In recent years, ‘video games as an art form’ has become somewhat of a hotly debated topic.
While some argue that video games don’t have the potential to be meaningful art, others argue the opposite and favour video games being considered art because of their expressive elements, such as music, design, visuals, acting, and interaction.
Take the 65th Annual Grammy Awards in February 2023, which finally recognised VGM (video game music) as an art form, creating a new award called the ‘Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media.’
Composer Stephanie Economou won the inaugural award for score in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok, but what about other elements of video games? Do they also deserve their own categories in their respective art form considerations?
Let’s dive in to find out.
Why should video games be respected as a distinct art form?
Many people these days say that video games, whether graphically demanding, high-end triple-A blockbuster games, casual games, the world’s best online slots from award-winning providers, Indie games or MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-play games), should be respected as an art form, each with their own distinct categories.
They may be completely different from any other artistic mediums, but does that mean they don’t deserve to be treated as art? The debate will no doubt rage on for many years to come.
Some will always favour them being considered art, and others will always have the opposite view.
What makes video games so popular?
Video games have been extremely popular since they arrived fifty years ago. These days, they have incredibly realistic 3D-rendered graphics and visually stunning animated sequences.
Experts have even described the scores often found in hit titles as one of contemporary music’s most exciting new areas. Games today feature powerful classical/orchestral music brought to you by full orchestras, well-known composers and talented young musicians.
If the soundtracks in some of the industry’s biggest titles are getting the recognition they deserve, why aren’t the games and the expressive elements contained within them also getting the recognition they deserve?
Some of the most famous video game soundtracks that have won awards (or have been nominated for awards) are the following, which some of you may already be familiar with. If not, remember to check out these soundtracks, which are now considered a serious art form:
Video game: Legend of Zelda: Breath of Wild. Composer: Manaka Kataoka, Yasuaki Iwata, and Hajime Wakai. Notable songs: Rito Village, Guardian Battle, Mipha’s Theme
Video game: Dark Souls. Composer: Motoi Sakuraba. Notable songs: Gwyn, Taurus Demon, Lord of Cinder, Ornstein & Smough
Video game: The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim. Composer:Jeremy Soule. Notable songs: Death or Sovngarde, Imperial Thorne, Secunda, From Past to Present, Dragonborn, and others
Video game: The Last of Us. Composer: Gustavo Santaolla. Notable songs: The Path and Vanishing Grace
Other famous games featuring epic scores include God Of War Ragnarök (Bear McCreary), Hogwarts Legacy (Peter Murray, J Scott Rakozy & Chuck E. Myers), and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (Sarah Schachner).
Some of the most iconic and widely acclaimed composers who have also plied their trade in the gaming industry are Nobuo Uematsu, Stephen Barton, Gordy Haab, Motoi Sakuraba, Yoko Shimomura, Koji Kondo, Nobuo Uematsu, Inon Zur, David Wise, Martin O’Donnell, Michiru Yamana, Gustavo Santaolla, and countless others.
Final thoughts
There is clearly a case for video games and their expressive elements being considered an art form. However, it seems that video games will always be compared to traditional art forms like music, writing, painting, sculpture, and storytelling, and they may never be taken seriously. Only time will tell.
In May 2011, the United States National Endowment for the Arts expanded the allowable projects to include “interactive games.” In other words, in accepting grants for art projects in 2012, they recognised video games as an art form, which many will say was a huge step in the right direction.
Perhaps, over the coming years, more similar situations will happen across the world, and video games may one day be treated as a serious art form, just like the other traditional art forms.
In the first part of his essay concerning his enduring lifelong fandom of Manchester City FC, and the club’s current owners’ wealth vis-á-vis his left-wing politics, Desmond Traynor recounts his origin story as a supporter of the club, and offers a critique of the Irish soccer commentariat’s biased attitude to City’s success.
After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences, what I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football. Albert Camus, article in Racing Universitaire Algerios club’s alumni magazine (1957)
Looking back, I can see that my attraction in starting to support Manchester City F.C. in 1968, at the age of seven, was perhaps the first indication of a budding contrarianism. Not that I had enough self-consciousness at the time to recognise it as such. What is interesting about certain decisions one makes as a child, adolescent, and even as a young adult, is that they are usually made prior to one having the full story, about oneself or others, or in general about this thing we call Life – if, indeed we ever get the full story. They tend to be instinctual, or even pre-cognitive, and so revealing of particular bedrock character traits in a still-forming personality. However, lest we kick off on the wrong foot, please note that I have not bestowed this questionable epithet on myself; rather, it has been attached to me by others. I do not necessarily think of myself as a contrarian, or even contrary. I just like different things than other people do, or have different reasons for liking the same things that other people also like. Which, obviously, could be said of anyone else’s idiosyncratic likes and dislikes. It’s called Taste, and there is no accounting for it – good or bad.
The origin story runs like this: 1968 was the year Manchester United won the European Cup, and almost everyone in Ireland who was not already a fan of that club became one. They captured the floating voters. I thought to myself: ‘Screw this for a game of soldiers, I’ll be a Manchester City fan’. This was not merely, or only, evidence of a latent, wilful desire to be atypical or antagonistic, or the product of a childish caprice: we had a good side then, and won the League that same year, the F.A. Cup the following season, and the European Cup Winners’ Cup and the League Cup in the 1969/70 campaign. The team was full of gifted players, heroes whose magical names rolled off the tongue, which still resonate today (among City fans, at any rate): Francis Lee, Mike Summerbee, Neil Young (no, not that one!), Tony Book, Joe Corrigan. Best of all was Colin Bell, one of the greatest midfield playmakers England has ever produced. Shrewd, languid, possessed of incredible stamina (his nickname was Nijinsky – after the racehorse, although ballet dancers require considerable stamina too), he could run box to box, but he didn’t always need to, as he could pick out a defence-shredding pass from forty yards. He was the definition of ‘silky skills’. Such was my infatuation that, as a fledgling player, I modelled myself on his example. I even persuaded my mother to sew a number 8 onto the back of my boyhood City jersey, in his honour. (Speaking of jerseys, another reason for my plumping for City was that I preferred the sky blue they wore to the red sported by the Red Devils.) Bell’s career was cut short in November 1975 when, at the age of 29, his right knee was severely injured in a challenge by Manchester United’s captain Martin Buchan, during a League Cup derby at Maine Road.
But then, apart from winning the League Cup in 1976 with a victory over Newcastle United at Wembley, we had a bad forty years or so at the office, with mid-table mediocrity gradually giving way to spells in the old Second Division (1983–1985, 1987–1989, 1996–1998, 1999–2000 and 2001–2002), yo-yoing between the top flight and what is now the Championship. We even endured the ignominy of being relegated to Division 3 for a year in 1998–1999 – as chronicled by Mark Hodkinson in a weekly column for The Times, later collected together in his book Blue Moon: Down Among The Dead Men With Manchester City (2011). Thus did the phrase ‘long-suffering’ come to be applied whenever City fans were spoken of by those of other allegiances. Hell, we even bestowed it on ourselves, often adding the equally derisive ‘typical Citeh’. In some unfathomably fatalistic way, it seemed I had been destined to support this club: its ethos suited the wry resignation of my ‘What can you do about it?’ temperament, with early promise curdling in to the predictable compromises of average adult living.
Colin Bell b. 1946,
City of Lost Souls
All that has changed now, of course. ‘When City are great again…’ wrote Mancunian music critic and lifelong City fan Paul Morley, in a short article titled ‘City of Lost Souls’ (Arena, November 1998), and lo it has come to pass. In August 2008, City were purchased by the Abu Dhabi United Group, and massive investment ensued – not only in transfer spend on players, but on infrastructure, the youth academy, and the regeneration of east Manchester with facilities for the local community. Gradually, results began to match the upturn in player and managerial quality. 2011 saw City secure their first trophy in thirty-five years, with a 1-0 win over Stoke City in the FA Cup final. 2012 brought our first League (by then Premiership) title in forty-four years, with the famous two goals in injury time against relegation threatened Queens Park Rangers to turn a 1-2 deficit into a 3-2 victory in the last minute, thus beating United into second place on goal difference (having already thrown down a marker by thrashing them 6-1 at Old Trafford earlier in the season). Every City fan remembers where they were at 93:20 on that sunny Sunday afternoon in May, otherwise known as the ‘Agüeroooo!’ moment. Me, I kept watching replays of Sergio’s winning goal for a week afterwards, in an effort to make sure that I hadn’t developed mild psychosis and entered an alternative reality. It confirmed for me that football provided the last vestiges of Greek drama in contemporary society, except that this was aleatoric theatre – a pop-up, if you will – for if you wrote it as fiction no one would suspend disbelief at this patently manufactured deus ex machina finale. Just when we thought it was going to be another case of ‘Typical City’, we emerged into a bright new sky blue dawn. The second Golden Era, it seemed, was well underway.
City won the Premiership again in 2013–14 under Manuel Pellegrini, who had replaced Roberto Mancini, the man who had presided over the beginnings of our historic resurgence. The arrival of tactician extraordinaire Pep Guardiola as coach in 2016 signalled the start of a period of sustained success for the club. City have won five out of a possible six Premiership titles between the 2017–18 and 2022–23 seasons, only finishing second behind Liverpool in 2019–20. 2018–19 saw City complete an unprecedented domestic treble of English men’s titles – the Premiership, F.A. Cup and League Cup. Add in a rake of League Cups over the same period, and the rosy picture is almost complete. But 2022–23 turned out to be the greatest season in our club’s history, as we not only won our third consecutive Premier League title, but also the F.A. Cup final against old foes Manchester United, and the long-awaited supposed Holy Grail, our first European Champions League Cup, in a final versus Inter Milan (incidentally, my favourite Italian team – almost a win-win situation, if there is such a thing), thereby achieving a rare feat – the continental treble.
Which just goes to show: if you wait long enough, everything comes around.
Envy and Ire
Unsurprisingly, the influx of such vast resources, and the on-field dominance it has brought, has aroused the envy and ire of supporters of other clubs. (I hesitate to use the term ‘rivals’, as it suggests that there are teams capable of challenging us on a consistent basis; in this case, can we settle on ‘competitors’ as the designation least offensive to all parties?) This discontent at City’s serial successes is exacerbated by a sense of injustice, as accusations of City’s breaching of both UEFA’s and the English Football Association’s Financial Fair Play rules fuel feelings that the club has bought its way to the top, due to the deep pockets of its owners and their skulduggery in the dark arts of creative accounting. Furthermore, there is the implication that because said proprietors are one of the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates, and the U.A.E.’s human rights record is less than pristine, then City’s wealth is tainted and its fans are hypocrites. Friends and acquaintances have asked me, often goadingly: how I can profess to be any kind of socialist and yet continue to support a team which represents the triumph of monied elitism? What kind of cognitive dissonance is involved in advocating for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against apartheid Israel, when migrant workers are routinely treated appallingly in Abu Dhabi, and reports circulate of government critics of the U.A.E.’s repressive regime being imprisoned and tortured? Am I ultra-selective in the causes I choose to espouse? One of the things this essay is, is an attempt to address, and hopefully explain – if not quite reconcile – some of these apparent contradictions.
This air of grievance is felt especially acutely in Ireland. There is a sketch by comedy trio Foil, Arms and Hog, where an applicant for Irish citizenship is asked a catalogue of questions as a test of knowledge for eligibility. One of the queries goes: ‘What are the two main religions in Ireland?’ Our candidate doesn’t miss a beat, responding with the quip, ‘Manchester United and Liverpool’.
While there are devout members of other denominations – for example, Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs, Leeds, Everton, Aston Villa and West Ham all enjoy healthy fanbases on these shores, and I have even met the odd adherent of exquisitely eccentric sects like Ipswich Town and Stoke City – the overwhelming majority of Irish soccer fandom of English clubs is comprised of faithful followers of either United or Liverpool. To be sure, there are often sound reasons for such gargantuan support, such as family tradition or connections with one or other of the clubs, or the presence of many Irish players or players of Irish extraction in current or previous squads. Yet, just as often, Irish people attach themselves to an English club for motives which are almost entirely arbitrary – the colour of a jersey or the first game they ever saw or a favourite player. (This is true of sporting loyalties, including football, everywhere. Although a Mancunian born and bred, qualified lawyer and professional investigative sports journalist David Conn, while hailing from a predominantly United family, became a City fan almost by accident, rather than orneriness: when he was six years old, and asked to choose between the two local clubs, he looked at their respective badges – United’s a red devil with horns, City’s a rose beneath a ship – and opted for light blue. Incidentally, Conn’s Richer Than God: Manchester City, Modern Football and Growing Up (2012) remains one of the best books about football ever written – and not just for City fans – combining as it does a forensic trawl through City’s financial dealings with the changing attitudes and mixed emotions of a lifelong fan witnessing the monetisation of the modern game. In many ways, my own effort here is just a pale imitation of Conn’s achievement, albeit from an Irish fan’s perspective.)
But the most common explanation for the popularity of Liverpool and Manchester United in Ireland is, I submit, because both clubs were, in the past, serial winners, just as City have become today. Many of these could be termed ‘legacy fans’ (the same is true of Arsenal, Chelsea and Leeds) – relics of when their clubs were much more successful, which was when they started supporting them. It’s easy to back a winner, and there is safety – and solidarity – in numbers. The herd instinct kicks in. This is why one notices a more than average quota of fair-weather fans among their number. When their team of choice hit a bad run of form, or their trophy haul is depleted, you will hear all kinds of excuses for slackening of interest, and the declaration ‘The game is gone for me’ because of the deleterious influence of floods of cash, or the introduction of VAR, or the corruption of governing bodies, or whatever.
Yet, if I had a penny for every ardent United or Liverpool fan I’ve ever met, and inquired of ‘Have you ever been to Old Trafford / Anfield?’, and drawn a blank – well, I would have a lot more pennies than I do today. For, as Paul Morley put it in his piece mentioned above: ‘To support United is too easy. It’s convenience supporting. It makes life too easy. There is no challenge. It is a cowardly form of escapism, a sell-out to the forces of evil…to support them is heroism in a can.’ Since the wheel of fortune has spun kindly in the direction of what legendary former United manager Sir Alex Fergusson once called their ‘noisy neighbours’, doubtless many United fans now feel exactly the same way about City. In United’s glory days, there used to be a loose coalition of fans of many other clubs congealed around the banner of ‘ABU’: Anyone But United. Nowadays, it has been supplanted by the amended acronym, ‘ABC’: Anyone But City. Fans of every club are inclined to partisan paranoia when they feel things are not going their way. But here’s the twist: there are far more Liverpool and Manchester United fans in Ireland than City fans. Is it any wonder that we City fans sometimes feel like a persecuted minority? And all for the crime of playing exciting, entertaining football – at a level rarely, if ever, seen before.
Etihad Stadium, Manchester.
Anti-City Bias
This anti-City bias is not confined to the foot soldiers of the red hordes (as I tend to think of the innumerable fans of these two clubs found in evidence hereabouts – rather than envisioning groups of radical revolutionaries huddled under beds around the country), but is also noticeably visible and voluble among the many high priests of their persuasion present in the Irish soccer media – hardly surprising when one realises that the majority of sports reporters and analysts here are drawn from the ranks of one or the other red menace. Clearly, fans of other clubs, and their public representatives, frequently hate on us too. But the gross preponderance of Reds’ affiliates in the make-up of the national football commentariat is not difficult to account for: if Ireland as a nation has large contingents of Liverpool and United fans, then print and broadcast media – dependent as they are on advertising revenue – will broadly pander to and reflect the views of that massive target audience which, in a classic case of vicious circle marketing, comprises a large section of its readership and viewership.
It is difficult to delineate this prejudice without mentioning some names. Certainly, the old guard were dead against us, with Eamon Dunphy publicly venting his dislike of ‘the City project’ when he was a freelance contributor on RTE television. Presenters such as Joanne Cantwell regularly goaded him on. But then, he used to play for Manchester United.
Of the current crop, Ken Early’s latent loyalties are easily identifiable from his Irish Times article headlined ‘Manchester City’s dominance a reminder the rich always get their way’ (20/01/22). Among many contentious statements contained therein, a pair of standouts were, ‘Most of us don’t watch football for technical quality or tactical intrigue. We’re watching because we want to feel something – and the risk of defeat adds savour to the joy of victory’, which he then linked to the ludicrous claim, ‘Look at the joy Manchester United have given the world these last several years. Lurching from crisis to crisis, they continue to be more watchable than City’s vastly superior team.’ The first is an appalling admission from a paid pundit, whose job it is to keep abreast of the strategic evolution of the game. Besides which, Manchester City still and always will be beatable – just like any other team – and watching them gives rise to a great variety of emotions in me, and other City fans. Plus, discerning neutrals can and do admire the precision of a well-executed game plan which City provide. As for the second, even diehard but cleareyed United fans know it is not true. They would acknowledge that United have for some time – since the retirement of Sir Alex – been a mismanaged laughing stock, which is why many of them have flocked to green-and-gold wearing protest club, Newton Heath. While there may be considerable schadenfreude to be derived by fans of other clubs in watching United’s steady decline into a comedic soap opera, they are surely no longer heading to Old Trafford to witness object lessons in how the Beautiful Game should be played. At the time of Early’s salvo, I wrote a fulsome rebuttal to the Letters page of the IT which was not, as was only to be expected, selected for publication. I subsequently penned a one sentence rejoinder, quoting his ‘more watchable’ assertion, which did see the light of day. It simply read: ‘Would it be impertinent to inquire as to what (red) planet he is living on?’
Meanwhile, the Sunday Independent is a virtual Liverpool FC fanzine, platforming as it does the Scouse-loving triumvirate of Dion Fanning, Eamonn Sweeney, and Declan Lynch.
Of the three, Fanning is the most measured and fact-based (evidently qualities not much valued at the Sindo, as his work is now more often to be found in the pages of the Irish Examiner, and he has been involved with podcasts for Joe.ie and The Currency.ie) in his criticisms. But his allegiances are easily discerned from a piece like the one headlined ‘A different Liverpool story in a parallel universe’, with standfirst ‘Liverpool’s golden age is ending but is it any consolation if one day they discover they were cheated?’ (The Irish Examiner, April Fool’s Day, 2023). Ineluctably, he highlights that City have been ‘charged by the Premier League with 115 breaches of financial regulations’, and refers to claims that City have ‘used shadow contracts to pay players’. However, he fails to address the argument that such ‘artificial rules’ are designed to protect the existing elite, other than to counter that ‘most rules in sport are absurd and all clubs in the Premier League agreed to these ones.’ Nor does he mention that City had since won their appeal against UEFA at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, for the alleged use of such shadow contracts, and for the alleged hiding of owner investment as sponsorship money – even if the Premier League charges have still to be answered. In fairness, Fanning could not have known at that point that Rui Pinto, the hacker who made public his ‘Football Leaks’ revelations, which were subsequently covered by German news magazine Der Spiegel, and led to the initial UEFA two-year ban on European competition for City, would be sentenced to a four-year suspended prison term for his crimes, including extortion, in September 2023.
Sweeney is a different case entirely, as he is the source of the most vicious and sustained attacks on Manchester City in this Mediahaus organ. A brief selection of sample headlines from recent years will suffice to illustrate his naked animosity: ‘Looks like Guardiola’s best days are in the past’ (10/11/2019) (that one wore well); ‘Man City’s manager is the figurehead for an organisation which represents all that stinks about modern sport’, the intro of which reads ‘Manchester City are football’s most despicable club and Pep Guardiola its most despicable manager’ (18/07/2020); ‘Soulless City will win title, but Liverpool have hearts and minds of fans’ (19/12/2021); ‘A classless man in charge of a classless club run by classless people’ (22/05/2022); ‘Ugly truth behind the success of City’ (29/04/2023). Without parsing each article word for word, take my word for it that, in any other context – and undoubtedly if it were directed against his preferred Liverpool or many others’ preferred Manchester United – his bile would be widely regarded as libellous incitement to hatred.
As for Hot Press alumnus Lynch, one is never quite sure as to what extent his tongue is firmly in his cheek or how much he actually means it (probably some weird admixture of the two), due to his unremitting deployment of ironic overstatement. In ‘Big Money meets Big Football meets Big Law’ (26/05/2019), having bemoaned the evils of leveraged buy-outs of clubs by ‘rich-guys-with-no-money’, he continues: ‘Now we’ve got rich-guys-with-money, indeed the problem with the rich guys who own City is not just that they are considerably richer than the rich guys who own Liverpool or Spurs, they are limitlessly rich as only oil-rich countries can be, they are ludicrously, crushingly rich. And still… still they’re in trouble with UEFA, accused of breaking rules in relation to Financial Fair Play.’ As though rich-guys-with-no-money are somehow preferrable to rich-guys-with-money. He endeavours to bolster his case by arguing, ‘One is reminded of the fact that football of the American kind is considered so important, it is rigged like some socialist experiment’, when it could just as easily be framed as being so important that it is rigged like a capitalist experiment – like the rest of U.S. society. By-the-by, he concludes that week’s column with analysis which lays the blame for Brexit firmly at Jeremy Corbyn’s door, a good indication of where his ideological sympathies lie. This is what passes for informed, astute political commentary in the reputed highest-circulation Irish Sunday newspaper. In ‘Don’t mention the war: filthy rich Manchester City were once hilarious losers just like Basil Fawlty’ (11/02/2023) he states: ‘There are complexities within this story of the Premier League charging Manchester City with breaking 115 financial fair play rules…But there are great simplicities to the case too, the most obvious of which is this: I don’t know any fans of Manchester City. I know fans of Man United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs, Aston Villa, Everton, Leeds United and West Ham. I even know a Nottingham Forest fan. But I don’t know any fans of Manchester City.’ Maybe Lynch should get out more. He is welcome to attend one of the triweekly meetings of the City Supporters Club – Dublin Branch (of which more anon) to check out how many City fans there really are hiding in plain sight in his midst. But it is in the terseness of his tweets that Lynch gives himself revealing free reign: ‘City are not a good side’ is a gnomically reiterated mantra of his; while ‘Would love to see the Arsenal winning the league obvs, yet I fear City* have aimed for a narrow win this season to maintain the illusion that the competitive structure hasn’t been wrecked by their incessant, hydra-headed cheating’ (8/05/2023); ‘Interesting to see comments about the Arsenal ‘bottling’ it from football writers who “bottle” the mention of those 115 charges against Man City* every day of the week’ (18/04/2023); and ‘No, the biggest bottle in history is the abject failure of so many English journalists and broadcasters to even mention that City* are facing 115 charges of cheating’ (15/05/2023) enter the realms of conspiracy theory nonsense. (It took a while for me to figure out why Lynch habitually places an asterisk after every obsessive mention of City, but eventually Merriam-Webster furnished what I presume is the answer: ‘the character * thought of as being appended to something (such as an athletic accomplishment included in a record book) typically in order to indicate that there is a limiting fact or consideration which makes that thing less important or impressive than it would otherwise be.’
John Aldridge
John Aldridge
The Sunday World features a ghost-written column by ex-Liverpool and Republic of Ireland stalwart John Aldridge. Week in week out, in plain man’s language, he trumpets Liverpool’s cause: the reason they are not able to compete is City’s perfidy. He is quoted in an interview with Kevin Palmer headlined, ‘It’s time to hammer Man City if they are found guilty’ (9/02/2023): ‘Everyone knows this has gone on from day one. They have done well to get away with it for so long. We will have to see what comes out in the wash and give themselves a chance to prove their innocence.’ Was no subeditor at the SW alive to the patent contradiction covered in the space of those three short sentences? In his own ventriloquised voice, in ‘Surprise guys can claim a Champions League spot’, he tells his red readership, ‘As I’ve mentioned in my Sunday World column, Manchester City’s dominance at the top of the Premier League table is a big problem for the English game, as interest will wane if they win the title by a mile every year’ (24/9/2023). Even if City have succeeded by nefarious means, is that even true? The Bundesliga attracts more than fans of serial winners Bayern Munich (eleven consecutive titles, and counting).
But perhaps the most egregious example of anti-City vilification comes courtesy of Miguel Delaney, who works for the London Independent but is of part-Irish extraction, and a known Liverpool aficionado. (He claims to support one Irish club and one Spanish club, but no Premiership club) Delaney tends to adopt the moral high ground, focusing more on the U.A.E.’s campaign of ‘sportswashing’ – an attempt to render their human rights abuses more palatable to the world – rather than on the resources the owners’ wealth places at City’s disposal. I will tackle these problems in due course, but for now, here is a smattering of Delaney’s critique. In his consideration of City’s 2023 title win, headlined, ‘Five titles in six years: Are Manchester City destroying the Premier League?’ over a standfirst of ‘Pep Guardiola has been given limitless funds to create the perfect team in laboratory conditions, and the result has been an almost total eradication of competition at the top of the Premier League’ (22/05/2023), he declares, ‘City have brutalised the very idea of sporting competition. There’s been no tension. There’s been no drama’, going on to assert, ludicrously, ‘That has meant there haven’t been any real memorable moments, beyond some great goals and the repeated image of Haaland and De Bruyne tearing at goal.’ Those images were, precisely, memorable moments. He concludes with, ‘The reality is all of City’s success is ultimately explained by the fact they are a state project.’ Prior to that, writing in his newsletter (17/05/2023) in the wake of City’s 4-0 win over European giants Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-final, second-leg at The Ethiad (a game I was lucky enough to attend), Delaney revealed that ‘sources within the game (and with Delaney, it is always unnamed ‘sources within the game’) are growing concerned with how City are brushing all before them aside.’ It is little wonder that Declan Lynch has commended Delaney on X (formerly Twitter), praising him for ‘doing God’s own work’. However, while other top clubs may be aggravated by City’s dominance, it is fair to say that City fans are rejoicing in it.
It might be a good idea if all those engaged in public discourse around football in Ireland were required to declare their interests before being allowed to comment. On second thoughts, perhaps there is no need for this measure as, as has been demonstrated, many of them already do this freely, yet their outpourings are not met with the requisite scepticism – because they are preaching to the converted, and their favouritism is plain for all to see.
It’s an exciting time to be Neapolitan right now. Or should I say a supporter of Napoli FC? I have to clarify, as there’s hardly a dull moment to be Neapolitan.
Wherever I go, it doesn’t matter whether it’s New York or Tenerife, when I answer the classic question “Where are you from?” so many emotions rage inside me that I am unable to handle, because I know there will be questions. And if there are no questions they will be insinuations. And if there are no insinuations there will be sterile rhetoric. Or unbearable clichés.
In short, being Neapolitan is a bit of a blessing, and a bit of a curse. Having clarified this, it is indeed an exciting time to be a Napoli supporter. This illness (in Napoli we don’t say “I am a supporter” or “I’m a huge fan”. We say “I’m ill for Napoli”, which is a literal translation of “So’ mmalato pe ‘o Napule”) got to me when I was just a kid.
It was not easy falling in love with the team, as during my whole childhood and adolescence Napoli SUCKED. During the second season after I started following them, we had the worst record in our (why is that supporters think they’re part of the team is something to investigate) history. Fourteen miserable points in thirty-four games. We even managed to lose at home to Lecce; a shameful 2-4 result.
So, you can probably understand when I say that I never expected what we have been seeing from the team thus far in Serie A.
Napoli is dominating the championship, and it has done so from the beginning. In August, after half the squad was changed, it was impossible to foresee anything like this.
We are seeing things we’re unaccustomed to, and the enthusiasm the team has brought to the city is incredible. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Victor Osimhen, Stanislav Lobotka, Andrè Frank Zambo Anguissa, Min-Jae Kim, Piotr Zielinski, and the other players are writing their names in Napoli’s history, making likely what we thought would be impossible: winning a scudetto.
What’s more they are making it look EASY! And they are also working wonders in Europe, winning their group stage and putting four goals past Liverpool and six (SIX!) past Ajax at their home ground. Recalling this makes me quiver with excitement. This is Real Madrid or Barcelona stuff. It’s crazy, but it’s happening for real.
Over-thinking…
A normal human being would just enjoy what is going on without reflecting too much on it. Unfortunately, I was gifted with an exceptional talent for over-thinking, and therefore began reflecting on how much this team can positively affect the city’s image.
It all started a couple of weeks ago when I was walking close to La Sagrada Familia where I live in Barcelona and some teenagers came up to me speaking a language I did not understand. They began pointing at the Napoli crest that is on the back of my tracksuit jacket.
It turned out they were Georgian students, over on holiday. They wanted a picture with me to express their love for Napoli, and Kvaratskhelia. It was an unfamiliar feeling, so I started to go around wearing the jacket to see if it would happen again.
Since then, I have been stopped, waved at, and had “Forza Napoli!” shouted after me. The other day, entering the office, the guy that works at the bar downstairs and two security guys I had never spoken to before, asked me about Napoli and expressed their admiration for the team I support, expressing their sincere hope that Napoli win the Champion’s League.
I am astounded by all this attention. I don’t know how to feel about it. And the astonishment does not end there.
Time Out
Time Magazine has put Napoli in its top fifty destinations to travel to. Ryanair has added more routes to and from Naples, and their representative even had a Napoli jersey on.
A recent article in an Italian newspaper has revelead that for the month of May it is almost impossible to find a hotel room there now.
Georgian authorities are attempting to create a direct connection between Napoli and Tbilisi to help locals fly to Napoli to see their favorite player. The Diego Armando Maradona stadium has now a diversified audience, with Koreans and Georgians in regular attendance.
YouTubers are now flocking to Napoli to see the team play, and in the meantime enjoying the city’s mesmerizing sights, art, and food. Thousands of tourists climb the alleys of the Quartieri Spagnoli in pilgrimage toward the mural of Maradona which is famous throughout the world.
I should feel proud that my city and team are performing so well. It is just that this is unleashing the usual Italian rhetoric about the Neapolitan being a ‘special people’, and of a ‘special city’, which is experiencing a ‘particular moment.’
The truth is that I’ve had it up here with that kind of talk about Napoli FC, and Naples. It is hard for me to explain what it feels and means to be Neapolitan. I’ll do my best, but I know that in the end, I might start using the clichés I hate so much.
Volcanic
Being Neapolitan means you have to excuse yourself for everything you did not do, every time something bad happens in the city. It means fighting with other Neapolitans, who think that Scudetto celebrations will lead some people to destroy the city and its monuments.
It involves the frustration of knowing that it doesn’t matter if it’s only ten people’s fault, it will be all the Neapolitans taking the blame. I even saw that a newspaper is worried that there will be killings and robberies throughout the event.
Being Neapolitan means watching #Vesuvio trend on Twitter every single freaking time there is an earthquake in the southern part of Italy. Let me explain this to anyone who think this sounds strange. It’s worse: it’s stupid. You have to know that being Neapolitan entails having a song sung to us that goes:
My dream I will fulfill / Il mio sogno esaudirò Vesuvius erupts / Vesuvio Erutta All Naples is destroyed / Tutta Napoli è distrutta Vesuvius erupts / Vesuvio Erutta All Naples is destroyed / Tutta Napoli è distrutta
On the subject of ‘Freed from desire’, some brilliant minds even brought out a single that was distributed on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, and many other platforms, before somebody had the decency to take it down.
It means that people from Bergamo, in the northern part of Italy, will happily join the German supporters of Eintracht Frankfurt destroying a part of the city because they hate our guts.
It means that every taxi driver I meet has seen the film Gomorrah, and I am too ashamed to tell them that I grew up in that neighborhood. It means that you will be the butt of many unpleasant jokes. It means that the lazy and incompetent Chief Wiggum of the Simpsons will speak with your accent.
It Hurts…
So, how does it FEEL to be Neapolitan? It fucking hurts! And that’s the harsh truth. It is a debilitating struggle, because whenever you talk or reason about your city, you are never right.
It does not matter who you’re talking to, or about what. You are never right, because you’re Neapolitan. You are wrong because you are Neapolitan. You are ‘special’, you are deceitful, you are the one who steals, who is lazy. They say that in stereotypes there’s always a grain of truth. And that hurts more.
What I’ve been asking myself during this incredible year is how I should feel about it. I don’t know anymore.
Should I already feel guilty for what some shitheads will do? Should I feel sorry about it? Should I be proud of what is happening or afraid it will not happen again? Should I laugh about the insults we receive because it’s just that the other supporters are sore losers, or should I be worried that the next time we go to an away match it will not be just a small part of the stadium singing about our sleepy giant?
I don’t know. What I do know is that I cried while and after Kvaratskhelia had received the ball from Osimhen, then dribbled past the whole Atalanta defence and midfield, turning three times in a very tight space before painting with his right foot a supersonic shooting star which ended its run in the top bin. It was simply too much. There’s only so much beauty you can witness without tears.
I know it can’t last forever and that I should be far happier. I know that I should be proud of how we’re doing, because as my terminally ill and short-memoried father said after I finished telling him (for the fifth time in six hours) that Napoli had won the Coppa Italia final against Juventus on penalties, “See… in the end it’s not so bad being Neapolitan.”
Diego Pugliese, Naples, 2020.
Featured images by Daniele Idini, Naples, July 2020.
Despite all the controversies in the run-up, and as with the last World Cup in Russia, most people are now looking beyond the politics, and enjoying the feast of football.
For many of those attending sporting fixtures, this is akin to performing a religious duty in a secular age. The rest of us generally slouch in front of TV sets and even squint into smartphones to satisfy compulsive appetites. In Ireland we have a particular grá for team sports as participants but mostly viewers, or even as virtual participants, with the advent of video games.
The rewards for sportsmen, in particular, are staggering, but many are left on the scrap heap at an early age, while others count the cost in later life with psychological and physical trauma.
"the World Cup itself is a bizarre and inexplicable thing. It temporarily requires even the most autocratic and despotic regimes to drop tools and play nice."https://t.co/ymOH6ZZPxB This report from the 2018 World Cup in Russia is worth revisiting!
The popularity of sports entertainment stretches far back into European history. The gathering of crowds for sporting occasions was a feature of Classical antiquity, when these spectacles were explicitly connected to religious worship. Held in honour of Zeus, the king of the gods, the Panhellenic Olympics of Ancient Greece ran from 776BC until 393AD, and attracted participants from across the Hellenic world.
Later, Romans were fanatically devoted to circus, which featured gladiatorial duals to the death. A note of caution was sounded, however, by the poet Juvenela c. AD100, who witheringly identified panem et circus (bread and circus) as the primary concern of the people:
iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / vendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses.
[… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.]
Sport remained an important feature of life in medieval Europe, where knights tested their valour and prowess in vainglorious jousts. Hunting was also popular among the aristocracy at the apex of the feudal pyramid. Pursuit of animals, referred to as ‘game’, was generally not motivated by their value as food: consumption conferred status beyond gastronomic pleasure.
Pre-modern sports bore a close resemblance to warfare, and, the conditioning of a participant overlapped to a large extent with a warrior’s training, as one sees in ancient epic, such as with the funeral games of Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad. Tests of physical prowess, advantageous on the battlefield are evident, as well as skills such as archery and javelin, which are clearly a preparation for warfare itself.
The Funerals of Patrocle, oil on canvas. Jacques-Louis David, 1778.
Fight or Flight?
At a sporting event, an audience could experience the thrill of battle without risking dismemberment, although the qualities esteemed in the heroic athlete may have whetted a thirst for blood.
This may lead to an assumption that sport fosters a destructive, competitive instinct. George Orwell was of the view that: ‘sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will’. But denial of the amusement seems curmudgeonly. Sport can bring us together rather than tear us apart. Perhaps it depends on the underlying psychology of the crowd.
The nineteenth century incubated most of the sports that are now prevalent in our culture, including the GAA. It was in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution began in earnest, however, that mass attendance of sporting events by a new working class originates, as stadiums accommodating tens of thousands of people sprang up in a newly urbanised society. Here we find the codification of now global sports such as Association Football, Cricket, Rugby (Union and League), tennis and field hockey all of which now have a global reach. Others, such as golf and motor racing emerging in more rarefied environments.
Interesting, it is in the anglo-sphere that alternative sports emerged to confront the British invasion; in the United States, basketball, American Football and baseball; in Ireland the GAA developed our distinctive sports; even Australia and Canada developed or adapted their own codes. This demonstrates the importance of sport as a source of identity in the English-speaking world where other cultural markers such as food seem to have been of less importance.
The popular sports in our time depart from Classical and medieval precedent – notwithstanding the revival of the Olympics in 1896 – in the skills demanded of the participants. Although most contemporary sports still demand serious athleticism, their skills sets would be of no particular use to a soldier, especially one engaged in modern, technological warfare; although the skills of the gamer might prove very useful indeed.
Nonetheless, modern sports are still animated by martial fervour, accessing, and perhaps controlling, that primal instinct to compete and, for men especially, to discuss the competition. Orwell opines that: ‘At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare’, but at that time most men, unlike today, had trained to be soldiers.
Harry Hampton scores one of his two goals in the 1905 FA Cup Final, when Aston Villa defeated Newcastle United.
Judgment
The demonic ‘Judge’ Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s no-holds-barred novel Blood Meridan (1985) describes war as ‘the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence’.
He argues that:
Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
The ‘Judge’ is right insofar as the higher the stakes the more gripping a sporting fixture becomes for an audience that puts aside its daily trials to vent their passions.
The worth of the participant is defined by their success or failure at crucial moments. But ‘the Judge’ is mistaken to assume that defeat is always a humiliation, as any crowd may honour a team or individual who loses with good grace, and sport is not only about winning; ‘greatness’ is also measured by how a loser conducts himself in defeat. Thus Harry Kane is above criticism despite missing a (second) penalty, while the Argentinian team are roundly condemned for rubbing defeat in their opponents’ faces.
It is striking that Swiss psychologist Carl Jung regarded games as being of the utmost importance for the wellbeing of societies. He said that ‘civilisations at their most complete moments … always brought out in man his instinct to play and made it more inventive’. Sport, he proffered, connects us to our ‘instinctive selves’.
Sporting success can really raise the morale of a nation, such as the Irish after World Cup Italia 1990. The connection to a team or individual should not be dismissed lightly. Even in defeat, fans can summon a spirit of togetherness that is not necessarily oppositional.
The popularity of sports may be connected to the decline of religious worship, but the religious origins of sport have not faded entirely – fans often pay homage to virtues of self-sacrifice and togetherness associated with spiritual traditions.
Moreover, with lives increasingly sedentary and indoor, sport returns us to the idea of a challenge that melds innate athleticism and skill. This is both a natural gift, and the product of training.
The audience also enjoys the mental side of the game, considering how a team or individual will triumph or fail in advance of a contest, and assessing why a particular outcome has occurred in the aftermath. It can be the springboard for discussion between complete strangers, generally leading to camaraderie rather than conflict.
Sport has also become one of the last redoubts for mythology at a time when this generally operates on the margins, or in childhood fantasies. Commentators are given licence to rhapsodise about the divine characteristics of participants. We bow before sporting gods, satisfying a latent desire for non-rational explanations, and a taste for supernatural interference, deus ex machina: ‘the hand of God.’
Sports journalism, unencumbered by constraints imposed on ‘serious’ journalists, vents superstitions and often casually averts to curses; ‘legends’ abound in sporting parlance.
Why did Messi not get a yellow card? Listen people, let's settle this once and for all. When a football God like Maradona or Messi handles the ball, it is not his hand at work but the "Hand of God". This is football theology 101. pic.twitter.com/GRvXrhIRwc
All this serves to enhance the appeal of ‘titanic’ battles, but sadly we are, increasingly, lured by the theatre away from examination of the vexed political questions of our time.
The assessment of Bill Shankly the former manager of Liverpool FC is worth revisiting: ‘some people say that football is a matter of life and death. I assure you it’s much more serious than that’.
It was therefore fitting then that when Jose Mourinho arrived in British football as manager of Chelsea FC in 2004 he chose to present himself as the ‘Special One’. For a time he carried all before him, with a little help from Russian billionaire Roman Abromovich.
Sporting occasions also offer a Dionysian alternative to lives that are increasingly constrained by social conventions. In what other arena of life can a grown adult scream and shout with unrestrained fervour, orr even streak naked across a pitch?
Sport imports a communal sense of belonging, evident in the crowd at a huge stadium and in the often transnational ‘imagined community’ of fans of a particular franchise. Support for national teams affirm a sense of belonging to the ‘imagined community’ of the nation.
The medium is the message. First television, and now increasingly the Internet, allows individuals, living thousands of mile away to support teams, often comprised of players from around the world.
Mythological themes are played out in real time. The truly great teams, it is said, are those that learn from defeat, just as the heroes of epic returns from the trial of Hades the wiser. We also encounter the tragedy of the flawed hero whose indiscretions are captured by the ravenous paparazzi, and attributed to the wider failings of youth.
English football fans at the 2006 FIFA World Cup.
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Yet we can have too much of a good thing. Attention to sports has reached pathological intensity. Slick marketing has moved an instinctive pleasure into a compulsive and easily-satisfied desire, activating demand in a manner that is almost pornographic.
In particular, the multi-billion euro football industry uses every available opportunity to lure child and adult alike into compulsive purchasing of television channels and merchandise that is gaudily flaunted. More troublingly still is the expansion of online gambling.
Young men are now paid unconscionable fortunes for playing games, which many would happily participate in for far less, or no financial reward at all. Televised sport used to inspire kids to imitate their heroes, now with gaming technology they don’t have to leave their couches, and the obesity pandemic carries all before it.
Rupert Murdoch recognised that sports would act as a ‘battering ram’ for his pay TV, an example most newspapers have followed. Sports coverage underpins a neoliberal zeitgeist by providing an alternative, apolitical, space with elements of tragedy and farce; villains and saviours; loyalty and betrayal.
Grandeur is evoked through metaphors such as the ‘trench warfare’ of a tight contest or the ‘phoney war’ of a friendly fixture; ‘citadels’ are ‘stormed’, and ‘no quarter is given’, along with specifically supernatural ideas such as ‘demons’ being ‘exorcised’. Stress is laid on the grandeur and importance of the events unfolding: thus we regularly learn that ‘history is being made.’ Too much of our lives, my own included, are absorbed by the spectacle.
With the degree of psychic energy devoted to the affairs of circus, it is hardly surprising that political involvement is increasingly the province of the paid-up professional; that the percentage voting has declined precipitously; that elections are explained by analogy with sporting fixtures; and that often warfare itself is relegated to the periphery. The widespread obsession is barely questioned by a media that feeds the fervour, and certainly not by politicians that display their colours to appear like regular guys.
The 2010 film ‘Inception’ has scorched the innermost parts of my brain. This big screen feast had concepts that lit all the senses. Visually it was seeing things like the city of Paris fold in and on itself. Aurally, Edith Piaf’s Je Ne Regrette Rien twisted and reborn as a time bending plot device and a highly memorable if unrecognisable score.
Christopher Nolan’s cerebral blockbuster may seem a world apart from a rugby contest in store in the Land of the Long White cloud. But the central tenet of the movie, the thing that has stuck with me the most, is that once brought into the world it’s almost impossible to kill an idea.
It’s that thought that resonates with the mouth-watering sporting clash that awaits us this weekend.
I’m not sure what the New Zealand team that first toured the British Isle in 1905 would have made of the central idea of Inception. But I suspect they had some inkling that they were creating something special: an idea that would exceed them.
It is unclear how the touring New Zealand side earned their moniker the ‘All Blacks’ whether through a typographical error – they All played like Backs? – or simply because of the colour of the jersey, which seems most likely. Whatever its origins, this national side made up of native Māori and colonials have been referred to as the All Blacks ever since.
Coupled with the pre-match ritual of the haka, and their top drawer rugby skills the team’s reputation travelled far and wide. They are easily the most successful national team in the history of the sport.
The All Blacks at the climax of their haka before a test against France in Paris, January 1925.
An idea had been born. These New Zealanders were no ordinary rugby team. They were All Blacks and they were unique. Their fans knew it too.
The Welsh choirs singing Bread of Heaven in the Cardiff drizzle may indeed be a religious occasion, but the relentless chant of ‘All Blacks. All Blacks. All Blacks’ simply demands success.
It didn’t matter who they faced. What team or colour. Resistance was futile. But one team suffered more than any other. Year after year the team in green were beaten all black, and blue. From that very first tour in 1905 Ireland endured 111 years of shoe pie.
At best there were crushing last minutes loses. At worst, and usually in response to these ‘near wins’ the humiliation of record score obliterations. In my lifetime it was teams that included the likes of Vinny Cunningham, Keith Wood and Conor Murray from 1992, 2002 and 2012 that typify this. Each poked the All Black bear and suffered brutal and pitiless responses. 56-9. 40-8. 60-0.
For Ireland, the All Blacks were a giant albatross on our backs, and it took a Kiwi to help bend, and finally break that mystique.
In just his third game in charge, Joe Schmidt’s Ireland had New Zealand beaten. Until they weren’t. It may have taken the last play of the game and a conversion twice taken, but the All Blacks had beaten Ireland. Like they always did.
Three years later in Chicago we finally beat New Zealand. This was an end of season game, however, almost an exhibition match, a test played in a neutral, non-rugby venue, against an All Black team lacking recognized second rows.
The following week they came to Dublin and ‘shoe pie’ resumed. With a violent intensity and no little skill, they beat us into submission once again.
The victory in 2018 was a more genuine breakthrough. But normal trouncing service was resumed at the subsequent World Cup when it really mattered. Joe out. Busted Flush.
But something had changed. The aura of invincibility around the All Blacks had disappeared forever. Mythological characters – the McCaws and Carters – were reduced to mortal men – Canes and Barretts.
When they came here last autumn Ireland obliterated them in the most one-sided, close-margin-victory I’ve ever witnessed. We played them off the park, with the score board somehow saying 29-20 at the end of the match. But make no mistake, the All Blacks had been beasted by Ireland.
Now, incredibly, Ireland could be the first side in the professional era to win a series in New Zealand. Having largely gifted the first test to the home team, Ireland won comfortably enough last week; although, slightly worryingly, throwing away at least two gilt edge tries to give a final score line that flattered the hosts.
This is new territory for an Irish rugby fan. But can we actually do it in the third and deciding test? For sure it’s not the best team New Zealand has ever put out, albeit with Sam Whitelock back in the second row they present a more challenging proposition, and they surely won’t be so undisciplined next time out. Ireland are essentially unchanged, but Ringrose’s dashing forays will be missed.
The rational mind says New Zealand are 7-10 point favourites. They just don’t lose home series. The PTSD of previous bloodbaths suggests there could yet be another dose of shoe-pie.
And yet, with their aura of invincibility gone forever, another idea is crystallizing, which is that, whisper it, Ireland are becoming New Zealand’s ‘bogey’ team.
It’s too early for this nascent idea to have much hold. Or power. But win tomorrow and it may start to play tricks on the All Black mind, just like the French have had a habit of doing.
In all likelihood, come 10am on Saturday morning my foolhardy hopes will be confronted by crushing reality as normal All Black service is resumed. But this is sport, where hope is everything.
I believe Ireland can make history. And even if i have egg on my face after the final result comes through, non, je ne regrette rien.
Feature Image: All Blacks rugby union team that toured the United Kingdom in 1905-6.
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During a visit to the Burren in County Clare, Oliver Cromwell’s lieutenant-general Edmund Ludlow wrote of the memorable landscape that it had ‘not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him’. A spell on a yoga retreat might have opened his eyes to the serene natural beauty around him.
In 1999, off a small fuchsia-fringed road near the Clare-Galway border, Dave Brocklebank found what he had been looking for at last, a haven from the turbulence of the city, and a place to realise his dream. The Burren Yoga Retreat Centre was born; where the wisdom of the East meets the wild Atlantic West of Ireland.
Wild Atlantic Way.
Dave and his wonderful family have invested themselves in the venture with admirable devotion, and no little sacrifice, bringing together a dedicated team to offer a retreat to enhance body and soul. I can testify to the experience affecting lasting, positive change.
I arrived in the early evening and breathed in the clean, fragrant air. A sylvan pathway led me past moss-covered rocks to the door where I was greeted by Dave, his azure eyes brilliant pools of inner calm.
He showed me around the recently renovated building; immaculately clean and finished to the highest standard. The objective is to be carbon neutral by 2025. The bedrooms, all newly constructed with fine-quality woodwork, very comfortable beds, and sophisticated modern touches such as underfloor heating and electric window blinds, are ample in size and bright, affording verdant vistas of lush fields and woodland. The bathrooms are sparklingly modern and elegant.
There is a room for silent relaxation, and one for massage from a therapist who, I was assured by a repeat visitor, has “magic hands”. Upstairs is a cosy nook for reading, with numerous books on yoga and meditation. There is a comfortable lounge in which to take one’s ease and admire the treescape and mountains beyond, or chat with fellow guests. Outside is a circular, stone space for outdoor activities; a nod to our ancient forebearers and the many archaeological sites in the area.
In the dining room, Ida, our Croatian cook, presented sumptuous and cleansing vegetation and vegan meals, produced from locally sourced and organic ingredients, all washed down with water from the well.
Gráinne leads a class.
The pièce de résistance is the brand-new state-of-the-art yoga studio. Here, in this large and well-lit space with enormous windows offering more expansive views of bare mountainside, and trees swaying in the breeze like seaweed in a current – Gráinne, poise and grace incarnate – gave gentle instruction in yoga and meditation, at times bathed in glorious sunlight. She is one of a team of teachers who Dave, over years of careful selection, has chosen to offer the best possible experience to well-practised yogis and novices alike.
And then there were the daily outings. The first was to mythic Coole Park, once home to Lady Gregory and haunt of Irish literary greats, their names carved into its Copper Beech autograph tree; W. B. Yeats, Bernard Shaw and J.M Synge. We took a stroll by its otherworldly turlough (a disappearing lake), its banks ablaze with vivid green, and along its woodland paths, passing great cypresses and cedars along the way. Then lunch in the pretty market town of Gort, in the charming Gallery Café with paintings by local artists displayed on the walls.
Clints and grykes.
On the second day, led by radiant, soulful Erin, our guide and bean an tí, we went to Mullaghmore, to explore the renowned karst landscape of the Burren, those primordial tropical seabeds, abrim with petrified corals, urchins, and ammonites, sculpted by glaciers and carved by rainfall into incised pavements of glistening clints and grykes. The latter are fecund with long-ago deposited Connemara soil to create nurseries for the abundant flora (among them orchids, herb Robert, and honeysuckle) to jostle towards the sunlight.
A dragonfly, tinkerbell wings of shimmering organza, sketched a perimeter around us as we walked. Upwards we climbed to the summit, horizons of wonder before us, it seemed as if we were atop the cerebral grey matter of a submerged giant.
Returning to the road, we paused to pet some “self-walking” dogs and headed to the shore, via the house which was the location for the irreverent Irish sit-com Father Ted, enjoyed an excellent seafood lunch at Linnane’s in New Quay and later, a swim in the brisk, abluting ocean.
Back to the centre and a yin yoga session. Given my lack of yoga over the previous months I was reminded of a quote from another famous Clint, who once growled, “a man’s gotta know his limitations”, but I was surprised to feel how my muscles and joints could be coaxed into suppleness in the right environment, and with such expert instruction.
So if you’ve been thinking of doing yourself the favour of spending some time at a lovingly-envisaged and realised home away from home, with superb food and facilities and nestled in sublime natural beauty then this retreat is for you.
Personally I have felt a renewed sense of corporeal freedom and am learning to transcend more easily the clints and grykes of my mind, moods, and emotions, and am discovering a higher plane of consciousness, to operate in the space between thoughts,
I carry it still, this moment of bliss in the Burren. And I hope you will too.
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Picture this scene. Next to a Martello tower, a grimy concrete shelter below which a motley crew, ranging from whooping lads to fragile ladies, make their way, often daily, into the ocean at Seapoint, Dublin. Some swim significant distances – measured in buoys and other landmarks – others simply ‘take the waters’. There are New Irish here, while native Dubliners mix easily with country friends, in the collective gasp before wading in.
I have visited the sea most days so far this winter. It is the dread of the cold, not the cold itself that holds the most fear. Once enclosed by the water my limbs thrash a course, and I am no longer conscious of the temperature. That is as long as I go in every day. If I leave it for any length, the cold will sting, even in the summer months.
Is this a sport I wonder? There is no zero sum game of winners and losers. No match reports. No fandom. But there is conviviality, life affirmation, fitness and even a boost to the immune system I have been told. But something deeper motivates my immersions, and any health benefits are tangential.
I am dreading the months of January, February and March. It is hard to contemplate temperatures that will have dropped a further three or four degrees to eight degrees.[i] Remarkably, the average sea temperatures in December is higher than in May, when the difference between air and water could be fifteen degrees. This month the water is often warmer than the air, although you lose heat a lot quicker without your clothes on.
Also this month the solstice coincides with a full moon. I have no idea if this has a symbolic significance. What I do know is that swimming with a crowd during a full moon is great craic. I have attended these lantern-lit gatherings for the past two months, and am hoping to brave it again on the 21st. One trick to stave off hypothermia is to bring along a hot water bottle to pour over extremities afterwards, making sure to avoid giving yourself a scalding.
I have just started wearing protective gloves – which I found on the street – into the water. It makes quite a difference to my hands on the twenty-five minute cycle home. I am thinking of acquiring booties that I see other people wear, but that would involve a financial investment in this lowest maintenance of sports. Really all you need are togs, towel and a good dollop of madness.
I take pleasure in seeing an array of birdlife by the seashore: there are the usual suspects of gulls and cormorants – which I now see are colonising the River Dodder near where I live as fish numbers decline in the sea – but also Brent Geese along with Waders some of which make their way from Iceland, so I guess they find our waters positively balmy! It is shocking to hear that shards of plastic are affecting these migrants’ welfare.[ii]
Most days I take a picture from the same spot overlooking the Poolbeg stacks. I do wonder about posting these on social media, but I have available to me the superb technology of a telephone, which takes fine pictures of sky, sea and land converging. Obviously in the process I am selling the platform of an irresponsible multinational, but cannot the same be said of any author whose book is on display in a chain store? I just want to convey the beauty of my city and its hinterland, and how we should treasure the wildlife, and examine carefully issues like the emissions coming from that eerie incinerator by the stacks.
This summer my mother died. Losing a parent is generally a seismic life experience. I think my dedication to the swimming has had something to do with that. Cycling to and from Seapoint I pass by places I associate with her. It is sad, but I don’t want to avoid it.
When my mother went into a hospice I immediately returned from the UK where I had been working. The following day she said: ‘don’t let me stop you from going for a swim’, much to our amusement. Two days later she passed away.
The other landmark near where I swim is Dun Laoghaire pier. It is so much a part of the geography of this place that it seems timeless, but it was built on the initiative of a private citizen, Richard Toucher, a Norwegian sailor who settled in Dublin, passing away in 1841. He provided, at great personal expense, most of the granite for the building of the harbour. This philanthropic enterprise saved many lives, and now provides a bit of shelter as we swim at Seapoint, where it can still get quite choppy.
This is an extract from one of his letters:
I write not for fame, but for utility. It is my aim rather to be understood than admired. To elegance of composition I aspire not. But I have some nautical experience…and…the idea of an Asylum Port at Dunleary is ever first in my thoughts.
The Merchants, Ship Owners and Ship-Masters of Whitehaven, Workington, Maryport, Harrington and Parton, are also preparing a petition to be presented to His Grace The Duke of Richmond, praying his aid and support for the erection of this much wanted pier at Dunleary. This I am not astonished at, when I reflect how many of their relatives have been lost on the coast of our Bay, the numbers of widows and fatherless children that are left to bemoan that this pier had not long since been built, which would have saved to them what was in this life most valuable.
For his troubles Richard Toucher died a bankrupt.[iii] We recall his great legacy today, this Cassandra Voice, who devoted his fortune to the continuing benefit of others.
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One evening, while walking on Derada Hill, a hare sprung from under my feet. I found myself, all of a sudden, on the ground burying my head in the warm form left in the grass, and I asked that primordial form to act as a poultice, to draw out my expensive European education from my head, because in my western way of thinking I was damaging the earth. It had set me up in opposition to what is natural and native to us.
John Moriarty, Nostos, (Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1994).
I can’t say when I first played hurling. It was with me on all of the great moments of self-discovery I can think of. Once I had a decent footing in the world I became aware of a stick being close by.
It defined my youth; this game, this skill, this way of spending time. It was frustrating and it was ordinary and it was miserable at times, but a current ran through me, a note that intensified as I played. It got more serious as I grew up, the stakes got higher, my identity hardened, a community of people formed and goals were unconsciously set, if not assumed.
A former captain of the Wexford Intercounty team, Diarmuid Lyng analyses games for TG4 and Newstalk , and contributes to national print media.
And when the final curtain fell, amid the chaos of going from the all-encompassing nature of modern sport to the great vacuum of retirement, I found myself in West Kerry, with the writings of John Moriarty, trying to read my way through a depression, in the hope that I would once again, make sense of me, to me.
I was wandering the countryside a lot during that period, learning to forage wild plants while growing comfortable in swathes of time dedicated to the question of how the outer world was interacting with my inner landscape.
I remember sitting at the foot of Ceann Sibéal on the evening of an honest storm, marveling at waves rolling in and crashing against the foot of the cliff. Inwardly, I thought of the net in Croke Park shaking. The waves of energy emanating from the player, the sliotar bypassing the goalkeeper and crashing into the net, creating a wave like that at the foot of the cliff in front of me.
I sat on Clogher Beach and marvelled at the ability of a player standing fully ninety yards apart from another, who hits a ball at over one hundred miles an hour, reaching a height of seventy yards at its apex, and within the first second or two of him striking it – in it’s very initial ascent – to move to the exact spot where the ball arrives so as only to have to extend an arm in order to catch it. What remarkable qualities of mind and body are at work there? What more are we capable of? And why doesn’t anyone refer to this? Shouldn’t it turn our spines in to question marks to interrogate the magnificent of it all?
Silver Branch Perception
What I found in West Kerry is that when the fences around me fell away, when I went out to the wild places, the boundaries in my mind disintegrated too, and these thoughts and feelings had their way with me. It brought me back to the soul of the game: to Silver Branch Perception.
Silver Branch Perception was bestowed on Bran Mac Feabhal by Mananánn Mac Lir in Irish mythology. It is a gift, a way of seeing the world for the paradise that it is; the awareness that when we separate ourselves from our social story, we can see the world paradisally.
The Tuath Dé would later defend this gift at the Second Battle of Maigh Tuiread against the Formorians.
Balor of the Evil Eye led the Formorians, who, according to Moriarty, looked on Ireland purely for its resources, the reducing eye – the Súil Mildeagach –seeing only uses and benefits. Thus a cow is looked on as pounds of beef, and a tree for the lengths of its timber.
The Tuath Dé, led by Lugh, held the Silver Branch and they fought to defend it. According to Moriarty, The Third Battle of Maigh Tuiread is being enacted within us today.
I recognise from my hurling experiences what he meant. We are disconnected from the parts of the game that are essential to the overall health of society. We have adopted a Formorian mindset, we have assumed Balor’s evil eye. It is disconnecting us from the essence of the game.
But Nature is lying us down on the psychiatrists couch and asking hard questions. Theash die-back disease is one of the symptoms diagnosed. This will decimate the most common Irish hedgerow tree over the next thirty to forty years. Its chances of survival are uncertain. Still 50,000 trees are cut down a year for 350,000 hurls to keep it business-as-usual.
But what of the ash tree? Could most GAA players identify what one even looks like? Do we care? Do we feel a responsibility for its survival beyond what is needed for our ‘use and benefit’? Is Nature reminding us of one of the fundamentals of the game?
We know now that the forest floor is alive with a web of mycelium that function along the lines of the Internet: a ‘tree wide web’. When a bush is sick it can tell a healthy tree, which may send the necessary nutrients to its ailing friend. Can we play the same role for the ash? Can we listen to what the tree needs, and come to its assistance?
If we don’t go back to listening, to being humbled by nature – if we ignore the possibilities of the Silver Branch – we will be paying lip service to bridging the great disconnect, choosing the dis-ease of the Formorian mindset so prevalent in modern Irish society.
Spiritually, there is a shift going on here from Rome to the Orient. Meditation, yoga, Tai Chi and mindfulness are rooted in Eastern ideas of existence. True to form, we look beyond our cultural inheritance to negotiate an internal crises in our perception of reality.
But answers are here, all around us. Let us plant ash trees in every GAA club in the country in the hope of identifying strains resistant to the disease, and ensure its survival. Let us reduce dependence on a food system in danger of implosion, by subsidising polytunnels for anyone willing to work one. Let us go out to the wild places and allow our own wildness to surface, and, in so doing, revive an awareness that what is primeval inside us is not to be feared, but valued.
I am aware of the intellectual ease with which many will digest this notion, but can we live it? Can we make the hard choices? Colonisation introduced many well-documented ills. Being the bastard child of Americana has brought even greater woes, though less appreciated, as we remain in a cultural, political and economical stranglehold. But as the neon lights of superficiality fade, what will anchor us?
I think about the role of hurling, the tree, and the way we play the game. I examine my own role. I wonder about my role as a father; I wonder how the win-at-all-costs mentality will affect my son. I wonder about what caused a woman to email me last week to say she was relieved a torn cruciate ligament would keep her away from the stresses of GAA.
The Minotaur
I ask Moriarty what we need. He tells me about the Minotaur.
The great Greek legend of the Minotaur is King Minos’s tale of woe. His wife Pasiphae becomes transfixed with the Bull God that emerges from the sea.
The Bull won’t mate with any human, so she orders the carpenter Daedalus to construct a wooden cow. Once completed she enters the cow, assumes the position, and the Bull impregnates her.
Soon she gives birth to a half-man half-bull: a monstrous creation. Out of shame King Minos constructs a labyrinth beneath the city of Knossos and banishes the Minotaur beneath the royal carpet.
Once a month a virgin child is sent from the city of Athens and dispatched into the labyrinth as food for the insatiable beast. Theseus takes umbrage that the maidens of his city are being devoured, and travels to Crete vowing to slay the monster. There he meets Ariadne, stepdaughter of the king and half-sister of the Minotaur, at the gates of the labyrinth. She gives him a ball of wool to navigate his return.
Theseus fulfills his destiny as a warrior by killing the monster and emerges in triumph from the labyrinth. That, to Moriarty, is the mythical story, but he sees another dimension.
The Minotaur represents our animal nature, and it is the appeal of this that Pasiphae has succumbed to. Minos as King has dominion over the people, and regulates his society. Animal nature, primordial wildness, runs contrary to civic virtue. He drives his shame beneath that which he controls. He then must feed that shame with sacrifice.
Enter the Warrior Theseus. He has bloody murder on his mind and awaits a triumphant return. But according to Moriarty this win-at-all-costs mentality must change; this is where we cross over from the mythological into the real, to the battles at Croke Park.
We don’t need another Theseus, or another Cuchulainn. We need a medicine man, someone that can dive into the depths of the Irish psyche and take a comb of walrus ivory to Caitlin Ni hUllachain’s hair: to comb our Cartesianism, to comb out our sins against Nature, to comb out our theories and creeds that put us on a collision course with this gorgeous blue jewel hanging in space.
If Theseus or anyone else wants to be a real hero, he must join King Minos and return to the labyrinth, take the Minotaur by the hand and walk him into the cityscape, accepting his shame in order to transcend it. This is the great journey.
We have a great opportunity now within the GAA to create a healing space in which coaches can heal: where they can tune into the deeper messages of the game, of the hurl, of the tree. Where they hear the medicines of Nature, which heals them of their anger and shame. Where they reconnect to purpose and are reminded of agency. Where they rediscover their place in the world, and where outcome is secondary to the journey.
Fulfilling a Heroic Destiny
Spiritually, we are at sea. That’s why we don’t feel the plight of the ailing ash. The Catholic Church took on the role of guardian of the great message of the Christ story. The message that we can be at one with the unfolding moment, that we can transcend our suffering and open ourselves to a greater potential.
The Church became moral arbiters of that message and pursued power and control, which divorced them from the source. They were not equipped for the gravity of the message that we are, in fact, already in Paradise. But independently we can create a space to engage with it, with humble invitation, we can heal ourselves and return to abundance.
Nature is abundant. The law of the universe is balance. When we are in balance we are in abundance. When we chose with agency to be in imbalance, we no longer live in abundance; instead we become locked in a mentality of scarcity, which furthers the imbalance.
Those that benefit most from these conditions are those that are most fearful of the scarcity complex within themselves. Those that are in imbalance have lost the ability to trust in the unfolding moment. They replace that trust with sufficient control of the moment to ensure they don’t slip into a reality that their minds are incapable of digesting.
We must deal with our fear in order to be whelmed and overwhelmed by the majesty of the natural world. In crossing that threshold we slip into a paradisal view of the Earth, and no longer want to damage it. This is free energy. We allow ourselves to re-integrate, we play our Orphic note that resonates with the universe.
This is where we identify our purpose, from this place. As though in sitting with Nature, in being psycho-analysed by Nature, where our preconceived stories about ourselves fall silent; the messages that we need to hear can be heard above the din: from the universe demanding we fulfill our heroic destiny; where we recall our gravity and our greatness, and make the contribution the universe requires of us.
Then we can identify the most pressing needs in the world, and apply our tremendous talents and resources to meet those needs, therein lies our purpose.
Croke Park
I spoke about some of these things in Croke Park recently, ideas that have been forming around me and inside of me, inspired by John Moriarty and my experience of hurling. He gave me leave to understand the world for myself, deferring to no one.
I don’t need experts to tell me about Climate Change, or the effect of EMF’s on bee populations, or young men’s suicide rate, to know the disconnect is for real. It’s everywhere. It’s screaming at us to stop, to look around, to renegotiate our most sacred and primal contracts with Nature, and hurling has a role to play.
Moriarty is guide. He is a guide because he went to these places. He let go of his conditioning and walked the earth with a barefoot mind and a barefoot heart. The last pages of Nostos, his autobiography, are written from the paradise he so often refers to. This is not a philosophical concept, it is the reality of the universe, which will lead us away from calamity. I know it is real because I have experienced it.
Its appreciation brings great possibilities for our young people, who are less hampered by the toxic legacy of shame lying on us as a people, on our language and on our landscape. With minds blown open by the Internet, they have the energy of youth to take great strides, but require mentors more than ever. Can the GAA offer a space where coaches harrow their own great depths to become the mentors we need?
Can we encourage balance in our young people so they can make their great contribution? Where they play sport to experience the union that is central to all creative pursuit, the feeling that comes when time and effort cease and a blissful harmony prevails. Can we value those moments once again, and in valuing them permit our young people to experience the world in a different way, beyond the limitations of outcome?
This is a journey Moriarty opened up for me, on which I constantly take wrong turns, but one worthy of continuing. If you are still with me, I encourage you to stand on the edge of a lake, or in front of a tree and just breathe. Breathe and resist the temptation to label and to understand and to intellectualise, and see what fills the gaps. It may be a fleeting experience, it may be difficult to hold on to, but it will heal.
And if you happen to see the wild form of the hare, bury your head in that wild form, and ask it with humility and reverence to guide you on this heroic journey out of the Formorian labyrinth, and back to the great and sacred Earth.
Diarmuid Lyng facilitates group exploration of spirituality in nature, masculinity, meditation, resilience, yoga to a wide range of audiences including schools, university, GAA clubs.
Moriarty is guide. He is a guide because he went to these places. He let go of his conditioning and walked the earth with a barefoot mind and a barefoot heart. The last pages of Nostos, his autobiography, are written from the paradise he so often refers to. This is not a philosophical concept, it is the reality of the universe, which will lead us away from calamity. I know it is real because I have experienced it.
