It’s time to make an admission. It’s not something I’ve specifically lied about but rather a truth that I’ve not actively publicised. I know I’m risking widespread ridicule here but it’s time to proudly declare it.
My name is Chris McCann and I enjoy National League matches more than Championship matches.
There, I said it. It’s not big and it’s not clever but it’s true. I know that when the measure of a team or a player’s greatness is calibrated it’s their Championship achievements that count. Exploits in July and September are what fill the archive of the GAA’s highlight reels not feats achieved from February to April. But I can’t help it, I love the league and it’s not just because it’s the footballing arena where Derry have achieved greatest success in the last 20 years.
A small part of it is probably a latent teenage/student pretentiousness. I’m the kind of arsehole who, back in the day, would have deliberately started talking about songs from REM’s IRS label back catalogue of Murmur, Reckoning and Life’s Rich Pageant when someone asked me if I’d liked Losing My Religion.
I was the same with Pearl Jam. When I was 19 they were my band, they did become very big but never quite went fully mainstream a la U2 or REM. They teetered on the brink of stadium and cigarette lighter status around 1994 when Vitalogy was a massive album but they quite deliberately steered a course away from this career path with successively more oblique offerings. Ask most people to name you a Pearl Jam song and they’ll come up blank. Ask them to name an REM song and a fair few will at least be able to hazard Everybody Hurts. The quality of Pearl Jam albums declined substantially, particularly after Yield, but it meant I, and similarly minded indie rock fans of a certain age, could retain an adolescent sense of ownership about them.
This made me happy. My feelings about the National League are something similar. If an Ulster final is U2 or the Foo Fighters at Slane then a February National League game is Talking Heads at CBGB’s in 1975 or The Who playing the Golden Slipper at Magilligan in 1967 (Google this it actually happened).
Yet there’s more to my love of the league than just pretention. There’s no denying the sense of occasion that you feel sitting among 30,000 at Clones or 60,000 at Croker when the roar of the crowd amplifies the tensions but in the more intimate environs of a league fixture you feel a connection to the game.
In Ballybofey last Saturday night my nine year old nephew Fionn decided he wanted to head to terrace at the far end of the ground so that he could retrieve footballs that had cleared the catch net for Thomas Mallon. As far as Fionn was concerned he was part of ‘team Derry’ playing a role for the county. My contribution was less laudable; as I became embroiled in a brief verbal joust with an umpire whom I felt was a little too enthusiastic in his efforts to secure a yellow card for Niall Holly. The point is a National League contest allows for a sense of connection with the game that simply isn’t feasible when you’re one voice among tens of thousands.
Perhaps more important is the club-like sense of community exists that around National League games that again can’t be replicated among the throngs of June and July. The hardy bunch of football perennials that stood on the icy terraces at Ballybofey last Saturday night and those that at turn-up to volunteer and support at Celtic Park today enjoy a camaraderie that can only be formed through shared experience. With city men like Alan Nash and South Derry natives like Magherafelt’s Marty Donnelly giving up their time to facilitate the games, and supporters like Thomas O’Kane from Faughanvale or my own club chairman Sean Bradley attending every match, it’s at National League games where the sense of Oak Leaf identity is strongest.
The crowd that turns up at Celtic Park and further afield in February are the county football cognoscenti. With breath visible in the crisp air and late winter sunshine, they huddle on concrete terraces discussing the merits of the new call-ups from Steelstown, Ballymaguigan and Lissan in the same manner that I would have weighed up the strengths and weaknesses of Sugar’s Copper Blue versus Soundgarden’s Superunknown in the early 1990s.
With the arrival of May and the Ulster Championship football goes mainstream, we’re forced to share our match day experience with the GAA equivalent of One Directioners. Of course we enjoy the thrill of the big day but we’ll also have cause to roll our eyes as some guy in a brand new replica Derry shirt asks why Enda Muldoon isn’t in the starting line-up or gowls “Go on Lynch ya boy ye” when it’s actually Emmett McGuckin who’s just sent the ball to the net.
So if you’re stood on the Celtic Park terraces this weekend, hold your head proud. You are the cool kids of the Gaelic football, the skinny jean wearing, bearded hipsters of the association. It’s a badge to be worn with pride, preferably pinned to the Alice in Chains t-shirt that you bought at their Ulster Hall gig in 1993.
Comments