Corofin camp concede break is needed after hectic run of matches

LONDON is a town of contrasts . . . of that there’s no doubt and there was something distinctly unseasonal about playing a GAA match in Ruislip less than two weeks before the year’s biggest festival.

A trip to Hyde Park on the Saturday night before the Corofin match to London’s Winter Wonderland, was akin to leaving an All-Ireland final on Jones’ Road with heaving thousands bumping into each other.

The scene was little different on Oxford Street or Carnaby Streets as people gathered like frenzied swarms of starlings just before dusk.

Then on Sunday, there was the trip to Ruislip, on the edge of this swirling mass of humanity, for a football game at a venue badly in need of serious investment.

In fairness to the London GAA bods, they have a serious plan in place to give the place a facelift and they probably don’t need any reminding that they need to start with the pitch.

Less than a thousand souls, many of them having travelled from Corofin, stood on the humble grass embankment on the edge of an old Middlesex farm, watching a game that at time resembled first time skaters trying to stay in the vertical position at the Hyde Park ice rink.

For Corofin, it was a bit like the race field from the Epsom Derby having to hack it with the chasers on a wet mid-winter’s day at Cheltenham. But it was a race that had to be ran.

Irish TV had to fill a two hour slot that evening with the match and its trimmings – it was no easy task to try and create a wedding dress from a bag of old shawls. Not one to be saved for future viewing.

The match though did have its own strange type of lure, for about half an hour – a bit like an old episode of ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ – as Corofin just about got the better of a three point battle with the Gaels from the North.

With Longford referee Fergal Kelly (who in fairness let the play run and who sensibly left the black cards in his pocket) close to blowing the half-time whistle, one could easily have slipped into the belief that this wasn’t for real . . . a kind of strange dream waiting for the beside alarm to break it all up.

In the end, Corofin did rouse themselves from a potential nightmare with a flush of second half points, most of them from the boot of Gary Sice, that eventually broke down the stubborn defensive snares of Tir Chonaill Gaels.

One of the ‘strong men’ of the Corofin team, Greg Higgins, who has been in a rich vein of form since recovering from injury, admitted that his side had to stir things up in the second half.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.