Draw Breath

We spent a fun afternoon in Croke Park at the Football League Finals. I was disappointed not to see Mayo win: I have a tenuous family connection and anyway the Ulster teams are all dreadfully thuggish and far too rough for an effette southerner like myself.

It just ain't, you know, cricket.

Thankfully.

Still, to my mind there's no better way to spend €25 on a Sunday afternoon in Dublin.

It's interesting, though, to compare a match day at Croke Park with my experiences of football living in Reading. For a start, matches in Reading were (and presumably are) marked by the presence of several hundred riot police at the station. There was probably fewer than thirty Guards inside Croke Park today and mostly they were watching the match and trying to keep teenage fans of the schools football final winners, Omagh CBS, off the pitch.

Also, the timbre of the chanting is far younger and more, well, female, than at soccer matches. I would say the crowd was barely more than half male.

As for the match itself, well it was pretty good, though as the players got tired the fouls followed. That said, poor old Ciaran Bonner looked like he got a terrible clatter and - if I'm not mistaken - was unconsious when he was stretchered off.

(The marvellous picture is from RTÉ, by the way.)