Let's go clubbing with the beautiful people

LOCKER ROOM:Croke Park today offers a wonderful celebration of community and the ultimate repudiation of Celtic Tiger delusions, writes Tom Humphries

THE GAA in all its awe and majesty gets many things right and quite a few things wrong. It is the nature of the modern media and the modern membership that we linger longest on the mistakes, pushing them about our plate like pouty 13-year-olds facing down a recalcitrant slice of braised liver.

We don't know whose brainwave it was to place the All-Ireland club finals on St Patrick's Day and into Croke Park but generally we feel inclined to campaign for more of that sort of thing.

The coalition of the national feast day, the national games, the national stadium and the national celebration of the very blood cells of our sporting culture is perfectly conceived.

We live in a time of oversized vulgarities (feel free to include me in that grouping) and trivial obsessions, and our sporting metabolism copes with a diet that is sometimes a little heavy on the cynical and often overly salted by the salacious and the scandalous. Once a year we get to cleanse the palate properly.

The GAA club has a complicated, umbilical relationship with the community around it. Those places where the local GAA club is neither loved nor hated but merely ignored can be safely said to have achieved global homogeneity or to have a preference for the cultural outlets the marching season brings.

The club is a forum for magnifying the experience of local life. Sometimes the club is a magnet for resentments and an instrument for division and exclusion. More often and more happily it is an outlet for cultural expression and the sort of communal celebration that is just no longer possible in this jaded old world.

I love to watch the unfolding of a day in a GAA club, the way in which everyone metamorphoses from daily drudgery into part of something bigger.

There are a few clubs in the country one supposes which have as members the odd pioneering brain surgeon, a potential astronaut and a mini-leaguer who will someday find the cure for cancer. Most of us though live little lives filled with quiet desperation. The sum of all our pushings and pullings in a lifetime doesn't make the world go any quicker or any slower. The outcome of our labours might on a good day offer us some job satisfaction and the necessary cushion of a wage but generally we break stones so that richer folk may make money. We learn to do that, we do it and then we take a rest before we die (and this column had started so happily, hadn't it?).

The club is a microcosm though and we all stand a bit bigger when we stand together within its fold. The club is one of the few places in life where you can constantly see your little bit of input making a difference. You are depended upon if you put up nets or open the dressingroom or know the sequence to switch on the floodlights and you contribute just as surely as you do if you have the knowledge and the communication skills to show a seven-year-old how to strike off his or her weak side or show a 35-year-old how to get through 60 minutes by spending less energy while having a greater effect.

Croke Park won't be full today. It never is for club finals and in truth this year's two pairings aren't dripping with romance.

Our own story in St Vincent's, oddly enough, probably has the most general appeal (All that departing history. And then Mickey Whelan's happy redemption, Pat Gilroy's perfect autumn, Mossy's box-office qualities and Diarmuid Connolly's precocious genius a are a few storylines worth following). Yet the notion of the club, a coalition of friends, neighbours, blow-ins and recruits, people who grew up together and argued together and played together - the idea of them all arriving in Croke Park at the end of their journeys is perfect. Croker won't be heaving with bodies but all over Gahworld there will be feelings of goodwill towards the participants.

There is something vastly different about watching your club play from watching your county play. Increasingly county teams are sealed-off communities. The omerta of the dressingroom has been tightened by the trend towards training camps and bonding holidays and communal suffering. County teams are increasingly inward-looking, and wherever you stand on the issue of the GPA and grants there is no doubt those modest stipends do drive in that fraction farther the wedge between county players and ordinary GAA men.

Club teams have a different dynamic. Mentors and players go about their business cheek by jowl with everyone from the mini-leaguers to the under-21s.

On the Tuesday night after St Vincent's beat Crossmaglen in the All-Ireland semi-final the boys were out training in the wind and rain, not on either of the pitches in the club but on one of the training patches beside the juvenile pitch. The club was brimming with kids and teams that night and the men we'd all gone to Navan to cheer on two days previously went about their business with no more fanfare than anyone else. Everyone else had work to be doing. So did the senior footballers.

Croke Park today brings together four communities all of whom have broadly similar stories in that all GAA clubs are similar enough that we can identify with each other and sufficiently different to permit each of us to feel we are The Chosen.

It doesn't really matter whether you are a city or a rural side; the club championship makes a village out of your home place. Marino's edges have been defined in recent weeks by where the blue-and-white flags begin and end. Within that space we all live and play.

When Crokes went the distance in 1995 you could see the same phenomenon; the club's profile as part of the community was suddenly heightened and visible and a place like Kilmacud, not ostensibly prime GAA territory, suddenly looked as tight and unified as Bellaghy.

By and large the club championship is conducted (once you get beyond the local skirmishing) in an atmosphere of goodwill and hopefulness. Three of the four clubs participating in Croke Park this afternoon probably set out at the beginning of their own championship on what they hoped would be a long march to Paddy's Day.

Most clubs had more immediate aims and even among the specialists of the competition there is the knowledge that just keeping the show on the road is such an arduous business vulnerability is a fact of life.

For the rest of us it is a case of just having to keep on keeping on.

On the evening Pádraig Harrington won the British Open it rained hard up in Darndale at O'Tooles Ground and those of us who had gathered to watch St Vincent's beat Naomh Barróg in a defiantly mediocre Dublin championship back-door game came away shaking our heads and feeling we would die of pneumonia long before we saw that team contest a county final. But Mickey Whelan seemed to know what he was doing and where he was going and appeared to have convinced his team. That was enough.

Today from Birr and Portumna, from Douglas in Cork and from Marino in Dublin, communities will set out toward the big house.

We Vins have the shortest journey and will walk en masse from the club to the stadium (12.30 if you fancy it). Nemo come the farthest.

Birr and Portumna are on cordial terms, being separated from each other by a fairly slender stretch of land and river.

Vincent's and Nemo are virtually sister clubs and if we weren't playing each other we would be wishing each other the best and roaring each other on.

Four clubs. Four communities. An afternoon of joyous hymning in the cathedral.

Parades? Shamrocks? Snakes? You can keep them. The most enduring repudiation of Celtic Tiger values throws in at Croker at 2pm.

If you understand or just want to understand it is the place to be.