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The Sound of Summer – Championship Man

John Foley

Men on a mission: various hues of Championship Man at GAA grounds around the country; this is their time of year

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Every summer at GAA grounds from McHale Park to Wexford Park, from Clones to Ennis, he makes his presence felt. The diehard follower – big ball or small, it's all the same – will arrive with an unerring optimistic spirit, the young lads in tow and a match programme in his fist. You know him by his name – Championship Man.

Liam Horan's weekly GAA essay of the same name – which airs as part of Des Cahill's Drivetime Sport on RTÉ Radio One during the summer – paints a vivid picture of an Irish summer through the eyes of that diehard GAA supporter.

Horan's decision to collate the best of these from the past two years into CD form – 'The Adventures of Championship Man and Other Cruciate Stories' – allows us to be regaled once again by tales of The Bandwagon Man, The Great Man to Get a Goal, The Top-of-the-Toe Kick-out and more. No matter where you're from, so much of Championship Man is familiar to anyone who has spent the summer following the fortunes of their county side. But it's Horan's eye for detail and the thin line between sanity and lunacy that the GAA supporter spends most of the summer treading that brings the characters to life.

One moment our hero is ruining a romantic evening with the wife by whispering the name of the county's blond-streaked year-round-tanned centre-half forward into her ear: "McDonnelly". The next he's commentating aloud in the back garden at an imaginary All Ireland final, sheepishly looking around to check if anyone caught his flight of fancy.

The supporting characters come thick and fast. The Man With The Radio To His Ear is one of the more ingenious creations, keeping all and sundry in the stand up to date with the other big game of the day.

"Fierce trouble in Cork. Man Down. Ref talking to his empires. Big row. Ó Muircheartaigh says they're all in. A wasp in the commentary box. Two more men gone. Mary Robinson's at the game."

What more does one need to know, apart from the score.

The Bandwagon Man moans about the quality of the tickets he got from the club, "after all I did for that crowd down through the years" before quietly asking the man next to him if it's 30 or 35 minutes a half.

The daughter is away in college doing a steady line with the Nicky Rackard Cup hurler from Sligo, and him thinking about transferring down to the club next year.

And through it all Championship Man dreams of glory, whether he's skulking off to the GAA message boards while telling the wife he's checking farmersjournal.ie for the price of weanlings, or pontificating on the lack of moustachioed county players.

The strange thing is that while some of the references like those to the impending economic turmoil last autumn date the essays, the GAA characters and their affectations are timeless, never getting old no matter how far into the past they have their roots. As he says himself, "It's the championship stupid".

'The Adventures of Championship Man and Other Cruciate Stories' by Liam Horan is now available in stores