When our level best is not enough – An Irishman’s Diary about why Americans can’t understand draws

A long-lost cousin from Montana made the trip of a lifetime to Ireland earlier this month, having put it off until retirement.

I worried beforehand that the old country might not match her romantic expectations, but I needn’t have. The visit was a triumph. Even the weather behaving impeccably, allowing Connemara, Kerry, and the Cliffs of Moher to show off their best side.

When she got back to Dublin, I detected only one small quibble. “What was it with the football draw?” she asked. I begged her pardon? The Dublin-Mayo game needing a replay, she meant: “You don’t have overtime here?”

I had somehow forgotten the All-Ireland, although 10 days previously, knowing she was a sports fan, I had predicted that would be a bonus. Her group had even stayed in the Croke Park Hotel for their first night, the Friday before the game.

Luck of the draw

So when I met her there, I had pointed proudly to the stadium, and explained the GAA, the weekend’s significance, the tragicomedy of Mayo’s 65-year curse, etc. Then, as her bus headed west on the Saturday, I warned her to expect the sight of grown men weeping if Mayo won.

To cap what should have been an unforgettable occasion, she had even found a pub with her surname on it in which to watch the final.

But after all that, the game was allowed end in what Americans call a “tie”, a situation she found inexplicable.

I tried to explain how differently we see draws here. How, in exciting games between well-matched teams, it’s considered almost an injustice for one to win with a late score.

Replays were not just happily tolerated, I said – it was compulsory for commentators to wish that a great game would end level, “so that we can do this all over again”.

If there had been time for a full lecture, I might have explained to my cousin that, in one sense, draws were the foundation on which Croke Park is built. That by happy confidence, its redevelopment followed closely upon a lucrative four-game epic between Dublin and Meath in 1991 – a saga since mythologised into the GAA equivalent of the Cattle Raid of Cooley.

Warming to my theme, I would then have spread the argument to other sports, especially soccer, where to “get a result” usually means the opposite of what Americans consider a result.

Exhibit A would have been Robbie Keane’s recent retirement, when everybody agreed that his finest moment had been a last-gasp equaliser against Germany, back in an era when all our games seemed to end 1-1.

If my cousin had been really unlucky, I might have started on cricket – a sport where they can play a stalemate over five days and not think anyone’s time wasted.

But that would have been a waste of time, probably, because to her and most US sports fans, a tied game will never be justified.

They were most famously dismissed, by one American football coach, as “like kissing your sister”. And this has always seemed to me an odd comparison, implying deviance as much as anti-climax. But then again, many US sports fans would see draws as a bit of both, something only decadent Europeans could enjoy.

At the US ‘94 World Cup, I remember debating the point with a local who, perhaps exaggerating, had suggested that “ties are for communists”. On the contrary, I protested, ties had been used quite successfully against communism; for example, during the bitter world chess championships of the late cold war.

Take 1978, when Soviet regime favourite Anatoly Karpov played defector Viktor Korchnoi in a first-to-six series, where the many draws didn’t count but were key to the mental warfare. Or 1984, when Karpov raced into a 4-0 lead against the young challenger Gary Kasparov –now a reformist politician – and looked to be heading for a whitewash.

Then Kasparov started drawing games, to wear the older man down. After 17 attritional stalemates, Karpov won again, for 5-0. But another 14 draws did the trick. Kasparov started winning until, with the score 5-3 and Karpov near collapse, the series was controversially called off.

Not that I’m suggesting chess stalemates brought down communism. Far from it. As everyone knows, it was Ireland’s heroic 1-1 defeat of the USSR in Hannover in 1988 that struck the mortal blow. We celebrated long into the night with our West German hosts. Barely a year later, the Berlin Wall crumbled.