Thurles, Wednesday, and blue and gold are this season’s must-have in Tipperary. Quelle surprise, four days out from an All-Ireland hurling final.
Walk around Liberty Square and every vantage point is bedecked in those famous colours: the post office and the chemist’s, the fast-food joints and petrol stations. You may need a VAT registration number to do business in this country, but by the sight of Thurles this week, a Tipperary jersey in the window of your premises to be recognised as a commercial venture.
We strolled along one side of the Square and lo and behold, we saw Tipp selector Michael Ryan strolling into a hostelry for his lunch (a chicken wrap, by the looks of it).
If you have to ask what establishment on the Square he went into, you clearly don’t know there’s an All-Ireland hurling final on this weekend; Hayes’ Hotel, if you could do without the tension in your life, which frankly looked like an explosion in a Tipperary colours factory.
It wasn’t always that way. Over tea with Michael Maher in the Anner, we discussed the All-Ireland countdowns of fifty years ago.
“It was different then, you didn’t have as much blue and gold around the place. People didn’t put it up on their houses and so on, but it wasn’t there to put up, either.
“You didn’t have it on sale in the shops then, for instance, the way you have flags and banners so on for sale in every shop you pass nowadays.”
By the way, that’s Michael Maher of Holycross and Tipperary, one of the greatest full-backs who ever played the game, holder of five All-Ireland medals. He speaks, you listen; he’s in favour of the proliferation of blue and gold.
“I think it’s great to see the colour – around the town, the county, in the crowds at the games. It adds to the whole thing.”
“People are showing the colours now, on their houses or businesses. I thought a couple of days ago it was a bit quiet, but it’s beginning to build now, the bunting is everywhere. And the car flags.
“There are two of those flags on most cars you see. Whoever came up with that idea is making a handy few bob, fair play to him.”
When we left Thurles there were plenty of those flags on the vehicles of our fellow travellers as we rolled down towards the motorway; if there’s a correlation between the flags on the cars and the bums on the seats in Croke Park on Sunday, there’s one obvious question: will anyone be left in Slievenamon this weekend?
