Minor objections to an ugly spectacle

Locker Room: Football never consults. It never makes a phone call and tells you, just out of courtesy, what its plans are. No. Football is a diva. Does as it pleases. Treats this place like a bloody hotel, writes Tom Humphries.

You might be, just say, a sports columnist with a half-baked idea in your head. The idea might be that for Monday you are going to write about the Dublin minor football side. Perfect.

Topical: 19 years since Dublin won a minor All-Ireland. Thoughtful: Gaelic football has changed utterly since then. Entertaining: and this Dublin team is full of good stories.

Of course you'll write about the young Dubs. If they lose, the streak goes on to year 20. Two decades. If they lose you insert several tsks and tuts and the words "woe is us" and get on with it. If they win you tint the piece with the colours of a brave new dawn. Excellent.

And of course they go out and draw with Laois. Maximum inconsideration. They tease you all through the second half of a thrilling attacking game. They'll win. They'll blow it. No. Yes. And at the end, fairly really, they are caught and a draw it is.

What do you hang a column on now? Why can't football consult?

And then a couple of hours later you see their faces. The Dublin minors are sitting at the front of the Hogan Stand when Tyrone win their first All-Ireland. They have the grandstand seats as Peter Canavan is carried toward the steps of the Hogan, as the Tyrone boys are mobbed and mauled. The young Dubs in their sweatshirts and shampooed hair watch it all wide-eyed. Hard to imagine the impression scenes like that make on a young footballer.

It's the delirium that will embed itself in the memories of the lads but you fear for them. There was something curiously out of kilter about yesterday's All-Ireland senior football final. For weeks we have been listening to this tedious debate about the quality of Ulster football; we have suffered through the death of analysis and the triumph of lazy parochialism.

To criticise Ulster football makes you guilty of the sin of envy. Makes you anti-Ulster. Makes you bitter about your beating. Renders you a begrudger.

Well, yesterday's final was dreadful. It was no rebuke to the critics. It was no proof that Ulster football has become more scientific. It was an abandonment of the aesthetic in favour of the cynical. It was ugly, a game only a half-blind partisan could love.

At any given time there was a player receiving treatment on the field. Usually he had been poleaxed by a late, third-man tackle. Sometimes though he'd just dived in the hope of getting his opponent booked. (Shall we have no more guff about the unbreakable solidarity of Northern footballers?) In moments of rare abandon the teams might forget themselves and leave only 12 men behind the ball. We swooned with excitement. Tyrone, the new champions, produced a series of nominations for Worst Miss Ever In An All-Ireland Final. Not much else.

Tyrone won't care. Armagh won't care. That's fine. There's some sympathy here for the attitude that matches are for winning. Winning with style is all very well. Winning is nearly as good. Losing with style is something to be dreaded.

Furthermore, I don't think there's a neutral GAA person anywhere who wouldn't have felt a frisson of pleasure at seeing Peter Canavan being hoisted across the field towards the Sam yesterday. There's a genuine thrill in seeing a county win big for the first time and, besides, players like Canavan and Kieran McGeeney have made special contributions to the game.

Ulster football is big enough (and ugly enough) now to assess things realistically though. This summer has not been about scientific advancement of the game. If putting 13 men behind the ball is out-thinking the rest of us then the man who stays in bed all day is due some sort of award for innovations in road safety.

Does a pig-ugly All-Ireland final matter? Not if you win it. Outside of that it does.

The game matters. As does the right of those watching it to declare whether they enjoyed it or not. Look at those faces on the Dublin minors yesterday. They were a unique team, still are.

The contribution of, say, Mickey Whelan, has been a personal triumph after his wrong-man-at-the-wrong-time nightmare with the Dublin senior side. When that ended badly, in unforgiveable circumstance of crowd boorishness on Parnell Park, Mickey Whelan might have been forgiven for walking away for good. I could see his face down there on the Hogan Stand yesterday. Young players all round him.

And what was different about the team? Well apart from having a player, an extraordinary player, with a prosthetic arm in their number, what was different was background.

Last Friday Belvedere College had a no-uniform day. Students were allowed come to school without uniforms provided they wore a Dublin jersey. Some 500 Dubs jerseys wended their way into classrooms in one of the country's greatest rugby schools. All in honour of Ger Brennan, centre back with Dublin and St Vincent's, student at Belvedere.

And up the field, with the bleached hair, was Mark Vaughan of Blackrock College and waiting on the bench was Danny O'Reilly of Terenure College, Alma Mater of Dublin hurler and under-21 footballer Conal Keaney.

These are unusual places for Dublin minor footballers to be found. A welcome development it is too. If the GAA has missed out on colonising great expanses of working-class Dublin at least it is making gains in the rugby schools. That's important not just because despite all the belly-aching that goes on about the GAA's preference for exclusivity when it comes to use of Croke Park, the welcome GAA has been given in traditional rugby schools has been chilly. It's good that the GAA is inserting itself into the thoughts of a section of the population who would have grown up largely outside GAA traditions.

The message has spread because generally Gaelic football and hurling are attractive games. They have meaning and reach that go beyond winning and losing. People often seek to diminish Gaelic games by arguing that they have no international dimensions and are thus in some way less important because they don't allow us (cringe) get that stamp of international validation we crave. The lack of international engagement is strangely appealing, a reflection of a philosophy that to be just what you are is enough.

Tyrone and Armagh know deep down what's being talked about here. For many, many years in those places above all others on the island they knew the comfort of Gaelic games, the possibilities for self-expression that football in particular offered.

They loved the game and respected the game and played it with a verve that was sometimes, to their cost, mixed with innocence.

Yesterday was ugly. The inevitable and dire conclusion to a bad season. It was a thrill to see Tyrone winning but hard not to think of all the neutrals, all the uncommitted parents, sitting down looking at what sort of a game their Little Johnny has just started playing. Just another sport where winning takes precedence over everything?