Sunday the most dreaded day of the week in GAA lockdown
Freelance journalist PATRICK EARLEY is a member of the Beagh senior hurling panel, but when the coranavirus led to sport being halted virtually overnight, he was one of thousands plunged into a strange and challenging world. In this feature, he outlines the difficulties of the last three months when isolated from the game he loves.
WHEN approached initially about writing this piece a couple of weeks ago, I thought to myself how am I going to put some sort of a positive spin on life in lockdown as a club hurler?
Lockdown was a hugely difficult time for us all for totally different reasons and as sports lovers with no games to watch, attend or play, there was a huge void in our lives.
Sunday became the most dreaded day of the week, and when John Horan appeared on the first episode of The Sunday Game on May 10, we began to consign ourselves to the possibility of there being no GAA at all for the remainder of the year.
That period in the weeks that followed was certainly the toughest of my time during lockdown but now, thankfully, the GAA have changed their stance and the outlook is far brighter – we all desperately needed that bit of hope.
The roadmap is becoming clear at last – a return to training on the pitch on June 29, contact training on July 20 with games to follow on the first weekend of August all going to plan, all of which makes this article an awful lot easier to write now.
I’m a 23-year-old freelance sports journalist who had been splitting my time between my writing and work on the family farm. On top of that, I play with the Beagh senior hurlers so for me, lockdown took both my work and my hobby away from me.
We’re a small, rural club with nothing to boast other than a church, a pub, a funeral home and our hurling grounds so for our parish, the pitch is central to everything that’s so good about our community.
To have that taken away has left a huge void in the parish over the last couple of months but like everywhere else, we have pulled together and that sense of community has never been so strong.
At first, the GAA instructed club bars and gyms to close in addition to the suspension of games, something we were all disappointed by but willing to accept given the spread of the virus throughout the nation.
But when the GAA’s stance heightened to the complete shutdown of all pitches and club activities on March 25, the reality hit home of just how serious the battle to quell this virus was and that our lives were set to drastically change.
Our last training session as a group came on March 9 and when it quickly became clear that our facilities weren’t going to re-open anytime soon, lads began making their way to the club gym to take away whatever equipment they needed to try keep themselves ticking over, though most of ours ended up in the possession of our county man Adrian Tuohey!
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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