Football and the sorcerer’s cure

Cavanman's Diary

I happened to be in conversation with an Englishman lately who knew nothing of Gaelic football. I tried to explain what it means in places like Cavan, about how the county goes half-cracked when the team is going well and how, in the GAA, you could watch a man play in an 80,000-seater stadium today and sit beside him in the barbers, or meet him at the school gates or the co-op or 100 other places tomorrow. I was getting nowhere, so I told him a story.

It was half past two on a Tuesday morning, I began, and we were looking for the cure of the sprain. I was driving the deserted streets of Cavan Town, in the cold of December, back in the short days and long nights of lockdown.

In Cavan, I explained, a cure is different to some other places. Here, there are people who have cures. They are not doctors, you understand. They’re just ordinary punters with extraordinary gifts – if you believe in that sort of thing.

There are cures for whooping cough and mumps, shingles or a bad back, which involve things such as placing the patient under the belly of an ass, rubbing their skin with a wedding ring or the blood of a ferret caught on a holy day or tying a piece of string on their bodies for three days and burning it before it touches the ground. To illustrate how patently mad this whole caper is, only one of those last four examples is something I have made up.

Some ritual of prayer is usually involved and the person who “has” the cure can usually give it to someone else before their own passing. Most do not accept money for it.

The cure of the sprain is a common one. Another is the cure of the bleeding, which can even be done over the phone. It’s a sort of folk medicine, some of which originated in medieval textbooks, more of which is centred mainly around returning on successive days, by which point the problem may well have sorted itself anyway.

But people really believe in it. I mean, my brain tells me it’s nonsense and yet even I believe in this old ritual, which has been handed down like a precious heirloom probably from pagan times and, somewhere along the way, became conflated with religion.

It’s a mysterious sort of sorcery, I suppose. Nobody understands it but they still swear by it. You don’t over-think it, it’s just part of you. You grow up in Cavan, you know someone who has the cure of something.

(At this point, the Englishman’s eyes were beginning to glaze over a little so I assured him I was getting to the point).

It’s just a thing you take for granted, I went on. Like Gaelic football. You grow up in Cavan, you follow the Cavan football team. Nobody questions the why or what or goes in for high-falutin’ explanations (bar columnists in the local paper, I added hastily).

I can’t find the word to describe it, I told my new friend, it’s just something that ‘is’.

You may know, know all too well, that it’s only a game, that it’s all hocus pocus anyway. But like the cures, there are some things you just don’t question. It’s blind faith.

Where was I? Oh yes. Anyway, my wife sprained her ankle after taking a tumble while out for a run on this icy night. At least I hoped it was sprained; after a few hours, it grew extremely painful so we figured it was best to head to A&E for an x-ray. If it’s broken, the docs will sort it, I thought - if it’s not, the cure would be invoked at first light.

Killing time, I drove out to our office and got some work done. Two days previously, the Cavan senior football team had played in the All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin, a fortnight after winning the Ulster Championship.

“Is that a big deal?” he asked me.

Ordinarily, that would mean nirvana, I told him. Mardi Gras, the Fleadh, the Superbowl - nothing would have come close.

The tradition is that the tribe rejoices. The players are feted. The place loses the run of itself – only this time, we were all confined to barracks, which made the whole thing feel surreal.

I was thinking about this as I drove around aimlessly; Covid restrictions meant I couldn’t keep my better half company in the waiting room at the hospital.

I passed the cinema. When we had last won Ulster in 1997, an estimated 20,000 fans turned up at this carpark, at the back of Dunnes Stores, to welcome home the players, who were standing on the back of a lorry. For context, the population of the county at the time was about 53,000.

The manager, Martin McHugh, had to come on to the rattly PA system and coax the delirious masses into calming down a little and moving back so as to avoid a crush. The crowd relented. Cavan had got their cup back after 28 years and McHugh was God, Moses, Mohammad, Buddha and Dev rolled into one. The blue and white sea parted as instructed.

As I snapped out of my day-dream and turned the car for Railway Road and the direction of the hospital again, the clock was showing 3am and you could have kicked football on Main Street. In the half hour I’d been spinning around town, waiting on the phone to ring, I hadn’t seen a sinner.

I passed the Imperial on the left and the Egg Market was on my right when I spotted a figure, athletic-looking, wrapped up well against the cold, his breath wisping away above him. He peered in my direction.

I squinted. Was it who I thought it was? I wiped the condensation from the window. The stranger stuck his thumb out and I pulled in. It was one of the Cavan players.

“Jaysus. Hop in.”

And that’s how I ended up dropping a man who played in Croke Park 60 hours earlier, give or take, in an All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin to the place he was staying out the road.

I don’t know what the restrictions on gatherings were at the time and I didn’t ask. I presumed, the season over, he was after having a beverage or two somewhere, although the pubs were closed.

I wanted to tell him what it meant to me to see them win the Ulster final, ask him had it sunk in, how it all touched tens of thousands of people.

But I didn’t. There is a distance there that comes with the territory in my job. It can be uncomfortable, writing about fellas and then bumping into them afterwards. Some take it to heart, too. And I’m not great at dealing with awkwardness at the best of times.

When we stopped, he thanked me and offered me a fist bump. “You’ll come in,” he said, in that country way, “for a drink.”

I’d have loved nothing more only to pull up a stool but I’d a deadline to meet in the morning and a wife with a sore ankle to collect before that. The Celt’s circulation had gone wild in the previous couple of weeks as the football support had mobilised. Christmas was coming, Cavan were Ulster champions and there were stories to be written.

I made my excuses, bade him goodnight and turned the car townwards again.

The Englishman nodded. “You get it now?” I asked.

“I get it now,” he said. “It’s magic.”

The word I was looking for.