Clones genetically immune to replication

Sideline Cut: Not so long ago, the Ulster football championship was regarded as the dark angel of Gaelic games. It was stark and unlovely and elemental and explainable to outsiders only by the fact that it happened "up there".

Generations of Sunday Game panellists reviewed the offerings from Ulster with the contempt a gourmet critic might evince if asked to ponder something as basic as, well, an Ulster fry, the colloquial "heart attack on a plate".

Over the years, the famously avant-garde Sunday Game wardrobe - never afraid to present its GAA men in blossom pink - went through its various colour evolution but the attitude towards Ulster stayed the same. It was a kind of Dante's Inferno of pulling, pushing, heaving, spitting, cursing, raining, thumping, kicking, jeering, booing and busting. And that was just trying to get through the turnstiles. The Ulster championship was angry about football just as certain men were terminally and unalterably angry about life. Certain truisms about the Ulster scene became distilled over the years into reliable old chestnuts. Not for the Faint-hearted. An Impossible Task. Getting out of Control. Off the Ball. Deserved to Go. A Poor Game. Not Taking any Prisoners. Bitter Rivalry. Clones.

Dear old Clones. Love it or hate it, there is no Gaelic football town even remotely like it. During the Troubles, a local famously declared: "They say it's not as bad as they say it is." That was how I always felt about the Ulster game.

Even before the Ulster renaissance in the 1990s, there was something rare and exciting and unique about the feeling around Clones on a big match day. Although much has been said and written about the complexity of the Ulster character, a good grounding for any novice would be to walk around Clones in the hours before an Ulster derby.

Clones is a market town living with distant memories of a time when it was a prosperous and important centre of the mid-Ulster landscape. Its square and the stately official buildings now owned by financial institutions give it a presence but the narrow main streets have a washed-out look, as if the last few decades had peeled away the shine. In the mid-1980s, Clones became associated with its most famous sporting son, Barry McGuigan.

A decade later, a kind of glorious infamy was bestowed upon the town through the literature of Pat McCabe, when its streets became the playground for the adventures of the preposterous Francie Brady in The Butcher Boy. That Neil Jordan's film treatment of the cult novel was located in the actual town just confirmed that although it might have been possible to find other towns that looked like Clones, nowhere else felt like Clones. The weeks of that film added a bit of extra colour and money to the town because for most weeks of the year, as one local admitted passionately this week, the place has nothing.

After the 1999 final, a local woman who served up sandwiches and iced buns and tea to the hacks that used to write up game reports in the Agricultural Centre near St Tiernach's Park said the very same thing. Clones is extreme about weather: it is either glorious or a malevolent monsoon. This evening was beautiful: the sky was salmon-streaked and Armagh had beaten Down and the chip vans down the town were booming out dance music. Boys in replica jerseys and girls dolled up to the hilt were drinking bottles near the buses that were rumbling in neutral, waiting to depart. A colleague was explaining to the woman that the noise and the boozing and the general Ulsterness of Clones made him wish he never had to see the place again. And she gently protested that the Ulster final was the town's one big day out and if that was taken away, they would have nothing.

I think for local business people in Clones, the big football days - as well as providing dramatically increased revenues - are a throwback to grander days. By noon, the Creighton Hotel at the bottom of the hill looks like the home of a particularly wild wedding and the two main streets that run at right angles are crowded with people, like Pamplona during the running of the bulls. But if any right-minded bull encountered the crowds hanging outside the Bursted Sofa, he would turn back.

Fans coming in from the Cavan or Enniskillen roads leave their cars outside the town so everybody ends up walking everywhere. For an hour before the game, there is a constant procession up the steep hill towards the ground. Because of the location of the ground, the noise carries throughout the town. When the game ends, Clones is bedlam for an hour or two but by eight in the evening the place is just abandoned. There is an eerie feeling in the evening after an Ulster final day, when Clones is left to its memories.

Not long ago, the notion of an Ulster final in Croke Park would have been outlandish. It is a reflection of the healthy state of the local game that it is now regarded as having mass appeal for neutrals. For the teams involved - and the announcement all but trumpeted the final as the latest instalment of the Armagh-Tyrone rivalry - it possibly heightens the sense of occasion.

I don't know, though. The Ulster Council has a right to hold its football finals where it pleases: there is no obligation to Clones. And it makes commercial sense for the GAA to fill Croke Park as often as possible. Yet the Ulster final belongs in Clones. When John Ford was making his great westerns, he didn't go scouting for locations in New York. Clones has become the natural landscape for the Ulster game, with its attendant passions and controversies.

Back when the Ulster championship was an entity locked into itself, fiercely parochial and too self-obsessed to make much of an impression on a national scale, Clones loved it and needed it. That was why there was such an outcry during the week from the business communities whose premises and streets are going to be hauntingly quiet on Ulster final day this year.

Clones has no leasehold on the Ulster final and it could be argued that its townspeople have been fortunate to benefit from the crowds it brings in each summer. But what it has established through its association with the Ulster game is something that runs deeper: tradition.

The most common complaint about this country is that the authentic was washed away by the flood of wealth. Clones on an Ulster final day was the definition of authenticity. Nothing ever changed except the date and the teams. The setting was reassuringly familiar and content to let its visitors do whatever they would in the atmosphere of crumbling splendour.

The time will undoubtedly come when Ulster's pre-eminence is in retreat and summer football again becomes a metaphor for the complexities of local feeling. But for this year anyway, it is going all grand and la-di-da in Croke Park. There is no real lasting harm: it will still be a provincial final and maybe even a great one. But it won't be an Ulster final, not in its soul.