AS chairman of Vocational Schools GAA, Jimmy Smyth is at the forefront of organising and promoting the 70 different competitions that are run across age groups, codes and levels in Ulster. They include competitions that Smyth first become familiar with during his time at St Colman’s College. The Lurgan native was a MacRory Cup and Hogan Cup winner while a boarder at the school and a picture of the successful team he played in hangs on the wall of the Violet Hill GAA nursery, alongside many other cup-winning sides.
Smyth laments the fact that, due to coronavirus and for the first time since the competition began back in 1923, the MacRory Cup final was not played last year, leaving a “gap on the wall” where a photo of the 2020 champions – either St Colman’s or fellow finalists St Patrick’s, Maghera - would always have hung.
“When you’re a first year at a school and you walk along a corridor, you see all the football teams that represented the school and were successful in the MacRory,” Smyth pointed out.
“When I went to St Colman’s I looked at the 1949 team – Kevin Mussen was captain – and you say to yourself: ‘I wonder will I ever be up on that wall?’ This year those lads from St Colman’s and Maghera went right through the year to get to the MacRory Cup final, as did St Patrick’s, Magherafelt and Our Lady and St Patrick’s, Knock who got to the MacLarnon final.
“Those finals were their days in the sun on St Patrick’s Day with BBC cameras and the whole lot and if they’d won, they knew that when they returned to their old school in 30 years’ time with their son and they walked along the corridor they would have their picture on the wall.
“But now there’ll be a gap on the wall and they’ll say: ‘See that year there son, 2020, we got to the final but we never got a chance to play it…’
“That’s the big killer, the one that got away.”
Last year’s MacRory final will not be played and time is running out on this year’s competition. Smyth has seen at first hand the impact of coronavirus on the sporting ambitions of his grandchildren but he is confident that the GAA will “pick up the pieces” when it is deemed safe for training and games to begin again.
“I have a grand-daughter who played in an U16 final last year and a grandson who is still waiting on his U15 final to be played,” he explained.
“So I saw it on both hands – the excitement and the joy for Niamh when the Clans (Clan na Gael) won the U16 title and Aidan (his grandson) standing waiting.
“But the GAA is a great thing for hope and the GAA will pick up the pieces again.
“It depends on time whether they can pick up the pieces from last year and Armagh is in a bit of a pickle at the minute with regards to promotion (the Armagh adult and juvenile leagues were suspended in October until this year but there remains no prospect of them resuming).
“But the big losers in all of this are young people – underage. Again looking at my own club, no matter what night you would have gone there the pitches would be full of young people playing football and that would be replicated across the country. The benefits of sport to society are unreal – the very fact that a parent can see a child going out to their sports club, whatever sport it may be. They know their child is going into a safe environment doing a physical activity with all the benefits that come from that.”
