Painting the world in primary colours

LockerRoom:There are lots of reasons to be grateful to Setanta Sports, especially for those of us who are chilled by the many resemblances between Mr Monty Burns of The Simpsons and Mr Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of most of the world and he who permits us to live in that world so long as we swallow the toxic issue from his many organs.

Setanta regularly goes off and lives up to its warrior name by doing battle with the ogres of the media rights world. It's good to see them coming away with hefty chunks of carrion like Premiership rights or the US PGA tour. Setanta offers the softened, couch-bound lefty who refuses to buy into Sky a guilt-free way to snack on those sports which Rupert confiscated some time ago.

I'm sure the fellas in Setanta have found gold at the bottom of a well or the end of a rainbow so swift and sure has been their rise to full-blown moguldom. We come though not to praise them but to thank them. For all the judicious mixing with the big boys which Setanta does, one of its sweetest moves has been the broadcasting of the simple box of thrills which is the Cumann na mBunscol finals, played with roaring enthusiasm in the depths of the winter.

There is a dedicatedly dissolute constituency out there still I am sure, composed of those happily defying the breezy categorisations foisted upon us all in Celtic Tiger Ireland. (Hi Co's indeed!). These are the people, students, artists and saloon bar revolutionaries whose day begins only when they are done warming the brain up with careful viewings of Neighbours, Countdown and Deal or No Deal. It would be a pity if these (fine and necessary) people were the only ones to have caught this week's action.

I mean did anybody else watch the Corn na nGearaltach final between St Joseph's of Clondalkin and Ballyroan the other day. The Corn na nGearaltach is the Division Two bauble for senior football as played in Dublin's primary schools.

Forget for a while the overwhelming grimness of puke football, the sad cynicism of fellas going to ground holding their faces when they receive a fair shoulder charge and the tendency of the teams ranked number two through to 31 in the nation to slavishly copy whatever small innovation Numero Uno has brought to a winning season.

The Corn na nGearaltach final was a humdinger and the participants will forgive me if I don't remember the names of all the heroes involved. I was too precariously balanced on the edge of the seat to take notes and can only state with confidence that Conor Houlihan, a little dinger of a poacher playing top of the left, scored four first-half goals which, as the man from Setanta said at the break, left everyone wondering how Clondalkin would cope with him in the second half.

The second half opened like the first had ended with a flurry of scores. The teams got to 5-4 apiece and then started worrying. The scores stopped coming as the lads became ever more fretful. The beauty was, though, that the fretfulness didn't manifest itself in adult ways. Nobody hid or refused to take responsibility, they just kept milling into the ball and thumping it with added enthusiasm.

Both sides - and this is an encouraging feature of watching Cumann na mBunscol's games in recent years - were notably multi- racial and as the second half progressed it was the muscular Nigerian contingent on the Clondalkin team who caught the eye more and more. They had a midfielder (whose name I am about to misspell I am sure) called Ari Shamp who drove again and again through the Ballyroan defence and who, for his energy and pace, thoroughly deserved the privilege of being the winning captain.

Whether he would get to climb the steps in Parnell Park though was in doubt right until the death when Ari's colleague Martin McGuinness clipped a ball over the bar to win an epic game. "Martin McGuinness" said the man from Setanta "remember that name". I sat back on the sofa drained but satisfied and decided not to do any work for the rest of the day.

There are fewer goals than ever being scored in the Premiership, the great Zidane finished his career a while ago with a headbutt to the chest of a rival player who had been winding him up with comments about his sister, we are up to our back teeth with drugs cheats and agents and spivs. Every time a sports person opens his or her mouth these days it seems to be to ask just one thing: "where's mine?" You could write a year's worth of sports columns without ever seeming to have enjoyed anything.

Is it too simple and obvious a point to suggest that seeing a bunch of kids exuberantly playing a great game of football in front of their screaming, delirious peers was like a week's holiday from all of that. It cleaned the palate, refreshed the soul and brought back memories of childhood and the discovery of what a great and simple game Gaelic football can be.

Primary schools football is about enthusiasm and that pure pleasure you got when you were a kid from the mad energy and robustness which Gaelic football lets you express. I interviewed an American short story writer a few years ago and we fell to talking about kids and she said that she worried about her little son because the world was changing in a way which didn't allow kids, especially boys, just to run off all that wild energy which they have inside them. She should have packed up her goods, chattels and infant and moved to Cumann na mBunscol territory.

I well remember the first game of Gaelic football I ever played. Born as Kilburn Irish and schooled in London as the only Leeds United fan amidst a sea of Chelsea fans, my parents went back to Ireland when I was eight and not long afterwards I found them and forced them to take me back in.

When I hit primary school on the northside I "ad an 'orrible sarf London accent" which my new teacher found most unappealing. He would advise, while holding me up off the ground by the ear, that "Ireland was a nation while England was still a pup". The rest of the class found this most amusing and waited agog for me to issue some sort of defence of queen and empire.

One day after weeks of this frustrating pantomime we all went to St Anne's Park where it was promised that there would be an exhibition of the splendid native brand of football and also a chance to participate. This latter segment of the afternoon's entertainment was for the benefit of an Múinteoir and the other boys who could thus satisfy themselves further of Ireland's superior claims to nationhood by watching me display the fabulous wilting campness which early exposure to the vice, soccer, had surely inculcated in me.

I loved it. I scored three goals, a total unsurpassed by me in nearly a couple of decades of playing the game afterwards (unsurpassed in career aggregate that is) and I returned to the class not just as something of a mythical hero (they talk about me still, me and my deeds) but thrilled with the discovery of this game where you ran till you were blue in the face (13 metres in my case) kicked the ball hard and high, roughhoused and jumped and flung yourself about.

Not long afterwards I made my debut for Galway in the little Saturday morning leagues which the school ran in St Anne's. Two big guys who turned out to be Alan Larkin and Paddy Gogarty used to help out by putting us in our positions and hinting that there was more to it all than we thought. Alan Larkin and Paddy Gogarty turned out to be gods of the 1970s. They were there early every Saturday morning before going off to train with the Dubs. Sniffer Clarke or Billy Bremner never watched me play soccer.

I thought of it all last week looking at Setanta. What a time it is to be a primary school kid and stretching your limbs for the first time, everything to learn and enjoy, your classmates in the stands cheering you, a Dub there to give you the trophy. Hopefully we saw some future greats the other day. May the joy stay with them. Hopefully we'll never hear them ask, "where's mine".