So that's it. A great (well maybe not so great) day of sport over. Meath win an unexpected Leinster Championship. Someone told me at the bagpack that there were very few flags up in the county because no-one expected this Meath team to win. And then there was the goal. "Why is everyone against Meath?" someone asked me this evening. I didn't tell him.
I came across a mother at the bagpack who had bought a Meath flag for her son. Her accent certainly wasn't Meath so I asked her. A Munster county, she told me, now living in Meath. "And do you support Meath?". She looked around and whispered "I hope to God they lose".
And then Spain win. Or rather Holland lose. I remember Dutch total football and it wasn't a bit like this. The RTE soccer panel seemed to think that the English referee was terrible. Who would be a referee?
The Guardian had leading poets celebrate sport on Saturday. Our own Theo Dorgan is there with a poem about an All Ireland final in Croke Park and Michael Symmons Roberts has the wonderfully titled Lines Composed on the Occasion of Manchester United's Champions League Defeat by Bayern Munich in April 2010
Underwhelmed by the quality of most of those poems overall. Surprised too, by how they were mostly quite soft focus, nostalgic and uncritical. No reflection on the thuggery and avarice of contemporary professional sport? Between that and Irvine Welsh's review endorsing of Urka banditry as a moral structure, the Grauniad felt a bit 'tabloid' this saturday.
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