Rudyard Kipling's overly-quoted poem, 'If', exhorts those who aspire towards manliness to treat 'the twin imposters' of triumph and disaster just the same.
Sean Óg does not subscribe to this maxim.
If a team wins by a point, they are proper men who are blessed with testicular fortitude. They also usually have a long history of beating the team they've just beaten. Sean Óg is a great believer in the power of history.
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If a team loses by a point, no matter how valiant their effort, they are terminal losers and bottlers who lost because of the deep moral failings in their makeup. Furthermore, they will likely never achieve anything ever.
The margins in high-level sport aren't so fine, according to Sean Óg. In every match, there is a parallel psychological game running alongside the action on the pitch.
And there, the margins aren't tight at all. If one keeps a close eye on the psychological battle, the eventual victor will have been obvious to you from a long way out. No matter how tight a match appears on the scoreboard.
The 'b' word, in particular, is one Sean Óg throws around with great liberality. The identity of the big losers this weekend made it inevitable that the word would pepper our conversation on Sunday evening.
Mayo are 'bottlers' and always have been. That's why they'll never win anything. We saw it there last night. Leading by four points. Then, Galway crank up the heat after capitalising on another piss-poor short kick-out and Mayo wilt under the pressure. Story of their life. It was ever so.
We did put it to him that seeing as Mayo have been routinely winning Connacht semi-finals without too much fuss for five years now, could it really be said that nerve and bottle were the decisive factors on Saturday evening? He re-asserted his argument as if deaf to our question.
To our knowledge, Sean Óg has never come across a Mayo defeat that couldn't immediately be blamed on mental weakness. Mayo could lose an FBD League semi-final in the dead of winter with a third string team out, and Sean Óg would still be citing mental frailty as the reason for their loss.
Sean Óg, you see, loves the term 'bottler'. It may well be his favourite word in the English language. Rather than merely questioning someone’s technical proficiency, the bread and butter of criticism, the 'bottler' label goes further and questions one’s whole character. As opposed to just being a bungler who’s bad at his job, the bottler is a nervy, blithering wreck who’s no kind of man at all.
It was the exact same in 1996. They led Meath by six points with fifteen minutes remaining. Meath, tough nuts who know how to win, came roaring back into it. What's more, they didn't even need a goal to reel Mayo in. Fast forward to 2013, everyone thought they had it won after destroying Donegal in the quarter final, a Donegal team who were still probably feeling the after-affects of all that boozing the year before, and then they go and blow a winning position at half time in the final.
Three years back, after watching Mayo slaughter Galway in Salthill, Sean Óg did something he had never done before or since. He sent a text into the Sunday Game. Or rather, he got his son to send a text into the Sunday Game.
"Today was a tough day for Galway, but I'll tell you one thing. Galway will win an All-Ireland before Mayo will!" That's what I said and I stand over to this day. The Mayo era in Connacht is coming to an end. They had their chance to make hay while the sun shone and they couldn't do it. There's a changing of the guard now. Galway are back.
Like so many men who remember the 1960s vividly, Sean Óg holds Galway football in great reverence. Their recent slump, he believes, relates back to their unwillingness to compromise with the forces of 'puke football' which infected the game so soon after their last All-Ireland win.
There was always great footballers in Galway... (He proceeded to talk about the Terrible Twins and the 1960s three-in-a-row team for a bit) Over the last few years, they've been at nothing. It's not in their makeup, you see, to grind out results playing putrid football. They always had more class than that. So, they couldn't adjust the modern era with its tactics and systems and all that. But they're back now and it's time to rejoice. Who knows, it could be a sign that things are changing in football. That the clock is being wound back and we're going to see a return to old style principles. Did you see Paul Conroy and Gary Sice kicking over points from fifty yards out? That's the way to do it!
NOTE: Sean Óg has long been baffled that players don't combat the blanket defence by simply kicking the ball over the bar from fifty yards out. He has spent years pondering the refusal of teams to engage in this 'tactic' and he just can't understand it.
Elsewhere, Sean Óg was also thinking about Galway, specifically the Galway hurlers, who played Offaly in Portlaoise in the Leinster championship - a sentence that Sean Óg would have difficulty saying without scrunching his face up.
Sean Óg Ó Kneejerk has long despised the Galway hurlers, with the notable exception of the teams of 1980, 1987 and 1988.
They are analogous to the Mayo footballers in his eyes. In addition to their genius for losing All-Ireland finals, both teams deposed their managers last year, an act which Sean Óg regards as contemptible.
More than that, Sean Óg hates the alleged shift towards health and safety that hurling has taken in recent years. When Sylvie Linnane, a Galway hurler whom Sean Óg reveres, was asked on 'Up for the Match' last year about his main gripe with the modern game, there was little surprise when he cited referees and their propensity to blow for everything these days. There is even less surprise that Sean Óg wholeheartedly agrees with such sentiments.
The problem we have now is that hurling refs are being monitored by a little guy up in the Stand with a notebook and a set of rules in front of him. Unless a referee abandons common sense (Sean Óg has a great belief in common sense refereeing. No problem, long-term or short-term, can't be fixed with a dose of common sense) and starts blowing up for every piddling thing then he gets told to lock away his whistle for a year. He won't be getting any big games. He'll be relegated to reffing dog-rough club games played out in front of twelve men and a dog. Therefore, we get lads being sent off like we saw in Portlaoise today, Conor Cooney for some non-existent flick and Colin Egan for a honest to goodness shoulder. We need to remove football referees from the equation.
Sean Óg has little to add on the Tipperary-Limerick game in Munster other than that he was proven correct about Tipp winning and that Seamus Hickey is not the player he once was. He has a straightforward explanation for this.
This nonsense of chasing Dessie Farrell and Donal Óg Cusack around has Hickey's hurling ruined. Since when did it help a man's game to be simultaneously running an alleged trade union. It never has.
If Arthur Scargill had been a hurler during the miner's strike his game would have gone to shit too. It's the Limerick management and county board that have to ship most of the blame in my view. Why did they allow Hickey to indulge in this extra-curricular work with the GPA? And if he persisted in wanting to they should have dropped him.
They've been cowed by the strike launched a few years back during Justin McCarthy's time. When a great hurling man was undermined by all these upstarts who'd achieved nothing. People said at the time the Limerick county board were too stubborn and they wasted a year through pig-headedness. But if I was sitting on the Limerick county board, Justin McCarthy would be manager still. There was more than just one season at stake in that dispute.
(Sean Óg Ó Kneejerk was in conversation with Conor Neville)
