The victor & the vanquished

This photograph, published on the front page of Monday’s Irish Times, shows amateur sport in all its glory.

To those of you unfamiliar with the sport, hurling is a fiercely competitive game – the fastest field sport in the world – and the two teams were competing for a place the ultimate theatre, a place in the All-Ireland Hurling Final.  Two teams of fifteen unpaid men who have trained and struggled all year, fighting for glory before some 80,000 frenzied spectators in Croke Park, Dublin, on Sunday, August 19th.  

In the main picture, Co. Tipperary have just been dumped from the championship – their 2018 dreams in tatters. Co. Clare, winning in Tipperary’s home ground for the first time in 90 years by a tiny margin of 26 – 24, have every reason to be ecstatic.

But the photo shows the victor and the vanquished in a moment of rare intimacy. Clare’s Patrick O’Connor, on the left, appears almost distraught at the disappointment he has helped visit upon Tipperary’s Séamus Callanan. Callanan seems, perversely, to be comforting the victor.

We will never know the conversation but what we are sure of is a meeting of two heroic sportsmen (and I use the word “heroic” deliberately, as anyone who has ever witnessed a hard-fought Hurling match will understand) who have complete respect for each other. There is no rancour or gloating, no bitterness no schadenfreude.

Whether we inhabit the worlds of business, politics or academia we would do well to study this picture, this portrait of mutual respect, of acknowledgement of triumph and failure.  For, as the two men in the moment are aware, all is temporary. Some of us could do worse than read “Ozymandias” and try to learn from him…

Photos by Ray McManus, Sportsfile; Cathal Noonan, Inphoto; Tommy Dickson, Inphoto.