THE late Ownie (Eugene) Murchan was a dyed-in-the-wool Armagh fanatic.
I can only imagine how delighted he would have been coming out of Pairc Sean MacDiarmada in Carrick-on-Shannon after Armagh had beaten Galway a couple of weeks ago.
And he would have been there.
He was there for the infamous 1973 match when Armagh turned up with 13 players and had to get a couple of men out of the crowd to play.
Armagh fans (and GAA fans in general) are a resilient bunch and Ownie travelled the country cheering on his county through the good times and the bad.
A great local character, he was born and bred in Mullaghbawn. In his early-teens he was hired at a hiring fair in Newry and went to the Scarva area to work as a farm labourer for a Protestant family.
He always said he was well-looked-after and was sent every Sunday on a bicycle to Mass in Tandragee with a penny to put on the plate. One day he decided to cycle to Mullaghbawn to visit his family home but when he got to the house he discovered there was no-one there.
He returned to the Poyntzpass area, married a local girl, settled and played for the O’Hanlon’s club throughout the 1950s.
The GAA was his passion.
No replica kit, no colours, sandwiches, tea bags and a flask in the boot… Men like him were the GAA’s ‘hard-core’ long before the term had even been coined. They were ultras without ever knowing it.
One ground Ownie detested was Ballybofey.
Seamus Murphy, one of his companions on road trips over many, many years (and his chauffeur regularly), told me last week how his friend had passionately disliked the Donegal fortress which had been a graveyard for Armagh teams over the many years he’d been going there.
“I hate this oul place,” he would say.
“It’s a tight, wee bastid of a pitch… Armagh never does well here.”
Armagh have had slim pickings in Ballybofey over the years and they weren’t on their own. Donegal have fallen on hard times this season but they went unbeaten for the best part of a decade.
Did that have anything to do with the size of the pitch?
Seamus did a bit of research and uncovered the truth: MacCumhaill Park isn’t a “tight, wee pitch” at all, it’s actually one of the biggest playing surfaces in the country.
You often here about the “wide open spaces of Croke Park” but the size of the pitch at ‘Headquarters’ is 145 x 88 yards and, at 145 x 90, Ballybofey is bigger and it’s the same size as Pearse Stadium, Cusack Park, Semple Stadium and Pairc Ui Chaoimh.
It’s all about perception and sometimes we can get a feeling about a ground that makes it a tough place to get a result. It must be this, it must be that…
But some things can’t be explained away with a few statistics and perhaps there is evidence to support Ownie’s gut-feeling about Ballybofey.
Take last season for example: Armagh’s bad run there continued when Donegal trounced them in the Ulster Championship. It was a sorry day for the Orchard county but in the rematch (a Qualifier) just a few weeks later in Clones (a smaller pitch than Ballybofey), Armagh skelped their former masters by 10 points.
Ownie Murchan would have enjoyed that…
IT’S unthinkable that boxing won’t be an Olympic sport after the Paris Games next year but, at the moment, that’s the way it’s looking.
Last week the International Olympic Council (IOC) booted the International Boxing Association (IBA) out of the Olympic family. A new body – World Boxing – was set up in April to manage amateur boxing but the worry is that it won’t be formally recognised by the IOC for two, perhaps three, years so boxing really is out in the cold and it hasn’t been included on the list of sports for the Los Angeles Games in 2028.
Who is to blame? Boxing is to blame. Or rather the people who were in control of the sport are to blame.
Too many scandals, too many dodgy decisions and rumours of bribes and deals and fixes. Fighters trained their whole lives to make their dream come through but had them dashed because of corruption. The IOC decided that enough was enough and after the IBA failed to clean up its act to their satisfaction they were shown the door.
Who will suffer? The boxers. The boys and girls at the local clubs who dream of one day following in the footsteps of their heroes and making it to the Olympics.
The impact would be huge in Ireland where our boxers have brought home more medals (18) than all the other sports combined (17).
Recently Hugh Russell, the Irish News photographer who won a medal at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, went to an amateur club on work assignment. While he was there the coach asked him to present medals to young boxers.
“Hugh won a medal for Ireland at the Olympic Games,” he explained.
Many of the kids’ parents wouldn’t even have been born in 1980 but they were in awe of Hugh and one by one they walked up to shake hands with a legend and think to themselves: ‘One day it could be me’.
Irish boxers are national treasures. Remember Wayne McCullough carrying the tricolour at the 1992 Games in Spain? The ‘Pocket Rocket’ from the Shankill Road? What a beacon of hope he was.
When Wayne got to the final and won a silver medal the whole county was watching and it was the same with Michael Carruth who won a bronze that year.
Remember Francie Barrett in 1996 in Atlanta?
And the list goes on Katie Taylor, Michael Conlan, Paddy Barnes… At the last Games in Tokyo there was Aidan Walsh and of course Kellie Harrington.
Boxing will be at the Paris Games next year but then the future is uncertain and a solution must be found. The Irish Amateur Boxing Association (IABA) has to give their full backing and support to World Boxing which is the sport’s best hope now.
