| The Joe Horgan Column By Joe
Horgan
I grew up literally within earshot of a football ground on the inner
city streets of England. I stood on the now demolished terraces. I remember
that at least one small factory backed on to one set of terracing behind
the goals. The stadium, the club, was still physically then part of the
community. Now I know that this sort of reminiscing runs the risk of degenerating
into sentimentality. Fair enough. But the proponents of so-called ‘progress’
have always been good at devaluing the past and making people feel that
any assessment that things may have been better before ‘progress’ is just
wishful thinking. They would have us think that any belief that things were
better the way they were done before is so much romantic hogwash.
I have no hesitation in saying that professional football was once better
than it is now. Admittedly as a child in the late ’70s and ’80s I may well
have missed the true heyday of the sport and I am not suggesting that the
amount of violence I saw in grounds was a reflection of anything positive.
Yet I will always believe that those old grounds, based still in the very
communities the clubs came from were in many ways better. I believe that
somewhere in the game the actual spirit of community that made them relevant
still existed. I believe that all-seater stadiums, out-of-town stadiums,
cheer-leading Tannoy music, brutal, mercenary professionalism in a money-soaked
game have not been ‘progress’ and that the game has in many ways lost its
relevance and its true meaning. That doesn’t mean that I don’t watch it
anymore but I believe that the heart and soul of the game has gone. When
Britain sold its best loved game over to the suits it sold away a big slice
of its social heritage.
Which is all by way of talking about the GAA. and its much lauded decision
to open up Croke Park by lifting Rule 42. This is a victory for the new
Ireland and the tone of the debate here in Ireland as set by the Irish media
was that in order for goodness and the modern Ireland to be represented
that the lifting of the ban was the only desirable outcome. The six northern
counties, Monaghan, Cork, some overseas delegates, these were the only ones
clinging to the old way and everyone else, in the spirit of sporting co-operation
of course, was on the side of ‘progress.’
Now I admit that I used to find it hard to understand why the GAA was
so defensive and I thought that its attitude to other sports at times bordered
on sectarian. In many ways I still believe that. I admire GAA, I think hurling
is a beautiful, fantastic game but I think any opinion of soccer as a ‘foreign’
game, a colonial game, a garrison game is hopelessly out of touch with Irish
reality. For many urban dwellers especially soccer is the game, is their
game. It is, for better or worse, a global game and is certainly far, far
from being an English game.
That aside though I would still feel serious misgivings about the lifting
of the ban. Not because I am now a GAA man because I’m not and for all its
faults soccer is and always will be my game. Not because I wonder why an
amateur game should help out two professional sports that should have far
bigger financial revenue. Not because I think that the assertion that Irish
soccer or rugby teams playing ‘home’ internationals abroad would be a national
disgrace is laughable. Lets stop pretending, the fans would love the trip.
Not because Croke Park is hallowed ground; rock bands, American Football,
they’ve all had a go there.
No the thing that really strikes me is that, as part of the continuing
modernisation of the country, is it the case that the last obstacle to us
being true members of the global elite is the fact that we might be awkwardly,
recalcitrantly, Irish. Is it really a negative aspect of a society that
it has something in its make-up that defines it in a way unique to it as
a people as a nation? Is it just that for the modernisers that the GAA is
just too plain Irish and that the awkwardness of that is far too cumbersome
in our new, globalised, homogenous world? Now I could be wrong and maybe
all those politicians, all those business people, all those media hacks
were so delighted by the rule change merely because they love sport so much.
Yeh, maybe.
|
