Gaelic Football

Last Monday I got to check out the “Gaelic Football Match of My Life” or at least the only one I’ll be attending for a long while. Gaelic Football, which is closely related to another Irish favorite—hurling, is a hybrid of soccer, rugby, American football and basketball (!). It basically works like soccer except (A) everyone can use their hands at all times, and (B) there are two ways of scoring: a goal (in the soccer sense) in worth three points, and a ball kicked through the uprights above the goal is worth one point. The game is played with a soccer ball and each team has an astounding 15 players on the field. To complicate matters the score in kept in a rather untidy way; instead of “13 to 8” the score is expressed as “1—10 to 1—5” where the first number in each score represents the number of three-point goals and the second represents the number of one-point field-goals. This means you actually have to do math to tell who’s winning!

The game I attended at Croke Park in Dublin was the once-a-season rivalry of local favorite Dublin (called the “Boys in Blue”) and Kerry. (The teams are all amateur and represent their county in the Republic of Ireland.) We wore blue to support the home team. Unfortunately, Kerry’s 31-year winning streak stood with a final score of 1—24 to 1—7 (i.e. 27 to 10).