupid than plain wrong.

In Vaughan's case the fact that many in Parnell Park were unsure of what happened until the photographic evidence appeared the next day may further diminish the weight of the charges against the Dublin manager.

Caffrey may merely have seen a young player receiving a second yellow at a time of the year when the referees' generosity with yellow cards has already been a talking point.

Whatever. It's clear that for a while the Dubs will take a shower in the reliable drizzle of our moral opprobrium. Will anything change as a result? Did it change for Vaughan after his landmark adventures with the DRA back in 2005? His sending off in the 2004 Leinster club final v Portlaoise brought almost an entire summer's worth of controversy down on his head the following year but he was still red-carded in the Leinster under-21 final of 2005 and the All-Ireland club semi-final of 2006, still had his cheekbone fractured by a Mayo supporter in a nightclub in 2006 and was to be found taunting Darren Rooney on the field in Croke Park last summer.

Vaughan's latest solecism, caught in perfect freeze frame on the back pages as his fist distorted his rival's face into something glimpsed in a funhouse mirror, once again, however, highlights the problems which exist in establishing law and order in the badlands of intercounty football. Beyond the ritual condemnation of a stupid deed all sorts of issues arise.

Vaughan - whose Gaelic football prominence stretches back to his minor days in the summer of 2003 when his bleached head featured an eyecatching badger stripe of Dubs blue - is not just the greatest well of untapped potential in a city crying out for something different and explosive, he is also alien to the philosophy of those who would do anything for a quiet life.

As a player whose profile is as high as his temper is short he will always be subject to tail pulling and worse in games. The most obvious solution from Vaughan's point of view and from Dublin's is a prolonged period wherein a saintly refusal to react to provocation makes the provocation go away.

Nobody knows what got said in the Monaghan dressing-room beforehand last Sunday, and Monaghan, like Dublin, may have gathered in a tight circle and uttered a Corinthian pledge that they collectively would go out and enjoy a sporting and morally uplifting afternoon. Maybe. Yet who, knowing the damage Vaughan can do from placed balls alone and being aware of his combustibility, would not have attempted to test the limits of his self-control? That is the culture that most GAA players live in.

Vaughan attracts negative attention on the field. He also draws it on himself. That he is persistently wound up by rivals does not excuse his retaliations or detract from the fact he has a nigglingly abrasive style himself, including a raw and quite high-armed style of tackling.

In some respects, indeed, it could be argued that Vaughan is curiously but perfectly emblematic of the team he plays for. He bristles with a potential that has as yet been only incrementally delivered on. He is media-shy yet defiantly flamboyant. He resents the limelight yet his existence within it is an unresolved part of his essence.

If he is a slow learner the team he plays for, veterans of the so-called Battle of Omagh and the John Morrison Rear Shoulder Charge and the Ricey McMenamin Repudiation - among other things - aren't the most nimble of students either.

And that perhaps is the crux of the matter. While it can be argued that this Dublin side's perceived failure to get its house together is counterproductive to their own cause there is no evidence or sign of the GAA culture at large succeeding in making matters of indiscipline a priority.

Apart from having to endure the distraction of media tut-tutting Dublin don't suffer unduly from these transgressions.

Dublin will argue that their business is more intensely scrutinised than that of any other team in the country and that in a GAA culture where it is routine in underage club matches to go to a referee after a game and badger him to retrospectively convert a straight red into two meaningless yellows they are merely playing the same game as everybody else.

If Dublin's perceived discipline problem isn't hurting them any more than any other counties' discipline problems hurt well why wouldn't they live on the edge? Is there a county in Ireland that doesn't justify the fielding of one or two hard men who operate on the borders of neutrality by noting that every critic would love to have a man like that in his county team.

Whatever the motivations underlining Caffrey's exchange with Vaughan as he came of the pitch last Sunday, there was nothing in the rules or in Caffrey's mindset stopping him from naming Vaughan in the side to play Armagh in Crossmaglen tomorrow.

There are many who would argue Paul Caffrey was entitled within the team dynamic to reach out to Vaughan last week as he came off the field and to deal with the issue privately later.

Vaughan's inclusion in a team seven days later suggests the levels of disapproval he encountered were as minimal as the punishment meted out from above. That though is an internal, in-tent matter.

The fact is that there is nothing to prevent Vaughan from playing. Therefore in the logic of the tent he plays.

This isn't so much a Dublin problem (although it is that) as a broader GAA cultural problem. In the modern game (with all the do-or-die intensity we ask it to exhibit for our viewing pleasure) has the GAA the willingness or the ability to police the critical series of 14 rather intense relationships which are conducted for the 70 minutes of a meaningful game between outfield players and their markers?

Vaughan's retaliations are stupid but the consequences have generally been short-term and there is no evidence of the wind-up culture which serves as a context for Vaughan's actions being dealt with.

Some GAA players trash-talk as fluently and steadily as NBA stars these days; many have a supplementary repertoire of physical niggles and annoyances they can inflict on their markers by way of additional distraction. These deeds are at least as unsporting as a punch in the face. They are an increasing part of GAA culture.

So is the intensity and the pressure to deliver. Vaughan knows that by and large he held his temper through Dublin's championship summer last year. He knows too that the final relationship with a marker he had in Croke Park was his time spent in the company of Kerry's Pádraig Reidy in the All-Ireland semi-final. "Cleaned out" was the general verdict delivered on the young Dubliner. That's a lot to process too.

Dublin chose to stand behind Mark Vaughan this week. As a gesture we would all have been more comfortable if Vaughan had been repudiated, and there was some relief when the alleged headbutt incident was seen to be unravelling with some honour and dignity late in the week.

The world inside the tent will always be different, though, and virtually every GAA team in the country will roll the dice and play the most favourable odds at the GAA's disciplinary roulette wheel this year.

Last Sunday's contretemps was virtually sorted out internally between the two sides in the hours afterwards. That's GAA culture. Shuttle diplomacy between men who understand the world inside each other's tents. A county chairman and a microphone combined to allow the business to spill over into the pubic domain again the next day. That's where we all came riding in on our white chargers.

The world inside the tent has different imperatives, though, and everyone in there knows that if Mark Vaughan scores the winning goal in an All-Ireland final this September all sins will be washed away.

Then, and only then, will the perspectives of those inside the tent merge with those of us outside the tent.

Winner takes all, we will say approvingly. You do what you have to do and to hell with the begrudgers. He's tough and difficult but what manager wouldn't want him, we will purr. And Vaughan's blond head and chiselled features will be the fodder of hero worship in the brain of every mini-leaguer in the county.

Between now and then there is no other world outside the tent for Dublin or the 31 other contenders.

There never will be so long as the GAA fails to reach inside the tent and deliver punishments that really hurt.

And the high moral ground will always be unfirm under the feet of those of us who stone the sinners but absolve the winners.