Michael Moynihan, Thurles

FOR THOSE who believe that Thurles is like Brigadoon, some kind of mythical spot that fades into a hazy twilight in the GAA off-season only to emerge into clarity for big championship Sundays, today was the proof that the Tipperary town isn’t just for summer. It’s all year round.
The All-Ireland club semi-final between Ballyhale Shamrocks and Newtownshandrum was the pretext for visiting Thurles, and it proved for once and for all that the dynamic is different in February. There’s a different class of supporter, a different class of weather, and there’s definitely a different class of hot dog on offer near the ground.
There are other ways in which the summer is different from the spring. You don’t have to set out at the crack of dawn. You don’t have to creep your car through the back streets to try and make the Greyhound Stadium to park. And you don’t chance a vintage t-shirt from the time your band supported Blondie in CBGB back in the seventies – Debbie, where did it all go wrong? – in favour of a heavy coat, needless to say. Plus woolly hat. Plus gloves, if you have them. Thermal underwear is a personal right, and having suffered a few chilly evenings, we don’t judge.
There are compensations for the smaller scale. Depending on your time of arrival you run the risk of encountering a couple of mentors huddling in a corner, or a household name breezily liberating a gearbag and a few hurleys from the boot of the car. Even the pitch invasion after the game had the quality of a family get-together, as opposed to the near-hysteria on offer in Croke Park at the final whistle in September, when quite a few of the invading buttocks still have splinters from the bandwagon deeply embedded.
The point could be made, of course, that such glories are on offer at club venues all round the country, and they are. The difference is that a game like yesterday’s exists on two separate levels: on an immediate and tangible plane, where a spin of the car brings you up close and personal with legends of the game like Henry Shefflin and Ben O’Connor. It also exists on a national level, with cameras and coverage, slipping into the historical record as ‘the day that . . .’
A lot of lip service is paid to the notion of the club game being the backbone of the GAA, but there wasn’t any tokenism in the fact that 6,000 people came to see Newtownshandrum play Ballyhale. There are less than a thousand people in Newtown’s catchment area, and Ballyhale isn’t a whole lot bigger. Consequently you’d wonder about the breakdown of the other four thousand. Tipperary natives not tempted by Italy-England on the TV, Kilkenny supporters looking for a fix ahead of the National League beginning, north Cork diehards deciding that cold as it was, it wasn’t that cold . . . and who else? The hurling nation’s hard core?