Writers stand in goal because they want to play and watch

CELEBRITY FANS:Poet and dramatist, Tom McIntyre78, Gaelic Football

Did you play much Gaelic football?

I played non-stop from the age of five to 28, 29.

What standard did you play?

I played for the Cavan junior Ulster-winning championship team in ’57, and I played a bit of senior.

What position did you play?

In goal, like Paddy Kavanagh – writers always play in goal because they want to participate and watch.

You played at the fag-end of a great era of Cavan football?

Yes – the ’52 All-Ireland-winning team was the relics of a team; after that, the great abyss. You can still hear the howls of lamentation outside the front door of this house.

What about Cavan today?

One of the great complaints is that Cavan teams are too small. They’re only, as my grandmother used to say, “scantlings”. In the 1930s, because they were all from country backgrounds, they were massive, huge fellas. Now, they’re townies and the same build doesn’t adhere at all.

Was there much sledging or comments from players when you played?

No. The atmospherics on the pitch then were quite different. You never contested the referee’s decision. Never.

What about banter between players?

Very little. The odd hard wallop. Sledging? You wouldn’t waste your time at it. I’ll tell you where it was an education, especially if you were playing in goal, was from listening to the country people leaning against the goalpost while the play was at the other end. That’s where you’d learn Irish-English: “Here’s Séamie Smith now, and I saw the day he was as good a footballer as you’d find in the ring of Ireland.”

There were a lot of fabled Cavan-Kerry encounters before your time. Can you remember any talk about them?

After the Civil War, even by the late ’20s, the gun smoke was still in the air. It touched the GAA and it touched the teams. I heard a story of a Cavan-Kerry match where you’d as many detectives around the dressingrooms as you had players. It took a while for the tensions of the Civil War to abate.

When my father died in the early 1980s, the Anglo-Celt,the Cavan provincial paper, published his obit notice, which contained the following sentence: "Of course, he was one of the few Cavan supporters who made the long journey to Tralee for the Cavan-Kerry semi-final of 1928."

Do you remember going to your first All-Ireland final?

I do. I was at the replay of the ’43 final. It was where my education began, in a sense. The morning of the Cavan-Roscommon replay, Barry’s Hotel had cache because it was an IRA hotel par excellence in the War of Independence. Around 12 o’clock on the Sunday, we were standing outside the hotel. There was talk and there was mutterings. “Big Tom” O’Reilly, a brother of John Joe O’Reilly, was captain of the Cavan team and a key figure. Word came down the line from somebody: “Big Tom not in good humour.”. “No. What’s wrong?” “He lost £20 on the dogs last night.”

What do you remember of the 1948 final, the one between Cavan and Mayo?

There were four goals in each half. It was a high-scoring game on a day with a ferocious gale. It was a game of two halves. If four goals go by you and you’re a goalie in an All-Ireland final, you’re liable to have a ballad written about you. There was a ballad written about the Cavan goalie, Dessie Benson, which boasts an immortal opening couplet: “Between the posts, there stood a ghost/His name was Dessie Benson.”

There was an extraordinary ending to that match. Mayo had one of the best place-kickers and one of the best footballers in the country in Dr Pádraig Carney. It was the last second of the game, Cavan were a point ahead, a free was given to Mayo. My recollection is it was 35, 40 yards out. And my recollection is Mayo had the wind in the second half. Mick Higgins – and it was very Mick Higgins, and may he rest easy – positioned himself as he was well entitled to do, 14 yards, or whatever the regulation was, from the kicker, and timing it perfectly, at the last minute, moved forward maybe one, two paces. I mean at the last minute, when Kearney had begun his run, and the referee did not intervene, and Higgins blocked the kick, and Cavan had the match.

I asked Higgins about it years later. “Tell me about it,” I said to him. “You took maybe a step or two at the last minute, didn’t you?” He looked at me and, as they say in Cavan, “a mad glee runs in his eyes”. No further comment needed.

Tom MacIntyre's new collection of poetry, published by New Island, is entitled Encountering Zoe.