A group of us used to sit around every Friday night after training playing poker. Bitching, really.
He wasn’t pulling his weight, and he did this wrong, and where the hell was that guy?
No chance of using a football at football training, no?
Did you hear what he said?
What was that drill about?
What’s the f**king point?
The rest of the team would take the piss out of us, call it the Poker Committee. The Think Tank.
They could’ve called us anything to be honest, it wouldn’t have mattered because you could be sure that every Friday, without fail, six or seven of us would meet and eat and play cards and delve deeper into the life of club football than anyone has probably had nightmares about. We were fair too – when there was praise to be given, it was given but when there were interventions to be had, they were pondered, and sometimes they were carried out directly to each other’s faces there and then.
It got that bad and intense that, after a while, we started introducing a tax system into the allocated time between the poker blinds being raised. It isn’t as complicated as it sounds, it basically just meant we allowed ourselves 17.5 minutes instead of 15 before the blinds would go up because we were holding up too many hands by arguing and whinging and taking the piss out of each other for whoever got roasted or busted an hour previous up at the pitch.
You’d have thought we were deliberating over the fate of a nuclear missile sometimes. You’d have thought there was nothing else going on in the world and that the planet might actually be revolving around Lissan, a village probably not even a few miles long in south Derry, where we were headed on Sunday for a league match.
You’d step outside of that bubble for a second every so often and it’d horrify you. You’d have this sobering realisation that maybe 80 or 90 people on Earth knew about these games and even less might’ve cared. Something you were dedicating your whole life to can seem so small in the grand scheme of things but therein lay the beauty.
It didn’t matter how significant these games with some of the most remote parishes in Derry really were compared with everything else that’s out there. What mattered was that this was our world and the rest might as well have been spinning around this axis. We had our community, our family, we had built our own little empire and we went to war waving that flag proudly. Everyone needs dreams and ambitions and this is where our’s were being harboured. This was our purpose.
We all need an escape but, here, our escape takes us to a place we now call home.
When you think back on your fondest GAA memories, it’s rare an action shot would stick out in your head. Sure, you remember the good games and you cherish them but they’re almost separate – the tales of battle and the memories.
Instead, you hold fast to the stretch in the evenings, the laughs you had kicking around before training – before you’d only end up crying about that same session.
You remember arriving to a minor match on a Monday night to watch the game and yesterday’s result going to determine the conversation – that and the worry about the number of young lads that are breaking through at the club.
The Christmas parties and the dinner dances and moaning at the lack of tickets sold by this team and that team.
The tea before the AGM and all the anticipated drama to unfold – if you don’t have a strong committee, you don’t have a strong club.
The lads who fought on a night out and you thought to yourself, ‘Christ, this team is in bother,’ and they were all laughing and joking about it an hour later.
The endless nights where playing poker was just a facade for a therapy session between a group of aggrieved young men who weren’t out of touch with reality, rather they had just created their own reality.
The GAA is a cruel mistress. You invest in her your time, you do all the work, you spend your money and resources but she’ll only want to keep taking.
She’ll bleed you dry, mentally, physically, emotionally. And then, after it all, you’ll make the same mistake again because real love isn’t decided logically with your brain. It’s blood. Blood coursing through your veins, screaming inside you to work its will.
And as much as you hate it, as much as you want it out of your life, and as much as you hate yourself for not wanting it out enough, you’re stuck with this thing because it’s love.
You’re stuck with this thing because you’ve made it your life and, when all is said and done, sure what else would you be doing?
So here’s to the bad times, the bitching, the memories. Here’s to the worst times and the low points and all the fallouts and bad blood and nights we promised this was the last year we were going to do it.
Here’s to it all, every last infuriating drop of it.
The pain in the arse that is the club: Where would we be without you?
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