If ever the desperate situation arises in a game where you want anything other than the ball to come your way…you know what’s going to happen next.
It could be a broken hurley, it could be an injured ankle or you could be just ran off your feet to the extent that they won’t hold you up anymore, but whenever you’re in that red zone, hampered and unwilling, the O’Neill’s is going to land in your paw. Gift-wrapped and primed. Unmarked and goal on.
A teammate will give the perfect pass they’d never shown form for striking. An opponent will come out with the mother of all screw-ups, just to set you free or else it will just break kindly. The crowd roar but they don’t know. If only the breaks were as favourable when you were ready for the damn thing, you could have been an All-Star.
Brendan Maher’s the exception to the rule. That man could score with a sweeping brush.
The way he fires the hurl away, with the point scored and the job done 🤣
We're never going to get tired of this from Brendan Maher 😍pic.twitter.com/rlY4DCNkr8
— GAA JOE (@GAA__JOE) January 8, 2020
Chris Crummey did his very best.
From the moment the Lucan man’s hurley went walkabout on Saturday evening, in the lashings of rain in downtown Carlow, he must have known he was in it.
That’s when the instinct kicks in. Carlow midfielder Aaron Amond stayed going, unaware Crummey was unarmed and he tossed it up to lamp it down the other end.
Crummey thought he was invincible.
“He tried to block it down Gaelic football style,” says Colm Parkinson on Monday’s GAA Hour Show.
“He got enough pressure on it that the ball wasn’t cleared that well…the corner forward won it and who was running off him only Chris Crummey still with no hurl?
“It was the moment of the weekend…”
“I think he thought he was going to get a try,” adds JJ Delaney.
“The Carlow lads came in on top of him then and he was kind of laughing like ‘what else could I do?’ Fair play to him, he stayed going. I tried that block down without a hurley before, but you’re doing it on instinct more than anything – but at the end of it, you’re just saying, thank God I didn’t block that ball down – it’s just stupid, you’re trying to block a hurl with your hands, and there’s only one winner there…”
Crummey’s a warrior though and Mattie Kenny will have been proud. Watch the Dublin man, in all his bravery and glory here, for 40 seconds of madness.
Yes we know he took about 20 steps, but if ever a man deserved a penalty. He saw the funny side of it too.
Sum up madness of hurling in 40 seconds…
Just follow Dublin's number five Chris Crummey here 🤣
Rugby, Gaelic football, hurling – all in one 👇pic.twitter.com/LpppMD04DG
— GAA JOE (@GAA__JOE) February 17, 2020
Elsewhere, whenever he wasn’t putting his hands in the belting line, Crummey was playing centre forward for Dublin in an experiment that worked a treat. With his aerial prowess and accuracy, he’s an archetypal centre forward and his versatility will give Mattie Kenny another option for the summer.
You can listen to the latest GAA Hour hurling Show here.
