Lonely hurling outposts need nurturing

Sideline Cut: One of the best sporting boasts I ever heard was by a man who claimed to be "the worst hurler in Ireland". He wasn't trying to be modest either. He said he had empirical proof. At the time, the Donegal hurlers were languishing on the bottom of Division Four, easily the worst-placed team in the National League.

The team for whom the man played were the weakest in the county and were habitually thrashed by Setanta and Mac Cumhaills and the other giants of the Tír Conaill game. And he insisted he was the worst player on his team by a country mile. Ergo, he was the worst player in Ireland.

Still, the man played the damn game for more years than Christy Ring and finished with no medals and no real tributes either other than from a young Derry lad who told him that watching him winding up for a clearance was like watching big Geoff Capes pirouetting in the shot-put circle. And, (much like when the famously errant big Geoff threw the iron ball) spectators, all eight of them, and players alike would await with a mixture of fear and fascination to see where the worst hurler in Ireland would send the sliotar. Once, he went for pure power over accuracy on a sideline cut and knocked his own manager, who was urging him to try for a point, out cold.

The only characteristic he shared with John Troy or Nicky English or Joe Cooney or the other artists who operated at the other end of the hurling spectrum during that time was that he really loved the game.

He was not alone. Although the effort to preserve hurling is already considered a battle within the traditional counties, the continuing survival of the sport in isolated pockets of the country has been little short of miraculous. Love or work or madness always brings men from hurling strongholds in Limerick or Kilkenny or Wexford to those parts of the country where the game is barren and, more often that not, these are the people who try to spread the word and the game in a land where Gaelic football or soccer has always been king.

Hurling teams in the netherworld of the game tend to field teams with certain well-defined characteristics. Every club team has its stalwart, a 5ft 5in whirlwind of indeterminate age with scarred little stumps for legs which carry him around the field at frightening speeds, using his hurl like a threshing machine. He is as hardy as a JCB and enjoys nothing more than being "opened" on the field. Fond of a fag and a pint, he has been advised by the doctor to pursue the more leisurely stick-and-ball game of golf, he but has been holding down the centre-back spot for the last 20 years and will still be lining out for 20 years to come.

Around him race three or four young lads, too young and innocent to realise the dangers that fly around their heads or else just too frightened of the centre back to say anything about it. Strategically placed will be the two or three blow-ins from hurling stock, Kilkenny or Galway men who had been on the threshold of minor stardom in their pomp and whose duty is now to bring flashes of inherent class and technique to the general frenzy of sweat and endeavour.

In the weaker hurling counties, these thoroughbreds are often described - somewhat dismissively by locals - as "wristy f***ers". As in "I nearly had that wristy f***er hooked".

Somewhere on the team will be a lad who has the misfortune of being genuinely decent at hurling, the type of lad who is good at all sports despite his best attempts to feign indifference. And there will also be at least one certifiably dangerous one whose chief reason for hurling is that it permits him to charge around at boys from neighbouring towns armed with a beautifully weighted weapon on the laughable pretence of gaining possession of a small and very fast ball which, in his 15 years of playing, he has only ever seen as a distant white blur and never actually struck.

There are dozens of these cobbled-together teams all over the top half of Ireland and they play the game winter and summer without any real possibility of the glories and pride-of-parish attention on which the GAA likes to believe it thrives.

The nature of Irish life has changed so radically in the last 15 years that even in football counties, starring for the town team does not carry the weight of recognition it once did. To play for the hurling team is to consign oneself to a life of sporting invisibility. That makes them all the more admirable.

After the Division Two football final between Louth and Donegal, which drew around 12,000 people to Breffni Park, the hurlers of Armagh and Sligo battled for the Division Three title. It was a dismal evening with that soft, saturating rain, and with just over 100 people in the famous Cavan cavern you could hear the players' every word and oath. As it happened, it was a much more interesting match than the showpiece of the day. Armagh won it in the end and celebrated with the same delight as their more famous football colleagues do in front of the biggest theatre in Europe. It was great stuff. It mattered greatly to the teams and to their families. But on a national scale, the event came and went with no great fanfare.

Light years divide these teams and the three or four counties that will realistically play for the Liam MacCarthy cup this summer. Antrim's appearance in the 1989 All-Ireland final, after winning the first Ulster championship played in 43 years, is now beginning to look like a miracle. And this year, the championship has no Antrim.

Tipperary, the most forbidding force in hurling for entire decades through the 1900s, won their first All-Ireland in 17 years that afternoon and have managed just two more since. Even for the most accomplished counties, it is getting harder to field teams of All-Ireland-winning calibre. There are more distractions for youngsters, more reasons not to hurl, more excuses and temptations for quitting early. And that is in the counties where hurling talent is in the bloodlines.

It is hard to know how successful a serious attempt by the GAA could be to revive hurling in those forgotten towns and clubs that continue to field teams against all odds. Although confined to Galway and the counties of the south, the All-Ireland hurling championship, which should begin with plenty of sparks between Tipp and Limerick tomorrow, is celebrated nationally.

The beginning of another championship will be greeted with great joy and intense interest by many people housed away in football counties, people who have maintained their love affair with the game however remote their location.

The Ring and Rackard Cups have started promisingly enough but the quiet counties of hurling need to be applauded and recognised more loudly than ever. They need to feel there is some tangible connection between the game they play and the majestic hurling spectacles that will take place in Thurles and Dublin over the next four months. They need to feel they belong to a national brotherhood and are not just whistling in the dark.