Avert your eyes, recoil into your chair, this is not for the faint-hearted. It’s barely for the strong-hearted.
Gaels are a different breed. They’re tough, sturdy, game and all the rest but, when it comes to club championship, they are animalistic and they would do whatever they have to do for the cause.
A 40-60 ball HAS to be won. An opposition player cannot be allowed to waltz around your defence. Anybody daring to run in a straight line forward is fair game.
That’s what happened in Clones at the weekend. Scotstown beat Ballybay 0-14 to 1-9 in the club championship semi-final to set up a tasty decider with Clontibret in the Monaghan showpiece on October 2.
Every inch mattered. Ballybay wouldn’t bow down before them. None of them would offer up a second’s respite – their seasons, their lives were on the line.
That almost seemed too literal in the first half when Mark McArdle came running out of defence in the maroon of Ballybay. He was met head on by Scotstown’s Fergal McPhillips, both of them coming like steam trains refusing to budge and the result was an almighty thump of a clash that would have even the brashest of us wincing.
The pair’s bodies hammered into one another like human sacrifices for their clubs and they were sent horizontal into the air before dropping to the turf. McArdle, on the ball, bounced back up straight away. It’s crazy to look at. He gets up like it was only a gust of wind holding him back and he looks to charge on again into the next challenge until the referee calls a stop to the play.
McPhillips took the worst of it. He tried to stay on his feet but, eventually, the Sctostown men took the decision out of his hands and removed the half back from the field of play.
There’s hard. There’s tough. And then there’s GAA club championship.
It was captured by Jacqueline O’Neill who was recording for her friend Lianna Wylie. She just so happened to be watching in from Australia at her three brothers playing in the back line.
You can go to the other side of the world but you couldn’t miss the club championship.
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