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Salthill and St Galls living the romance(The Irish Times Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)LockerRoom : Listen, when it comes to getting entertainment bang for your hard-earned buck you can't beat the All-Ireland club championships. Every year the competition contrives to throw up something a little different. Novelty and romance never grow stale. We were just getting around to joining the chorus of laments for the apparent decline of the small village outfits who used football in particular "as an expression of their community". Romance was dead, the smart money was saying. We were keen to parrot them. There'll be no more Corofins, or Bellaghys or Caltras. The big guns, the conglomerates of the game, the Kilmacuds and Nemos, had apparently mastered the art of keeping the show on the road through the epic expedition the competition involves. And yet Salthill and St Gall's will provide as novel and romantic a football final as we have seen. Two good yarns to warm the stadium. What more could you want? Salthill make the journey to the big smoke on Paddy's Day with a lot of remembering to be done along the way. Back 15 years ago now Salthill knocked Crokes of Killarney, as distinct from Kilmacud, out of the All-Ireland club championship at the semi-final stage. Having done so they were favoured heavily to beat Lavey of Derry. You'll remember probably how that one ended. Lavey, from the uncelebrated metropolis of Gulladuff, were scrappy and smart in the south Derry tradition. They won handily enough and so it was that a wee parish of not much more than 350 houses took home the Cup. That's the great romance of the All-Ireland club competition. Yesterday St Gall's defeated the aristocrats of the club game, Nemo Rangers. They say there's no romance in Croke Park on Paddy's Day when those on the dance floor are all city folk. St Gall's are romantics, though, as all survivors are. The club used to exist and draw its members from the old Bombay street area of Belfast. The citizens of the area were republican by birth and inclination back at a time when all politics was just reflex. In 1969 things changed. St Gall's moved down to their current premises hard by Milltown cemetery. You can see their posts rising on the left as you drive into Belfast. The Troubles came and for a while the population of the cemetery rose quicker than the membership of the club. The little streets off Bombay street are arteries which run you into trouble if you don't know them. Once upon a time if you got lost you wound up on the Shankill Road. When things got bad between the communities the little streets were filled with violence and fear. Bombay street burned in 1920 when an RIC man's funeral in Co Down sparked of a pogrom in the nationalist working-class areas of Belfast. A monk from the Clonard monastery and five civilians were killed. Bombay street burned again in 1969 and the club moved farther into nationalist heart down on the lower Falls. They have been through thick and thin since then, losing men early to the graveyard next door courtesy of the Troubles. Through a time when kids were afraid to carry hurleys openly. Through losing men to the H Blocks. Through seeing a member, Patsy Sheehan, enter a hunger strike in the darkest days. And somehow holding together despite the pressures which would have sundered other clubs. And pressure there was. From the GAA. From Sinn Fein. From members. The club was filled with political people. They debated long and hard as to whether the playing of games was a sufficient expression of their collective political will. They emerged into better times. The county championship of 1982 spawned the side which went to the All-Ireland semi-final against Clan na Gael of Roscommon the following spring. Two points up and a minute to go and Tony McManus nobbled them with a goal. They lived off the memories and regrets for years. Through the 1990s they endured and were part of the bizarre and destructive politics of Antrim GAA. The county teams seemed always to be in the grip of a civil war which was being waged by the clubs. Players were withdrawn, clubs went into season-long huffs. The potential of a city the size of Belfast was being frittered away as the county football team entered a long run of seasons through which they contrived never to win a single championship match. In recent times St Gall's have become Belfast's pre-eminent club. Their record at underage has been exemplary for some time now and the fruits are showing. Last year's county championship was the fifth on the trot. Currently they hold the county minor and under-21 titles as well. No day yet lived through will have matched yesterday though. Beating Nemo Rangers was an extraordinary feat and another sign of the extraordinary confidence which courses through Northern GAA at the moment. Nemo don't lose semi-finals in this competition. They lost one in the old Mardyke in 1976 to a St Vincent's team liberally spangled with members of the Dublin team of the 1970s. They lost another in 1988 to Burren of Down and have won the other 10 semi-finals they have played in. For long stretches yesterday even though St Gall's were leading and were playing the better football, one just assumed that they would be beaten by tradition. Nemo would conjure a goal up from somewhere and that would be that. St Gall's would go home as Ballygalget did last week and ponder that Antrim teams just don't beat Cork teams. No reason why not. It's just tradition, and in the GAA tradition is as good to have on your side as a 16th player. And next month in Croke Park tradition will take a little beating. Salthill got up and running with the help of a couple of Kerrymen, PaidI O'Mahony and Ger O'Keeffe, who found themselves in Galway and lodging with one Tom Leonard, who was chairman of the local junior club, which had a name but no teams. The lads played away under false names for a little while and nobody objected much to a couple of thoroughbreds keeping themselves fit at such a low level of operations in the county. That junior division two side back in the 1970s though was the beginning of senior football in Salthill. That senior existence has been punctuated by just two county championships. Almost uniquely, one imagines, they have used each of those two wins (1990 and 2005) as springboards for the long haul to an All-Ireland final the following spring. It's nice indeed when a little crossroads with a pub, a post office and a football team makes it all the way to Croke Park. It reassures us of one element of what the GAA is all about. There's encouragement and romance in the cities, too, though. Salthill and St Gall's play the game in places where it should be dead. Keeping the game alive on urban streets in the era of Sky Super Soccer Sundays and a billion other distractions is romance worth celebrating. |