Against hurl odds on Dubs' D-Day

Front-row seat for historic battle

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IT'S June 21, the Longest Day in Dublin city.

I'm standing on Hill 16 next to our household's newly minted veteran of the Leaving Cert.

For him, and his Class of 2025, it is ‘D-Day Plus One’ in the great campaign that starts once school is out forever.

But there is nothing to suggest that in little over an hour, we will both remember this sun-splashed Saturday as one of our own ‘Day of Days’.

We are watching as Dublin hurling captain Chris Crummey trudges from the Croke Park pitch with red flashing in his eyes.

The famous words of D-Day and Band of Brothers legend Captain Dick Winters drift into my mind on the Clonliffe Road breeze: “We're paratroopers - we're supposed to be surrounded.”

Winters was describing the regular fate of his Easy Company troops as they dug into foxholes in the Belgian town of Bastogne to fight the Battle of the Bulge.

They were cut off behind enemy lines with no reinforcements, not enough ammunition and dressed in the wrong clothes for winter in northern Europe.

Yet 29 days later they would be christened the 'Battered Bastards of Bastogne' by newspapers after defying impossible odds.

Back in Croke Park even those odds look a little mean.

PULSE

The Dubs are down to 14 with an hour to play against probably the greatest team the game has ever seen. A familiar tale is unspooling: “We're Dublin hurlers - we're meant to be surrounded.”

And then...

There are those that dismiss the joining of dots from sport to the great themes of life as “mythologised guff” and “hyperbolised nonsense.”