The Last Ditch: 20 years on, the book that conquered an author's extreme phobias

FOR PEOPLE OF a certain age, journalist Eamonn Sweeney's book The Road To Croker was a sporting and cultural touchstone.
If that sounds like a wild example of hyperbole, hear us out. The Road To Croker was a diary of the 2003 GAA championship season as followed by Sweeney, and let's just say there was a lot going on at that time. While rugby's transition from amateur to professional was explicit, the GAA was gradually doing the same thing but under the covers.
There was money swashing about the place. You could sit down for a coffee and talk to a player, even a Dublin footballer or a Clare hurler. Truth be told, their stock wasn't so high back then.
Looking back on it now, there was a huge innocence. Part Jack Kerouac in pondering his existentialism on trains and buses, but also a little John Candy and Steve Martin in Planes, Trains and Automobiles in the way he might, ohhh, fetch up midweek for a few drinks in a bar in Tempo, County Fermanagh on the hunt for a few words from county footballer Ryan Keenan.
Either way, it was fun, colourful and vibrant and firmed it up in an impressionable mind or two – including this one – that the life of a GAA reporter might be enough to keep body and soul together while also enjoying yourself. It sure had to be better than working, right? Right?
In the meantime, Sweeney wasn't quite the larger than life character of the imagination. He wasn't on the circuit. He instead could be found on the pages of the Sunday Independent, emitting eruptions of anger or else tender passages on the clans of west Cork.
He would puncture the pomposity of managers, players, politicians and administrators. He had a cut once at my own wheezebaggery, putting me into a subgroup of Paul Galvin and Mickey Harte that I am sure they were delighted with.
He'd construct an argument about a man preparing to ask for a lawnmower only to play out the scene catastrophically enough that when the door was answered, the man on the doorstep would be told to fuck off, him and his lawnmower.
Madcap. Sweeney the Madman. Great stuff.
But yet, anything he wrote came with the thought that he didn't have to go face-to-face with any of his targets. We'll circle back to that in a bit.
Long story short, he was approached by publishers Hachette Ireland to see if he would be interested in doing a modern-day Road To Croker. He ignored them as long as he could, until he agreed. We all like a little jam in our egg.
And so he did. He went around the country and followed the games and the various sideshows. Called into here for a spot of grub, had a long hard think to himself about McGeeney's rage and Davy's rage and the issue of toxic masculinity, racism in the north inner city of Dublin, the Cork hurling lunatics, Hozier lookalikes in Tipperary jerseys belting out 'Whiskey In The Jar' while surrounded by Cork yahoos and groups of girls who simply wouldn't stop singing Shania Twain.
He delivered the manuscript to his editor and publisher, Ciara Considine. Then he slipped it in that she was lucky she got it at all.
Why so?
Well, we come back to the whole thing of him not being on the circuit. Over the period soon after Road To Croker, he developed a panic-stricken aversion to travelling. He couldn't even stand on a train platform without feeling his throat close over and sweat pouring out.
His world shrank. He refused to go further than five miles in the car. It became a paralysing handicap that kept him rooted to his base in west Cork.
In order to write the book, he had to conquer that. Considine regarded him quizzically, and then said, 'But that's… that's the book.'
So he took the DH Lawrence approach. He read the book that he wrote, and then he started all over again.
The Last Ditch becomes so much more than a book about following a championship season. It's that, surely, but it's crammed with layers, poignancy, love, hatred, certainty, vulnerability.
It has the potential to become an instant classic. After reading it, we had to speak to him, even after he threw that shade several years back.
Declan Bogue: You had all this time to write about a really concerning issue for you and others. And you didn't. That's unusual for a journalist, surely?
Eamonn Sweeney: I read something recently, I don't know who it was. I was going to say Jonathan Franzen, but it probably was not him. I have a fierce habit of ascribing anything I don't remember to Jonathan Franzen.
But he said, the thing that scares you most is the thing you should write about.
That's when you'll actually write something of some worth and, and like, I mean, yeah, I know I did have the platform, I did have the platform for years, funny enough, to write about these personal things, but I never kind of really wanted to go down that road.
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It kind of came out almost by accident. Ciara said it to me and then I started writing and then I thought, 'Jesus, you know, this is a great.' It's a great weight off the mind and it's been a huge experience.
I mean, I'm easy enough on how the book does or how it's received. I'm in the bonus, now.
DB: A cathartic experience, no doubt?
ES: I thought, jeez, this looks, this looks kind of stark enough for us to put down in print.
But the funny thing about the process of going through it was, you see, you're telling yourself all the time, 'Oh sure, this is only a small thing, this is only a normal thing. Sure, I can't get on a train, big deal. I can't get on a bus, big deal. I can't travel five miles in a car.'
Jesus, you know, everyone has their cross to bear, so I mean, I don't know how people will take it, to be honest, you know.
I'm sure there's a fellow somewhere going to his friend, 'I always told you that fellow wasn't right in the head.'
DB: It clearly was the major element in restricting your career. We never got to see Eamonn Sweeney's big sitdown interview with manager X, Y or Z?
ES: Well, yeah, mind you to be honest, I always felt even when I was traveling, that I was that I was a poor enough interviewer, to be honest. I don't think I was ever great at that.
I wouldn't miss that. I missed going to matches I think.
To be honest, there were (interviews), there were, but when it sort of kicked in, I left a few people sitting there waiting for me, and that's when I knew it. Kind of pull the horns in. You can't be arranging interviews with people and leaving them there because you can't travel. That did happen.
Croke Park. James Lawlor / INPHO James Lawlor / INPHO / INPHO
DB: And now you've been released back into the wild.
ES: I'd actually planned to go with the daughters to the Kerry-Cork match, but then I had to travel up for an interview. So I'm looking forward to getting out.
After I finished the book, for example, one thing I did was I've never been away with my daughters to Dublin. So when I finished the book, we celebrated, we went up.
And since then I've gone to Paris and I've gone to Amsterdam and the world has kind of opened up.
I was in my own kind of lockdown for about 10 to 15 years and that.
And without the book, I think, to be honest, I'd just rattled on the way I was going and the world becomes smaller and smaller and you get used to it. It becomes the new normal for you and you say to yourself, I don't really miss this.
DB: Your first book was written by a younger, more innocent fella who seemed to be having a great time. The Ireland you write about still seems wild fun. Maybe it's all happening on trains and buses!
ES: I don't think it's changed that much. The country has got more sophisticated or it's got whatever, but the GAA doesn't seem to be that different. There's a lot more tattoos, that's about it.
DB: The passage about the Hozier-lookalike Tipp hurling fan in the train carriage surrounded by Cork fans was surrealism.
ES: Everything in the book is absolutely true. Do you know what I mean?
There's no kind of, you know, sticking two stories together. This is just what happened. I happened to be in that carriage, and there was your man. I thought he was the coolest man I'd seen in his life, to be honest.
And I'm also so kind of reclusive from popular culture. I would say to my kids, 'They were singing this song called You're Too Sweet For Me, have you ever heard it?' They were saying, 'Dad, you're probably the only person in the country that doesn't know what the song was.' I wasn't even particularly sure what it was, to be honest.
DB: It's also a brilliant cultural exploration. You attend Russian religious ceremonies and eat at exotic cafés. It's a marvellous push-back against right-wing drivel.
ES: You see, the whole social media thing just pits one side against the other. Anti this and pro that, and we don't get a good exploration.
Part of it, I suppose, is that I'd been so long out of the world. I thought, I'm in Dublin and I want to see as much in Dublin as possible, and also I'd been so long for going abroad. That's what really killed me was not being able to go abroad because I used to love travelling.
I think you're correct too, because I see so, so much of the kind of right wing stuff comes out of this idea of treat everyone with suspicion. 'Oh, God knows what, God knows what they're at in their churches or their mosques' or, 'Oh, if you went into that place and if you went into that place in Moore Street, they'll have your guts for garters', do you know what I mean?
And what I felt everywhere I went, people were really friendly to you, but if you think of it, that's what we're like. If we meet a foreign guy at a GAA match, you're delighted to see that he's interested in it, you take it as a compliment, you know, and then I didn't meet one suspicion. They were saying to you, 'Are you having a good time, you know, did you enjoy that now? And it was great.
It's better than spending your life full of suspicion and worrying that the foreigners are getting everything.
Oisin Conaty and Kieran McGeeney celebrate Armagh's All-Ireland win. Tom Maher / INPHO Tom Maher / INPHO / INPHO
DB: You've really given some of this stuff serious thought, such as the area of where machismo and a combative mindset stray too far. (Sweeney explores Kieran McGeeney's embrace of mixed martial arts and asks what role that mentality played in Armagh's All-Ireland winning culture.)
ES: It's like drink, to be honest. Some fellows can handle it, but it's toxic for an awful lot of people.
If you went back, especially 20-30 years ago when I was when I was starting off in sportswriting, this was a kind of thing that everyone wrote about this. There was a time when everyone, fraudsters in general tended to really believe in this Hemingway stuff. Jeez, every game was a war. 'There is a time when we must stand.' All very kind of unimaginable stuff, and to be honest, I always found it kind of oppressive, one-headed way to go on.
It strikes me as well, especially for young lads — you talk to people dealing with young lads, and there's a problem with young lads: [Conor] McGregor and Andrew Tate and people like that, it's a terrible way to live your life.
It does work in persuading a guy to, you know, to go in for that dangerous fifty-fifty ball out on the sideline, but should be left there.
DB: What did you find were the major differences in the sports over 20 years?
ES: Waterford I think at the time hadn't won a championship match in 20 years. I remember writing that book and then I was thinking just on that; it was a very serious hobby for an awful lot of people.
They put a lot of time into it, but at the same time, you're talking about twice a week, you're training on Tuesday and Thursday and you meet up for a game. After that, unless you're Armagh, you were maybe in the gym once, maybe twice a week, right?
It's a very Celtic Tiger idea that you're going to pay the manager because he's the CEO, but the players are going to get fuck all, you know.
It's a real top-down Celtic Tiger neo-liberal conservative idea of how business works.
Training them as fucking much as possible because he's probably getting money for sessions and mileages and on top of everything else so that the shit is driven out of them, they have no person like and they retire at 28 or they go traveling or whatever. It's a power imbalance.
DB: How about Irish journalism and how the games are reported on?
ES: I think Irish sports journalism in general tends to be much more independent spirited. If you look at the way that the English soccer journalists lap up all kinds of old nonsense, and tend to see themselves as being the representatives of the clubs, I think Irish journalism is pretty independent. I know there's a handful of lads who will always use the Croke Park line.
But, to be honest, I'm forever thinking about things I wrote even 10 years ago.
I'd be walking the dog and I'd think of something I wrote, and I go out loud, 'Oh fuck, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.'
Why did I write that?
***
That's the story of writing. The most emotional passages are reserved for his daughter who is on the autism spectrum, and his Galway-obsessed mother.
We'll leave that to the reader to explore for themselves. But this is a book that enters the GAA canon.
Check out the latest episode of The42′s GAA Weekly podcast here

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