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The All-Ireland Hurling Final happened on Sunday last (September 11th) at Croke Park in Dublin. Tickets were changing hands for almost €5,000 (yes, five thousand euro) before match day, some 80 times their face value. The reason for the frenzy was that one of the teams, Galway, hadn't won a title since 1988 while the other team, Cork, were looking to score two consecutive wins. Unfortunately for Galway, Cork were never in danger of losing the match, maintaining a lead of two points for most of the game, briefly dropping to one, and pulling away at the end to finish five points clear. The game itself was a fantastic display of the sport, however. Not only were there several "long pucks" which scored points (take a leather ball, less than three inches in diameter but quite dense, in one hand, and the butt of a three-foot stick in the other hand; toss the ball in the air, then grab the butt with the thus-freed hand in something like a golf grip and hit the ball as it drops. Your target is 75 yards away, seven yards wide, and the ball needs to be at a height of seven feet or more when it reaches that point. Now do that while running full tilt and being pursued by the opposition), but there was also at least one instance of my favourite sort of hurling manouvre; a Cork player in possession of the ball with his back to the goal, surrounded by Galway players, somehow managed to hit the ball more-or-less over his shoulder and scored. It's breathtaking to watch players at this level in action, all the more so when you consider that they're all amateurs - policemen, farmers, and so on who practice and play in their free time. If you can at all lay hands on footage of this game, I strongly recommend you watch it. Pints of guinness are optional.
corrections dept.
Mar. 17th, 2005 01:27 amSince I don't have an account on Metafilter, I can't comment on this front-page post on Irish sports. I would like to point out to the author that the GAA is not the collection of sports, it is the organising body that runs them. As you'd guess if you followed the link, where you'd learn that it stands for Gaelic Athletic Association. It is entirely up to the curious to figure out why it is that an association devoted to Irish sports is better known and indeed registered on the Intarweb under its English acronym, rather than the Gaelic one which belongs to a construction company (physical construction as opposed to "This Website Is Unfinished Because I Got BoredUnder Construction", although coincidentally enough that's exactly what's on the CLG site).
Were I to be more pedantic I'd point out that "playing hurling" is redundant, as "hurling" is itself the verb indicating the act of playing the game. But I'm not, so I won't.
Were I to be more pedantic I'd point out that "playing hurling" is redundant, as "hurling" is itself the verb indicating the act of playing the game. But I'm not, so I won't.
