Darragh Ó Sé: A Kingdom without football is very hard to get your head around

Someone asked me the other day how was my pandemic going. Well, here’s how.

The week before last I was at a tractor run in Ardfert on a Sunday afternoon and the rain was bucketing from the sky. There must have been a hundred tractors rolling along and the roads were lined with people, all wrapped up in raincoats and umbrellas and boots and the whole show. They were collecting for frontline workers and, with the crowds that were out, I’d say they made a pile of money.

This is what happens when there’s no football. People need something to do. By that stage in the whole thing, we’d have gone anywhere and done anything just to be around people. A tractor run in Ardfert? In the rain? Sign me up! Is eight in the morning too early to arrive?

It’s been a long three months for everybody. It’s amazing how quickly you fall out of the habits you had before. I got a text three weeks ago saying Kerry would have been playing Cork that day in Páirc Uí Chaoimh and it stopped me in my tracks. It had totally passed me by. In other years I’d have known that date as quick as I’d have known my own birthday.

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But that’ll just tell you how upside down everything has been. Everybody’s life has been thrown into the tumble dryer and given a good spin around. In our house, we have two girls, 11 and six. My wife works in pharmaceuticals so she was considered an essential worker when the lockdown came. Meaning the girls were left with me as a teacher.

In football terms, I’d say we were knocked out of the province early but made a bit of a rally through the qualifiers. It all happened a bit quick for us. I was keeping the auctioneering business going at the same time, liaising with solicitors and so on. My secretary was set up with a laptop in her house, dealing with calls. My phone was hopping the whole time. It’s no surprise I’m gone grey as a badger.

The girls don't listen to me, high up or low down. They don't even ignore me

At the start, I thought I’d fly it. Sure haven’t I three brothers who are teachers? Any problems and they’re only a phonecall away. So one day, we had a maths question that we were struggling with and I whipped out the phone and rang Tomás. I explained the problem and he gave me two answers for it.

That didn’t seem right to me so I rang Fergal. He gave me one answer, the right one. Later on, I gave Tomás a ring back and asked where he thought he was going with two answers to one question.

“Sure what are you doing listening to me?” he says. “I don’t know about that stuff.” Sorry, my mistake.

Anyway, the girls don’t listen to me, high up or low down. They don’t even ignore me. A few mornings I ended up shouting at them and getting myself mad and then when I got it out of my system, I realised I had forgotten what I was saying to them in the first place. They’d look at me for 10 seconds after I finished shouting and I could see them just deciding,

“Ah sure he’s a fool, we’ll keep going here.”

Hanging out

There was one morning that I was standing giving out to the younger one, saying: “Right, put away your toys, we’re going to get through this homework now today and stop the messing”. I wasn’t shouting at her but I was stern, we’ll say. The way you’d talk to a referee at half-time after him giving a load of frees against you in the first half.

But then I turned around to see the older one was filming me on the iPad. “What are you doing?” I said. “I’m sending this to Mom,” she said. And so the video ends with me walking towards her pointing my finger at her and going, “I’m warning you now – stop filming me!”

They have me well beaten. I played against some of the best midfielders of all time and I fancied my chances every time I togged out. And now I find myself some mornings sitting there going, “Jesus Christ, how did it come to this?” I’m goosed before I leave the dressing room.

There was a couple of fellas covering a silage pit and the first word out of them when they saw me was, 'Will we see no ball at all, Darragh?'

In fairness to the two girls, it’s so hard for them to go that long without hanging out with their friends. We got out to play football together and go for walks together but it isn’t the same for them. They’ve been great, all in all, considering the hand they were dealt.

I rang Mick O’Dwyer one of the days to see how he was. He was complaining that every time he turned on TG4 or RTÉ, they were showing a classic match. And by classic match, he meant a game where Kerry lost. The full match of the 1982 All-Ireland final wasn’t shown on TV for nearly 40 years but he swears it was on three times in the space of a fortnight there recently. The 1977 and 2013 games between Dublin and Kerry were on too. More classics.

To be fair to TG4, they’ve kept the schedules full. Too full, in some cases. I turned it on one day and they were showing a match from the Comórtas Peile na Gaeltachta from years back. It was shocking stuff now. Any time you hear me go on about the good old days, remind me of that. Any rosy glow I had from all the old memories were squashed fairly quickly watching it. Another dream shattered, another balloon burst.

Life without sport takes an awful lot of getting used to. Kerry without football is very hard to get your head around. Wherever you go, people are short of something to talk about.

I was out doing an evaluation last week in north Kerry and there was a couple of fellas covering a silage pit and the first word out of them when they saw me was, “Will we see no ball at all, Darragh?” They were talking in a lonesome kind of a voice, like Elvis had died or something.

There has been a lot of sadness and a lot of pain for families and nobody takes that lightly

But that’s the effect this has had. Football is the fabric of society down here. People had a routine. If you’re passing a dairy herd of cattle in a field and you see them coming in a line, it’s because they know when milking time is. People are the same. They’re conditioned over years of habit and practice and routine. You do your work, you feed the family, you go to your football. And now through all this, people are in a tailspin.

Wrong message

That was the one sour note from the GAA that I felt through it all. When John Horan went on RTÉ at the start of it and was so downbeat about the games coming back. I know he thought he was doing the right thing by giving it to everyone straight, but I thought it sent the wrong message altogether. GAA people needed hope just then. I don’t mean in an airy-fairy sort of way, either. They needed something to cling to.

Around that time, I was talking to a man who has three sons – 18, 19 and 21. And in the early days of the lockdown, they were seeing it as an opportunity. They were getting fitter, doing their gymwork, getting their kicking practice in. They were observing all the guidelines but they were using the time to improve themselves as players.

But after they heard John Horan stick the pin in the balloon on TV, they drifted away from it and started letting it slip. The message they heard was basically, “Ye’re at nothing, lads. Wasting your time”. I know he wouldn’t have wanted to come across like that but I thought he didn’t really get what was needed. People were so beaten down, people were getting scared. The grassroots needed to be given hope that the year wasn’t going to be in vain.

As we sit here now, it looks like we’re going to get some games after all. The appetite for games is huge. The first Junior B game will be an all-ticket affair. When the inter-county stuff starts up, we’ll be wearing heavier coats and woollier hats but that’s no hardship either.

Things seem to be going the right way at last. There has been a lot of sadness and a lot of pain for families and nobody takes that lightly. But hopefully, if we keep going at this rate, our old lives are going to come some of the way back to us.

Not a minute too soon. Just ask my daughters.