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Dream On...
At a time when the focus at Rockalyoke is fast-forwarding to the quarter-finals of the Towns Cup it will seem mildly perverse to delve, yet again, into bygones. But the fact is that the recent process of plucking fifteen Skerries stalwarts from the pages of history and installing them in a hypothetical Pantheon has not been without its travails. Selection of the Dream Team, to put it bluntly, has created more quandaries than it has solved. Democracy, specious as ever, is at the root of the problem. The western world's favourite selection policy has, once again, had its deficiencies starkly exposed, throwing up some debatable laureats and retailing a distinctly unbalanced reading of the past. Apart from the inevitable personation, the one man - one vote shibboleth is in urgent need of revamping. For how could a stripling of 25 or 30 summers have the vision required here for responsible use of the franchise? And why should recently accepted members - the immigrant population if you like - be accorded the same voting powers as the enlightened indigenous community. Punditry is never an overnight acquisition and, in the interests of equity, selection of the Dream Team should have been vested in The Honourable Company of Dinosaurs, an NGO whose members habitually gathered on the left flank of the upstairs bar when their climbing faculties were intact but who are now more likely to be found propped up in the official snug. Another factor which militated against a truly representative choice was the vagueness of the mandate. Were we picking the fifteen best or the best fifteen? If the latter, why were Louis Galbraith's credentials so shamelessly ignored? Dropout is on the point of making a significant statement so follow carefully the route taken by the pen: if Louis Galbraith had been playing for Ireland this year we would not have lost to the French in Croke Park. Only recently has it come to light that if, for any reason, a Six-Nations match is not completed, the score will stand, provided the game has gone beyond the 60th minute. Now, in the entire history of Skerries rugby Louis Galbraith is the only one who ever had a properly thought-out exit strategy. His wide range of failsafe recipes for bringing a match to a premature end should have made him an automatic choice, if not for the national side, at least for the Dream Team. Another design flaw was the very cavalier method of appointing a captain. Awarding the job to the one who polled highest was a gamble which, happily, paid off when the roulette wheel stopped opposite the name of a natural leader, Mulcahy. Thought might be given to the idea of a separate ballot for this most critical of roles. Specialist caudillos would then come flooding into contention - men like Eric O'Toole who used take up a vantage point in the middle of the field at kick-off and stay there for 80 minutes, barking his orders to all points of the compass. Or Stafford Stack (his initials were more than a coincidence) who inspired generations of dressing rooms with his passionate readings from Mein Kampf. But all these inadequacies pale into insignificance compared to the distortion wrought by adopting the Hollywood-style gambit of Nomination. The bulk of any electorate is made up of those who consider it either too arduous or too inconvenient to think for themselves. Proffer them a few names and they will gladly and blithely work within that ambit. The corollary of Nomination is, in fact, Exclusion and the Fontainebleau Wheelers*, a mobile Sunday-morning think-tank, has recently taken up the case of the excluded. The kilometers slid by painlessly as peloton insinuated itself into the Fingal countryside, trawling all the while in Rockalyoke's convoluted past for the names of the forgotten, the despised or, simply, those who had been denied the accolade of a nomination. The dossier, it soon became apparent, was a very delicate one. What about the talented caucus that arrived from Dundalk in the early eighties when rugby was not very popular and not at all profitable. And why was Napier's benefaction only partially invoked? Corkery and Donaldson were, arguably, Joe Kelly's best exports. How did the roll-call of wingers end before the appendage of Hartford, McGloughlin, Crinion, Hagan, Quirke M., Ahern, all guaranteed try-a-match men. And what did Skerries distinguished dynasties do to invite such neglect. The Branagans were comprehensively air-brushed out, despite the fact that Michael is the only Skerries player to have scored a try in Continental Europe, and of the Jenkinsons, if Christopher is very much sui generis, David and Paul are, at least, as deserving as Peter and Mark. Sudden onset amnesia should not obscure the fact that Skerries' retrospects are bristling with high-class performers and that Nomination was a mistake. When the intrepid peddlers finally got back to the unsaddling enclosure, their excavations had yielded a full back of rare refinement, two wings of contrasting stature but equal oppportunism, a centre tandem that allied intractable defence to audacious enterprise, half-backs of compelling authority and a pack with industrial quantities of fervour and intent. The following team will, therefore, represent the Underdogs against the Dream Team at the Ballast Pit on April 1st.
The way is now clear for the selection of the Nightmare Team. Fantasy, after all, is free. But the caveat comes from the Everly Brothers: "Only trouble is, Gee whiz, I'm dreamin' my li-ife away -ay" *The Fontainebleau Wheelers is a long established leisure cycling group for broken-down rugby players of all ages and conditions. It is an offshoot of the Thursday Night Club which in turn is a subsidiary of Skerries Rugby Club. Enquiries to Dropout (8490459)
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