A Very Cork Christmas Day

23rd Dec 2010

Are you a getting a bit sick of slipping and sliding your way around town on every footpath? Embarrassed as you perform spontaneous leg spasms struggling desperately to keep your balance? Even the novelty of "sidewards cycling" on the bedsheets to warm them up when you get into a freezing bed is becoming a bit of a chore. Yeah, we're with you on that too.

There's another one. That slight trepidation when you go to turn on a tap or the shower first thing in the morning. The anxiety that after the taps have crankily expelled any shards of half-formed ice like an ashen-faced student hanging over a toilet bowl on a Friday morning, that this might finally be the day that the water just never comes.

I totally agree with you Uncle John. If you look back at the replay again you'll see that Cadogan won the ball fairly before the fingers went in his mouth.

We've all been there, but relax sham, Christmas is upon us and for the next few days you get to throw your feet up, create warm fires so big that they would raise eyebrows if they were seen in industrial incinerators and consume chocolate, crisps and sweets with every swallow of saliva without a smidgen of guilt. A license to indulge.

The ideal Cork Christmas Day Afternoon starts with meeting all the relations and actually enjoying getting cornered by your uncle who does a twenty five minute on-the-fly brandy-induced presentation of how he would restructure the Seandún division including a tangent on how dual-star Eoin Cadogan could become the next Teddy Mac and win a double if only his plans were taken on board.

If for some weird reason you don't have a recoding of every televised match that Cork played this year you can pull out a DVD with either the full All Ireland final or the equally satisfying defeat of the Dubs. Watching Joe Brolly's anti-Cork comments are frightfully entertaining in retrospect especially when the entire room erupts at one of his broadsides on the Rebels and simultaneously shouts LANGER!

At this point you should be on more than your first drink to help you through the more difficult stages of those matches but not beyond your third as you'll miss all the subtleties of Donnacha O'Connor's shimmies around the cumbersome Down full back and the exact starting positions of Nicholas Murphy's soaring fetches.
 

Im mean, in fairness like, look at the way Nic grabbed that ball. There was three Down langers around him an' all.

Everyone present should roar their approval as if it were the first time they saw it and requests for up to ten rewinds of particularly satisfying incidents of Cork play should be wilfully accommodated.

If your DVD player permits it then each incident should be played at every available slow motion speed in case you miss something. In total about three to four hours should be sufficient for viewing a seventy minute match where the result is a Corkman lifting silverware - or of course beating Dublin.

It is not unusual when Cork sporting heroes and drink are involved to have "feelings" for the men in red (or white if it's the final your watching) by the end of the game. It is perfectly natural for any man to admire men of such admirable sporting stature and of course watching the camogie directly afterwards will help clarifying "things".

During the hours of post-match Christmas Night debate in your living room where unfettered praise is simply rotated between different Cork players and members of the management, recreating your favourite incidents from the match after the All Ireland final viewing can also be fun.
 

Even if your cousins are up for it. Hurling in the snow is best avoided.

When drink is involved, physical caution should be shown especially if the living room is festooned with the toys of smallies who have long been put to bed.

Nobody wants to have to explain to young Finbarr that his Playstation was "taken back to Santy's factory to be repaired" because it drowned in a pool of beer after being axe-kicked into smithereens during a recreation of a very specific Graham Canty versus Kieran Donaghy that occurred in front of the Blackrock end during the first half of the Munster final semi-final replay down the Pairc.
 

Cork city from Sundays Well as viewed from the new PROC hot air baloon this morning.

Going outdoors to explain, for example, a certain favourite tactical nuance of Conor Counihan and how you think it can be applied to any Ulster team is not advised even if your sitting room doesn't have enough space and your mam is banging the floor boards upstairs telling you all to quieten down.

You've probably escaped injury so far despite all the slipping and sliding around the footpaths of Cork over the last few weeks so explaining to doctors in CUH what you were doing with your top off trying to win 'breaking-ball' in sub-zero temperatures on a snow covered driveway in the small hours of Stephen's Day will no doubt…how can we put this diplomatically….add to your character building.

Even if you stay inside the danger of getting overly-passionate about your favourite footballers can be treacherous: blindly texting all contacts on your phone to see if you can get Graham Canty's phone number at 4am on St. Stephen's morning to tell the Cork captain just how much you and your brother's love him is probably best left until the more sober surroundings of Pairc Úi Rinn some Saturday night in the 2011 league.

And even then just a silent pat on the back as he walks off the pitch will probably do the job.

Nollaig Shona to citiziens of Cork and Corkonians everywhere!