Cross marks place we once loved well

Sideline Cut:  On Sunday, Crossmaglen Rangers will go for their fifth Ulster title, having ruled the roost in Armagh for the last 10 years. It is a remarkable record for the old market town whose GAA club was for many decades the most potent symbol of nationalism in the North, with the British army watchtower looming over the playing field. It is hardly a coincidence that the flowering of Gaelic football potential in Armagh and Tyrone followed the peace agreement in 1998.

The emergence in Crossmaglen, within the same decade, of such immense talents as the McConville boys, the McEntee twins and the Kernans and such consummate performers as Francie Bellew and Cathal Shortt has, however, to be regarded as close to miraculous - or else there is something in the water in that part of the country.

Thinking about tomorrow's match against Ballinderry, another stubborn and phenomenally high-achieving football community, I realised I have only ever seen Crossmaglen play football in gales or rain.

Even in high summer, Oisín McConville does not exactly radiate a St Tropez tan, but when you watch him play in the black and amber stripes of his hometown club on hostile November and December days, he looks virtually transparent with cold, forlornly roaming around the marshes of some provincial football ground and bursting into life now and again to deliver three or four cracking points from play.

I remember going up to visit Crossmaglen one night in the winter of 2000. Joe Kernan was in charge then and the county trainer, John McCloskey, was supervising the training of the team. If you have never visited Cross, it is an old-fashioned and solid country town, its shop fronts facing the grassy square. Like most Irish towns, it was shaded and silent by seven o'clock in the evening, with just a few youngsters sitting in the dazzlingly bright window booths of the cafe, chomping on fried chicken and slurping cokes. For teenage kicks, there was not much doing.

But the Rangers clubhouse, just a five-minute walk from the square, was cheerful and crowded, and in the dressingroom below, the senior team were pulling on extra jerseys and shirts for what would be a session in near-freezing conditions.

Kernan was welcoming and affable and serious about what Crossmaglen were about, speaking candidly about what football meant in the town and to him.

Until 1909, Crossmaglen played as the Red Hands and Creggan, changing their name and adopting the stripes at the suggestion of a businessman from Dundalk.

The Kernan name goes back, and one of the more famous passages in club history involves Big Joe's uncle Jamesey. Playing for Armagh in 1926 in Belturbet, Jamesey Kernan took a hard-enough hit but waved it off. As he slept that night, what was obviously a serious internal injury worsened and he died. As Joe Kernan memorably put it that night, "There wasn't a ball kicked in the town for a full year out of sadness."

The mourning was declared over when Kernan's grandfather threw a ball out the front door and the game took off again. "It's just one of those wee stories," Kernan said.

In 1996, Crossmaglen won the first round of the Armagh championship by a single point against Sarsfields. Their season ended with an All-Ireland final victory against Pádraig Brogan's Knockmore on St Patrick's Day. Further national championships followed in 1999 and 2000, and by then Kernan's claims for a tilt at the Armagh job were undeniable. Two years later, the town was in carnival mood as it prepared to welcome Kernan back with the Sam Maguire.

After decades of living with the reputation of being one of the most troubled spots on the cursed Six Counties map and Merlyn Rees's sobriquet "Bandit Country", that famous All-Ireland win felt like a coming into the light for many local people. Crossmaglen was and is, of course, a nationalist town, and some of the darker episodes in the years of cold killing occurred on its streets. But the GAA club managed, particularly when it came to prominence, to remain steadfastly and admirably neutral on the subject of politics. They would protest the presence of the watchtower but also made light of it as a nuisance, particularly post-1998 when it began to look stagey and superfluous. It was still bright when the Sam Maguire landed in town, a fine September evening, and Kernan, in ebullient form, said, "We came in through the front door, the way anyone should go into a house."

Neither Armagh nor Crossmaglen have won a national championship since. But under Donal Murtagh, Crossmaglen are still challenging, and in what looks set to be a very evenly contested All-Ireland semi-final series, a victory tomorrow would arguably leave them favourites to close in on national glory once again.

The importance of the club to the GAA has become both a marketing slogan and a cliche. But there are signs of recognition that the club scene may be in danger of being crushed by the ballooning scale and commercial value of the unwieldy All-Ireland intercounty championship.

The call this week by Ger Loughnane at Michael Cusack's birthplace in Carran that the GAA go back to what made it great - the club game - was timely. It was also ironic, given the dispute between the Portumna hurlers and the county board in Galway, the county with whom Loughnane hopes to light up the national grid.

There is no doubt that the club game, with its bitter parish rivalries and savage local pride, is what gives the GAA its meaning and depth. But it is also a strangely private passion. Neutrals attending these all-important club games in the dead of winter can often feel like interlopers, because to understand and love a place, you have to come from it.

Crossmaglen are just one story from this year's championship.

The re-emergence of Ballyhale Shamrocks has taken the comet of Kilkenny's latest success story through these Sundays of brief daylight. And it is an incredible thing that the senior and under-21 hurlers of the year buy their Mars bars in the same shop in the same town.

The general fascination of the club championship, though, lies in the question of why certain GAA towns and parishes prosper. Or, indeed, why others do not. For all the virtuous words about the nobility of the clubs and the parish pride, there is a counter-truth told by GAA people of the growing difficulties of finding adults to give time to coaching, of how hard it is to coax youngsters onto the fields, of teenagers showing up for Saturday training with eyes spinning from drink.

And there are many examples of once-strong clubs slowly fading away for the simple reason that playing for the town no longer holds the same appeal or status it once did. I think that is one advantage Crossmaglen and the other fortresses of the Ulster game will continue to have over potential rivals down South.

Although they are separated by a notional border, Celtic Tiger prosperity has not swept through those towns, and therefore their GAA clubs do not have to recruit kids whose heads have been made dizzy with the culture of instant gratification prevalent across that border. The idea of training, in penury, for a distant goal is becoming outdated in Tiger Ireland.

I often think that the best way of remembering what Irish towns were like in character 20 years ago is to walk through a Northern town like Crossmaglen today. These places are more conservative, less showy and probably friendlier now than their Southern counterparts. And the club is the main collective source of pride.

We could learn a lot.