The Battle Of Jones Road

War Breaks Out Between The Irish And Australians At Croker

By Daniel McCarthy

In the flesh he appeared to be the same man with the gentle, Yoda-like demeanour, whose courageous Meath teams died hard the twenty three years he managed them. They had a perfect balance struck between the piano movers and the piano players. From the original hairy arses such as the Lyons brothers, Mick and Padraig, their cousin-in-arms Liam Harnan, Foley, Coyle and Gillic to sharp shooters like O'Rourke, Flynn, Stafford and Giles, Boylan's teams played with a wild fury and a stinging punch. Even talented young players such as Neville Dunne, who were but fleetingly present on the Meath conveyor belt before settling down to a new life here in America, were indelibly marked by the never say die Meath spirit.

In the wake of the totality of both victory and defeat which the different shades of Sunday always brought, the Dunboyne herbalist always cut a dignified, serene figure. He was and is a man of God; he almost became a man of the cloth himself. Damn it, his wife who has borne him a young family of six children was herself formerly a Bride of Christ. This son of a civil war veteran, whose officer father was a close friend of Michael Collins, could always find a way to reconcile his teams and the matches they played, even at the height of their sworn blood-feud rivalry with Dublin, with his God. A God at times more inclined perhaps towards an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth than to turning the other cheek, but a just God nonetheless. It could be safely reckoned that they would never inherit the earth for their meekness, but the Royal kingdom did inherit the Sam Maguire cup four times under his watch during a golden era for the county.

On Sunday last, an ashen faced Boylan who had just presided over an Irish team that had been well and truly spanked by the Aussies 69-31 in the match itself and 109-79 for the series despite an eight point Irish win in the first test played in Galway, lost his usual demeanour. He cut loose. Just as he had done during the first quarter of the match, aiming vitriol at Jim Stynes, the former GAA footballer turned Aussie Rules legend and now International Rules Australian assistant coach; and Kevin Sheedy, the Australian Head Coach. RTE analyst Colm O'Rourke, who was a mainstay of Boylan's earlier great teams, said it was the first time he had seen Boylan lose the rag after a match. Boylan was emphatic that it was not down to sour grapes, he acknowledged that the Aussies had played the better football. Yet he was livid at what had transpired in the first ten minutes of this game, pointing to the hatchet job done on Graham Geraghty. 'I played intercounty for 20 years, was involved with management for 23, and as far as I'm concerned what happened out there in the first quarter is not acceptable in any code of sport. It's not acceptable on the street,' he told RTE.

'All week Graham Geraghty has been targeted. We were told what was going to happen to him. And the people got their way. When you have Tadhg Kennelly, Colm Begley, Shane Ryan, Graham . . . Do you know how many interchange players we had left? Three. How that can be termed as playing with the spirit of the game is beyond me. Do we want to have this competition just to show I'm stronger than you, bigger than you, and can knock the head off you, can give you the knee in the back, and that's acceptable.'

Indeed he later revealed that he had wanted to withdraw his players from the game after a violent first quarter, but the players convinced him otherwise. A cynic could retort the forwards should have stayed there given the abysmal shooting performance put on by the Irish, but the brawling and whispering of sweet nothings into their reddened ears was not conducive to a sport of football. The Irish captain, Kieran McGeeney also echoed Boylan's sentiments: 'If you wanna box, we will box, if you wanna play football, lets play football, lets just call it what it is. We don't mind it physical, that's part and parcel of the game, but what happened today. I mean with Benny Coulter. It doesn't take a brave man to elbow someone in the face.'

Both the GAA and AFL were very anxious to foster an international outlet for their respective associations. The series was a sell-out both in Galway and in Dublin, where 82,000 fans attended, the largest ever audience to watch an international match in Ireland. Ominously, many of these were streaming out of the ground by the third quarter, as the Australians lorded the eventual football exchanges over a subdued Irish team, visibly shook by the nastiness of what had gone on earlier.

That such incidents marred what was previously a breathtaking performance of footballing skill, speed and sublime movement from the Aussies was unfortunate from the overall international developmental viewpoint. They had gained the respect of the Irish for their mastering of many of the art forms of kicking the round ball as it is playing with the oval ball that these guys make their bread and butter - as professionals. This is in contrast to the Irish, who have to go back to their own day jobs on a Monday morning. Indeed Boylan tells of how his former Meath star, Bernard Flynn lost his job after taking the Monday off following their All Ireland win in 1988.

The 'internationalists' therefore needed the orchestrated thuggery initiated by the Australians in Croker last Sunday like a hole in the head, and it could very well spell the death knell for the current series. This would perfectly suit a growing number of voices in Ireland who resent the AFL poaching and wooing with professional contracts young GAA talents such as Setanta Ó hAilpín, Colm Begley, Tadhg Kennelly and Sean Kavanagh; its interference with club fixtures and what they view as a bastardized concoction of the worst elements of both codes. The Australian banishment of the shamed Brendan Fevola following a nightclub incident in Galway where he assaulted a barman did little to aid their popularity profile, and when Irish players all over the field were targeted before a ball was even thrown in, the contest began to take on a circus appeal. It reached farcical proportions by the time of Australia's third-minute goal scored by Brent Stanton who dinked the ball into the top left corner of the net because all eyes were still on a bout of fisticuffs, 50 metres downfield. It must be pointed out that some of the Irish players responded in kind to the punishment that was being meted out as one Australian player was head butted and another was kicked by an Irish defender.

The GAA president Nicky Brennan and Boylan have both casted serious doubts on the continuation of the series in the immediate aftermath of the match. This is at odds with the upbeat sounds that had emerged from the Australian camp during the week with calls even for a third match to form part of future series. Their manager, Kevin Sheedy has pointed out how well received they have been by the Irish public during their tour and how excited he is at the prospect of this new international sport taking off like Naismith's basketball invention in the previous century.

Sheedy himself is an iconic Aussie Rules figure, in many ways an AFL mirror image of Boylan. In spite of the Dalcassian name, Sheedy is aware of only some distant Cork cousins. His Essendon club were the whipping boys for many years before Sheedy took them over. Their fiercest rivals were Hawthorne and in 1983, Sheedy's first year in charge, his Essendon were duly walloped by them. The following year Essendon played like possessed demons, and threw off the yoke of Hawthorne in the Grand final. Some of the Hawthorne players have spoken of their genuine fears of being hurt when playing against Sheedy's teams for the twenty odd years he was to manage them. This is at odds with Sheedy's genial, off the field persona. Sounds familiar?

One of the morals of what can be a cruel sporting life is that the big, brave ones will almost invariably beat the brave, little ones. As long as one squad remains a representation of the professional sporting cream of Australia and the other the sporting incarnation of committed and pure patriots, filled with unpaid love of nation, there will always remain a serious imbalance in the nature of this new departure. To wield a motley crew of milkmen, civil servants, builders, picture framers and farmers into an efficient fighting machine, the Irish will have to adopt a professional structure.

In many ways the Irish have to sort their own house out before they start looking at the more universal or international picture. It is impossible for the hundreds of adult club managers to scientifically prepare a team for a club championship which begins in May, shelved for the best months of the year and wrapped up in the muck of late October and November. Who can blame a younger player for taking the summer off abroad?

The real crux for the GAA is not issues pertaining to Croke Park Stadium, but to ask itself is it an association for general participation as represented by the c.2,300 clubs or is it an association for pursuit of excellence as represented by the inter-county structure? For the last 122 years it has ably served both masters, but make no mistake, a lot of clubs and club players are up in arms about their second class status in terms of playing time in the wake of the intercounty qualifier system, and the clubs are the essence of the GAA. Our Irish rugby brethren have brilliantly succeeded in establishing a professional apparatus based on the provincial system, but Irish club rugby is reeling. If the club is blotted out within the GAA, so dies the GAA. The advocates of inter county professionalism point to the AFL model when countering arguments of the Irish support base being to small to embrace professionalism. Some have suggested that the GAA as an umbrella body can support both the amateur club association and professional county association as two separate wings. Whatever the merits, one thing is for sure, these issues are going to burn ever hotter for the GAA family.

In the meantime, while giving the benefit of the doubt that the Irish players will remember the footballing skills they learned from the cradle for future international tests, we either pick men of war, Boylan turns to the God of great anger and take the Aussies on in the physical stakes next time or properly implement the rule that says if a player gouges, punches, spear tackles, head-butts, kicks, elbows or generally assaults an opponent then that player gets a straight red.

Or else go to the circus.