Sean Óg was feeling bereft at around 5 o'clock yesterday evening.
As is his tradition, he had nipped into the bookies that morning to peruse the handicaps for the day's Gaelic football and hurling matches. Since he's not the type to be 'logging on' to the GAA website to check out the upcoming fixtures, he asked Saskia behind the till for a sheet with the day's matches on it.
On being handed the sheet, he asked her if she had the second page handy. She told him that that was all the games there was.
He looked down at the measly sheet. He was dumbfounded.
It reminded him of the time when, out of disdain for something Eamon Dunphy had written, he stopped buying the Sunday Independent one weekend and bought the Sunday Business Post instead.
On arriving home, he immediately got back in his car and drove back to the newsagents, telling them that there was a bit of his paper missing.
The man behind the till told him that the Sunday Business Post didn't have a sports section.
Angered, he told the young lad to not be so fuckin' smart and go get him the sports section.
FOUR GAMES!! I wouldn't mind but four shite games. Two bloody Munster football games where the winner gets to go and get horsewhipped by Cork or Kerry the next time out, a match in London, and an Ulster football match. My God! What way in the name of God have they these fixtures organised? And not a tap of sport on anywhere else.
At this moment, and with some trepidation, we broached the name of Bruce Springsteen. As we suspected, this was the cue for a fourteen-minute rant of which we have edited out all but a snippet.
... this is worse than the time they had the American football on in Croke Park and the All-Ireland semi-final had to be moved to Limerick. The Yanks are calling the tune. That's the way it's gone. All the GAA are interested in is money, sure you know that. Everyone knows that. That's common knowledge. They're going to sell Croker to Facebook or something soon. They'll turn it into the European hub or something and pay 0.0000001% tax on it, through the Dutch sandwich or the Swiss Roll or the Yorkshire pudding or whatever it's called.
It's only a matter of time before Beyonce or someone wants to play Croker and the third Sunday of September is the only day she has free. They'll fuckin' move the All-Ireland Final to Parnell Park, so they will.
I'm telling you, that day is coming, son. Believe you, me. That's the way the GAA is gone.
We were tactful enough not to mention that Bono was onstage with Springsteen for a while last night. It simply wasn't worth the hassle to mention this. Sean Óg hates Bono. He hates him even more than the average hater hates him. Whenever Bono appears on telly talking about foreign aid, or about the peace process, or about sending Amy Schumer off to fight ISIS, Sean Óg's anger reaches what can only be described as cartoonish levels.
He immediately starts panting and his veins start to throb. His teeth are gritted and his hands curl into fists. After approximately six seconds of listening to him (that's as much as he can tolerably manage), he tells the barman to shut off the telly before he puts his glass through it. On one occasion, the crowd in the pub broke into applause after Sean Óg said this. An anti-austerity campaigner came up and bought him a pint.
Then, to add insult to injury, they put an Ulster game on the telly. I give up, like. Some irrelevant game between Cavan and Armagh.
Sure, Cavan haven't been any good since the Second World War. By the time they win the All-Ireland, the final probably will be being held in America again. The GPA will probably dream up that scheme. Some ruse to sell some Ford motor cars or something. And you'll only be able to watch it on BT Sport.
By the way, I wonder did the Americans move a baseball game to make way for the Cavan-Kerry All-Ireland final (in 1947)? They did in their hole! No, only Ireland does that. Spineless!!! Gutless!!!
We tried to reason with Sean Óg that the Ulster championship is the most competitive by a distance and is increasingly high-scoring these days. But to no avail. His hostility to Ulster football runs deep. It'll take more than a couple of seasons of bright, attractive football to overturn years of prejudice.
There was never any good games in Ulster. I'll never forget the All-Ireland final between Tyrone and Armagh that time (2003). It wasn't football at all. It was fighting and lads diving and mouthing at each other. The game hasn't recovered from that. That's where the cancer started. You can trace it to that.
They've all these coaches up in Queens who started all this defensive football. They're being funded by the British government. Sure I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing wasn't a unionist plot to destroy Gaelic football. It's grim stuff to look at.
The Ulster lads used to be sound. Back when their role was to come down to Dublin and get walloped by Kerry or Dublin in an All-Ireland semi-final. And then every third year, they'd play the Connacht champions and they might have a chance of getting to a final. Which they'd lose.
As is the case with many Gaelic football followers, an inordinate amount of Sean Óg's time these days is spent discussing something Joe Brolly has just said. Like the majority of vocal GAA opinion, Sean Óg decided, almost reflexively, about fifteen years ago, that he didn't like Brolly, he didn't like his lip, and he didn't like his dancing intellectualism.
Except that he finds himself agreeing with a lot of what Brolly says these days. He has used the phrase "Brolly is a bollocks but he's bang on there" with astonishing regularity in recent times.
Brolly is a bollocks but he's bang on there. These young lads are being ruined by this megalomaniac managers. If Jose Mourinho met some of these lads he'd tell them to chill out and that it's only a game.
(Sean Óg Ó Kneejerk was in conversation with Conor Neville)
