Humour

You know you're a junior hurler when.....

You spend all winter on the beer speculating on who will be brought in to manage the junior hurling team next year.

The hardest tackle you will make all year is in an indoor soccer match in January.

When you break your borther-in-law's leg.

There are 35 at training under lights on a bitter February night (unfit but enthusiastic) - the average for Augsut is 7 (unfit, sick of training, reading Teagasc manuals and making silage)

The club treasurer spends some time at the AGM lamenting the yearly cost of running a club and especially the bill for hurleys; a month later, the team is being urged to "give 'em timber lads - we have plenty of hurleys on the sideline..."

When you go for a pick-up, you tap the ball at least twice on the hurley before you fumble it.

Ground hurling is for juveniles and camogie players.

The full forward has his son and grand nephew in the corners.

The grand nephew is two years older.

For a 2.30 throw-in, you start packing your gear bag at 2.40 and still manage to be on the field before the referee even arrives.

You can get a match called off because your star player is playing divisional under-16 the following week

Your tight marking corner back never gives an inch - except of course, when the ball gets inside his own 50 and he charges out after it with all the other backs, forgetting that the other team are even on the field.

Your goalie lets in a sitter every second game - this usually happens after you have scored 5 points from play to reel in a difficult half-time deficit.

Or in the first minute if it is a final.

Your full-forward can't score but "he's a good man to bust up the play".

Your centre-forward can't score either but "he'll stop a good man from hurling".

Your championship is either a round robin that requires you to play six league games to eliminate one team, or a knockout starting in October.

Any members of your panel who claim to have back injuries are either lazy or completely daft. Unless you can see blood, bruises or bandages, they are making it up.

Before every match, the forwards are told to stay wide and not bunch - but this is not what happens. The only time any forward goes wide is to take a sideline cut or if they are looking for water.

Your backs play from behind waving a hurley with one hand while resting the other on the forward's back - this is why all your scores and all their scores come from frees.

You can't field a team during the fortnight of the Leaving Cert.

The more people instruct you to "let fly if you don't get it up the first time", the more you ignore them.

Your left-corner-back plays at No.4 because he can only strike off his left side.

Ditto No.7.

Your star player always has one other brother "that was even better but he couldn't stay off the drink".

"Coming from Meath, I don't know much about any sport other than football. I've seen handball once. I've heard tell there's a game called 'rounders'and I'm even told that there's a women's version of gaelic football, where they're allowed to pick the ball off the ground and a point is worth three goals. But all I knew, until recently, about the other sport administered by the GAA was that it involves the use of weapons and that only Kilkenny, Tipperary and Cork are allowed to play it. (For the information of football people, Kilkenny, apparently, is a county in Leinster). I've never met people from Kilkenny or Tipperary because those places are very far in off the main roads, so the only hurling fans I've ever met were from Cork. (I can understand why Cork people follow hurling, because I've seen their football teams). Anyway, these people told me (without being asked) that hurling is "de fastest field game in de world (boy)" and "de most skilful sport of 'em all (like)". So I decided that I should plug this gap in my education and rented a few tapes of big matches to try and figure out how hurling works. I was immediately surprised to find out that, unlike most field games, hurling doesn't involve the use of a ball. Look as closely as you like at any game of hurling and you'll see no ball. At first, I thought the ball must be too small and travelling at too great a speed to be visible to the naked, non-Corkonian, Kilkennian or Tipperarian eye. But I quickly realised that hurling is, in fact, a stick-breaking competition, in which the object of the game is to break your weapon, a thick ash stick, either against your opponent's stick (like the reverse of the principle of conkers) or, failing that, against his limbs, torso, head etc. While the weapon remains unbroken, it is used to weaken the opponent's resistance and thus make it easier to chase him down and improve your chances of a successful break. The stick is called a hurley and there are three parts to it - the warhead, which is the heavy end of the weapon, usually reinforced with steel bands. It is used for cudgelling, bludgeoning and inflicting contusions, concussion and localised damage to the head and body of the opponent;- the blade this is the sharpened, curved part of the device, just above the warhead area, which is effective in slicing through fleshy tissue and in routine amputation applications;- the butt, which is the stabbing end of the apparatus, used for tenderising the opponent's rib cartilage. The only protective equipment used is the helmet. Helmets come in a variety of styles. Many players wear knee-pads tied to the tops of their heads, some stick their heads up through the bottom of a canary-cage and one lad from Cork wears a deep-fat fryer. The headgear also comes in various colours because, apparently, no two players on any team are allowed to wear the same colour. The game starts with two players from each side standing, fully armed, in the middle of the field. On a signal from the referee, they start to beat each other about the ankles with their sticks until the referee blows a whistle. When he blows it again, other sets of combatants lay into each other, trying to break their sticks, either overhead against their opponent's weapon in a sort of aerial fencing (known as "the clash of the ash") or on the opponent himself (the gash of the ash). When a player succeeds in breaking his stick - a smash of the ash - a huge roar goes up from the crowd, the player waves his broken stick above his head in triumph and immediately he is thrown a replacement weapon from a store that is kept on the sideline (the stash of the ash). The crowd roars at other random occasions also, in what appears to be a side competition between the two sets of supporters, because when they roar, a man in a white coat holds up a white flag, in the manner of an umpire in football. If the roar is really loud, he waves a green flag. If a player manages to strike his opponent on the hand or in the stomach area, this is known as a "dirty pull" and is one of the principal skills of the game. The only form of violence not permitted is pushing an opponent in the back and referees deal mercilessly with offenders against this rule. On the other hand, crippling, mangling, maiming and disembowelling and all other forms of lash with the ash are quite in order. The contest continues until there are no spare sticks left and the referee declares a winner, presumably based on a combination of broken stick count and number of casualties which, considering the weaponry deployed and the ferocity of the conflict is usually remarkably few.

As a result of this preliminary research, I came to a few obvious conclusions: Kilkenny must be disarmed - by force if necessary; weapons inspectors must be given access to Cork and Tipperary and there is finally an explanation for the fact that the Romans never came to Ireland.

I discovered also that only teachers, students and policemen play the game. This makes sense, everybody else has work to go to. One final mystery remains: where are the Gardai when all this is going on?

GAA Quotes

Tipp fan on the Galway legend

Copyright © 2004 Patrickswell GAA Club

Last modified: May 14, 2005