As you can see, sport dominated my weekend.
Time was, All-Ireland Football Final Day would have been one of the biggest days of my year. But my move to “hurling fan” has seen an erosion of the football final’s importance. Add in the fact that this year’s final was an all-Munster affair – with relatively little enthusiasm for it in other parts of the country – and the big occasion proved a sort of big anti-climax really.
The other big Irish sporting occasion of the weekend was the Rugby World Cup clash of Ireland and Georgia. This didn’t affect me very much as I personally think that rugby is a game for toffs and oafs. Oh yes – and idiots too. Why else would you have a referee constantly shouting the rules out to players? Imagine if that happened in other sports. Can you imagine it in tennis? “Hit it. Hit it back. Hit it again. Hit it back again.” Or in hurdling: “Run, run, run, run – jump. Run, run, run, run – jump.”
My beloved Villa didn’t do too good today losing out to Manchester City, one of the few teams I actually loathe. But…
The really, really, really big sporting occasion of my weekend, however, was seeing my son’s hurling team reach the finals of their P7 championship. Played in Cushendall on a bright sunny morning, with views of Ailsa Craig and Scotland in the background, the setting was pretty much perfect. Unfortunately, they lost the final but they managed to capture a couple of big scalps along the way. And my boy scored two goals. So he was happy.
We celebrated by going to the shop and buying the kids ice cream before we hit the road. Then, in the car, Dusty Springfield’s Son of a Preacherman popped up on the radio on the way home. For some reason, one of the kids knew all the words. So the rest all joined in with him as best they could and then they sang it over and over and over again as we drove back to Belfast.
Stuff like that you just can’t plan.
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