JOE BROLLY: The Gerulaitis prophecy

IT is hard to imagine a better game than Scotstown v Newbridge. When Scotstown were nine points up, they did not blow the lead. In fact, they scored a superb imaginative goal in the middle of the Newbridge comeback. Newbridge simply played extraordinarily well during that spell. The excitement in injury time was off the scale. The same in extra time, where I was sure that Scotstown would finally surrender to the ghosts of their previous nine failed Ulster campaigns. Newbridge began the penalty shoot out in the manner of Donegal in their Ulster final against Armagh. Definite, ruthless, composed.

Then, it all turned upside down after Conor Doherty put his over the bar. Cue the Kevin McCabe effect, named after the 1986 All-Ireland final where Tyrone were six up entering the last quarter and McCabe put the penalty to win it over the bar. The Kerry men looked at each other in surprise, felt the surge of adrenaline of men who had just been mistakenly released from the prison van by G4S, then went on to win the game.

Scotstown have one more game to fulfil the Gerulaitis prophecy. Kilcoo’s very self respect, their deepest self, depends on winning. They truly embody their parish. They are of them and for them. It is an expression of what they are as human beings. They perform because for them it is a matter of life and death. Can Scotstown find this quality somewhere deep inside?

Brendan Blewitt died last week, aged 90. He was my wife’s father. They buried him in his Knockmore GAC president’s blazer and suit. Kilcoo would have been proud to have him.

He was one of the founders of the club. A farmer whose toughness, even in such a tough place, was remarkable. “All elbows ands knees on the field,” Frank Mulvihill told me. “Best to avoid him.” When they started the club, there were no changing rooms. They filled a five-gallon drum with hot water for the games, so the players could sponge themselves down afterwards. “There was no deodorant in those days,” said Michael McHale at the funeral. “Someone would bring talcum powder if we were going to a dance afterwards and we would sprinkle it all over ourselves.”

Once, after the last game of the season, an away game. The team had planned to go to a dance so Michael’s father’s five-gallon drum was borrowed and filled with hot water. “When we got to the dance,” said Shane Sweeney, “none of the girls would dance with us. Eventually, one of them said to me, ‘you stink of diesel.’ Turns out Mr McHale had filled the drum with diesel during the week to fuel his tractor and Michael didn’t realise it when he had filled it with the hot water. We didn’t notice the smell at all with all the talcum powder.”

In the last years of his life, Brendan had surgery to straighten his hand, which had become clawed due to a badly broken thumb that he had never looked about. Wires and pins were inserted. The wire annoyed him when he was working on the farm. One evening, the glamorous brunette and myself arrived into his kitchen to see the bloodied wires and pins on the table in front of him. He had pulled them out himself using tweezers. “They were itching me,” he said. A few weeks later, at his follow up appointment, the horrified surgeon told his daughter, “That operation is performed under general anaesthetic.”