Todays IT

[Jinxy]

Have to admit Humphries piece on the back page made me smile. It's called "A day in the life of an embittered mentor". Good fun.

[Deal_Me_In]

Jinxy any chance of posting it for the rest of us? Cheers

[Jinxy]

Don't have a sub unfortunately. Hoping someone else could.

[Tatler Jack]

Day in the life of an embittered mentor

Locker Room : Senior intercounty championship action started yesterday, writes Tom Humphries . A wonderful time of year that fills us with talk and slender hope.

Whatever pessimism you harbour about your county when the league ends in tears with not enough points and no messiah on the horizon you walk into the summer fooling yourself like a flush punter in a bookies. If everything goes right. If we got on a little run. If all the injuries just go away and the good corner forward comes back from Australia.

It's a time when the elite players do their elite thing. Bless 'em. In the Gaelic Player Association's battle against John O'Donoghue for grants for intercounty players this column is firmly on the side of the workers while retaining its watchful stance against professionalism. If, however, the money ever comes there are things this column feels the GPA and the GAA need to work on: research-and-development issues which would narrow the gulf between the day-to-day experience of the tanned and muscled elite player and the ordinary foot soldier.

Firstly, nets and flags. These are a key issue and if any one election candidate offers a solution he or she will get my second preference (well, not really, but I will allow them to think that).

As a mentor, I doubt there is any greater blow to morale than scanning the club fixtures and realising your little team is the only team playing on a particular home pitch on a particular day which promises to be particularly cold and particularly wet. You would nearly concede home advantage there and then.

Have you done this work? Arriving down three-quarters of an hour early? In the rain? Trying each one of the three-million club keys, none of which open the door where the nets are stored. Unravelling the damn nets from the sack into which the last bitter, frostbitten, disconsolate mentor bundled them. Standing over the great tangled ball of netting in a mucky goalmouth like a fisherman whose trawl has yielded nothing but two beer cans and half a bicycle.

Really it's not politically correct to say this but nets are the sort of work Dickensian urchins should be engaged in. Or immigrants. Or children in poor countries. I would pay them above the odds and swallow a lifelong left-leaning habit of being on the side of the little guy. It would be character-forming for them to experience this part of our sporting culture.

Anyway it's so easy! In recent years there has been an innovation which is supposed to help after you have untangled the nets and tried putting them on upside down, sideways and backwards before realising they are the nets for the small juvenile goals. Nets nowadays come equipped with little plastic toggles which are supposed to fit into little plastic slots on the back of the goalposts. Bah! The old days of tape and string were just fine. You knew where you stood.

Mainly these plastic toggles cling to the nets as you try to untangle them. In your impatience and frustration you break one or two of them clean off while trying to yank the densely clotted string away from them.

Then begins the ceremony of actually putting up the nets. The senior netsman, he with an eye for these things, mounts the little stepladder or sometimes just a chair and as he goes he is holding one particular toggle aloft as if it were Excalibur. On wet days as the senior netsman ascends the ladder or chair his platform sinks accordingly into the mud, diminishing his elevation and presenting the prospect of people in the clubhouse gathering at the window sniggering just to watch the pair of you try to extricate the chair or ladder from the goalmouth mire by pulling and tugging like vets at a foaling.

The senior netsman will then cast his eyes to one side and then the other before placing the toggle into a slot of his choosing. This is a seminal moment. If you are working as junior netsman it is your job at this point to say nothing although you can clearly see the slot has been poorly chosen and if ye go down this path there will be no sidenetting at one side of the goal at all.

As senior netsman, it is your duty to stick with your opening gambit to the bitter end. It is a monumental admission of fallibility to ever undo your first toggle. Better to wind up pulling the net forcibly to the ground and securing it with stakes. Given the pressure and tension involved there is a real chance that if a ball actually hits the net the bulge effect will catapult those stakes into the air. If the stakes are in any way aerodynamic they may come down and pierce the skull of a full back (generally not noticeable) or a corner forward (disastrous).

Of course the stakes are not aerodynamic. The smarter mentors took all the aerodynamic ones and put them in a little bag which they keep unto themselves. You must make do with twigs and broken bottles and bits of wire which with your frozen fingers and feeling like the central character in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (gulag, cold) you must bend into a U-shape.

Then you must go around the goalposts and neatly tie the nets to the posts in all the places where the toggle system hasn't quite worked. This would be like a surgeon applying the final suture only you have no string so you both use your shoelaces and maybe a belt and a couple of post-it notes from your jacket pocket.

Is there nothing that can be done about this? A harpoon system perhaps which would shoot nets at posts, affixing them firmly with one squeeze of the trigger? Permanent, vandal-proof nets?

Always arrange the games of certain mentors as the middle part of a programme of three games on a pitch. (If there's one thing worse than putting up nets it's taking them down when the knots won't undo, the toggles won't slide out, the team has been beaten by 43 points and you hear people wandering back to the warmth of the clubhouse saying, "Sure their mentors do f*** all.")

I'm in favour of an apprenticeship system whereby mini-leaguers with their nimble little fingers are made to do this work until they are ready for greater things.

Then there are the flags. Often to get out of the nets business it seems advisable to volunteer to flag the pitch. Always a mistake. You start at the corner, planting your flag like Amundsen at the pole, walk backwards, pacing to the 14-yard line, plant again, back to the 21, and so on. Perfect. It is the rule indeed that everything seems perfect until you have reached all the way around to the far corner. Then you stand with hands on hips, surveying the work, noting happily out the side of your eye that the other two hoors are just finishing untangling one net.

The pitch by now is usually shaped like an octagon with floppy sides. It is 20 yards wider in the middle than at the far end. The far end indeed is too narrow to pass fire regulations but the end you are standing in is broad enough to host an Olympic Stadium. One sideline veers mischievously into a neighbouring county and back again. The midpoint at one side of the field bears no relation to the midpoint at the other. Ho-hum, Picasso. You dander off and help with the nets.

You do this because you've done the team's water bottles earlier, rinsing and filling them. And somebody stuck chewing gum to the upholstery of your car on the way home from the last away match, when you had to put more bodies into the back than the law will allow. So ya feel sorry for yourself and hope the ref will sort out the sideline.

So championship comes and the elite get to do their thing and you love them and cheer them and envy them and hope they stay involved when it's all over, because the GAA is all about standing at the window in the club looking at some hoor who used to be young and handy trying to put up nets as his chair sinks into the mud.

[Billys Boots]

I enjoyed that.