Hardcore GAA fans in a league of their own

SIDELINE:THE MOST heroic of all GAA people are to be found among the small and imperishable army of fans who follow their county teams around the country for National League games.

GAA fans who turn out on wintry days are the lifers of the association. For devout league fans, the championship, for all its trumpeting and glories, is, at heart, a frivolous kind of show: Gaelic games for dilettantes. The league, its much-maligned sister competition, is where fans earn their stripes.

In the salad days of summer, the GAA nabobs stand at their smoked-glass windows and gaze down with quiet satisfaction at the armies of fans marching up the Jones’s Road. Tens of thousands pour through the turnstiles in record numbers, producing figures throughout August and September that are phenomenal. At the height of the championship, the best of Gaelic games can produce crowds that would surpass any of the major sports in the world.

But it is weekends like this – the third round of the football league and the sense that the thinking men on the sidelines are beginning to get serious – that intrigue the hardcore fans in every county.

This morning, there is a small and hardy contingent of Galway football people preparing to journey into the heart of Tyrone for a game under lights in Omagh. In the football enclaves of the Metropolis, a loyal band of Dubs are packing bags for the long march to Ballyshannon to see the boys in blue playing Donegal, feeling as brave and as doomed as Napoleon’s foot-soldiers on the eve of their crossing of the Alps. The Kerry faithful have probably already set out for Celtic Park in Derry, the fabled city in the far north. They have heard the Walls of Derry afford marvellous views of the aurora borealis. Stoic Monaghan men will make the short hop up to Armagh, rarely a happy hunting ground.

These are not just casual day trips. They involve rigorous planning. League fans take their business seriously. They like to leave early and often have a cartographer’s knowledge of the back roads and short cuts to their destination. Nobody knows the country as well as GAA league fans and no group of people are better equipped to explain the changes that the last 10 years of prosperity have brought. They can point at the Michelin-star gastropub on the main street of a midlands town and reminisce about the magnificence of the mixed grill that was served there in earlier days. They know which petrol stations still have pump attendants, which town has the best newsagents and where the bad bends on the road are.

They will know which mountain range is interfering with the radio reception from Montrose and they won’t mind anyway because half of the pleasure of driving on a Sunday morning is in the silence of it. When they get to the match town, they will leave the car on a side street and stretch their legs with a stroll through the main street, strangers in a strange land. League fans dress for all kinds of weather, often all at once. They tend to be umbrella fetishists, carrying all manner of size and colour in the boot of their cars. League weather is notoriously changeable and its followers know that.

Often, they will appear at the ground looking like Chris Bonnington in the old Bovril adverts in anticipation of driving winds and hail storms but by half-time, they will stand in short sleeves enjoying the sudden and unannounced appearance or spring sunshine.

As far as the match goes, they never expect that much. Often, the teams selected during the week differ greatly to the side that actually takes the field. There is no sound as loyal as the faint ripple of applause that greets the away team when it trots onto the field.

Even the best hurling and football teams in Ireland look different in winter; they are at three-quarters pace, they cannot move as slickly, they are what they are, amateur sportsmen, with real worries crashing in on them the same as everyone else. Even the gear has a crumpled, just-out-of-the-wash look about it, as if Mickey Harte or Brian Cody had snatched the jerseys down from the clothesline just before disappearing out the back door.

It can be peculiar seeing the cream of the country’s GAA talent playing in quaint, parochial venues. League games are frequently destroyed by the weather. They are often one-sided. Passions are muted.

The league is to managers what acid was to the Beatniks. They experiment fearlessly and compulsively. Often, league teams can consist of hardy old-timers who have stuck around one season too long and a promising young left-footer on the rise who, after a miserable hour of interrogation from the likes of Francie Bellew or Graham Canty, will never be heard from again. The league is cruel in that way.

For the league fan, an unpromising away game holds the tantalising possibility of showcasing the debut of a once-in-a-generation talent like Michael Donnellan or John Troy. There is always the chance the epic names like Shefflin or Cooper or McGuigan will do something unbelievable, gifting the crowd with some sleight of hand or foot or mind, with a slightly self-indulgent embellishment which would have no real place in the make-or-break theatre of the championship, but that can make a few hundred souls glad that they have spent three long hours in a car.

Sometimes, GAA fans will sit on the bleachers watching one game while listening to another match on their headphones. They will bark out updates to those around them, unwanted or not. A poor result – another defeat that leaves their team rooted firmly at the bottom of Division One – will confirm for the league fan that he is right to be pessimistic about his team’s chances.

He will laugh mirthlessly when the manager makes the change with 15 minutes remaining that he had been shouting for with just 15 minutes gone. Equally, an improbable away win can bring about a rush of dreamy happiness. League fans standing in zero temperatures in Omagh or Crossmaglen can be struck with hallucinations of silverware and September and will feel, for a while, absurdly happy about things.

They will know this is akin to the euphoria a mountaineer can experience high on the slopes of Everest once the oxygen supply thins out. They will know from bitter experience it is not a good thing to feel happy about your team in March; that it inevitably leads to even greater disillusionment in June or July. But sometimes they cannot help themselves and it is on these occasions the touring parties will find themselves waylaid on their adventures.

They will ditch Monday morning and all of its dreary responsibilities and sit in a snug in a strange bar in a strange town and feel right at home, where they will be received like exotics by the Sunday evening habitues pleased to see a few new faces. The winter-spring league experience will never be mistaken for a spa weekend. Travelling to follow your team at this time of the year is not about “pampering” yourself. It is about expecting nothing and being happy about it anyway. It is about setting out for the hell of it for a match that, if won, may mark the beginning of something special but, if lost, doesn’t mean the end of anything at all.