Fallon's Town Talk: Musings on a day of football heroics and apocalyptic weather

Five minutes into the second-half of last Sunday’s Allianz League match at Hyde Park a young man of 11 or 12 summers spotted a friend in the stand. He shouted out: “This is a training session for Roscommon.” The Armagh fans in our vicinity weren’t a bit affronted by the boy’s pungent comment. In contrast they chuckled and concurred with his sentiments. “He’s dead right,” one visitor said. We will get back to the course of the match later but for now I am going to salute Armagh’s travelling support.

Our son and I passed the Hyde at 12.20 for a match that had a 2 o’clock throw-in. The Armagh fans had already formed a queue which spilled onto the Athlone Road. I don’t even recall witnessing such a sight before the gates had opened for a league match.

The more cynical will say it’s easy to follow a team who brought home Sam Maguire in 2024 but Armagh have always had fanatical support, dating back to their fabled clashes with Roscommon in the 1977 and 1980 All-Ireland semi-finals.

Armagh may well be the best-supported football team in the country, certainly along with Mayo. What differentiates Armagh and Mayo is that the Orchard County’s visits are less frequent and, also, in contrast to the customary home defeat to the Green and Red, Roscommon have a terrific record against Armagh in the Hyde.

Big match day, especially as spring struggles to shrug off the grip of winter, is a welcome visitor to Roscommon Town. Many of the enthusiastic Orchard tribe stayed on Saturday night and added to the social vibrancy of the town. Quite a few of them bolstered the collection at Mass in the Sacred Heart Church on Sunday.

The official attendance was 6,217. I haven’t any reason to doubt the veracity of those figures but the crowd looked to be about twice the size of the 4,000 plus that attended the previous home match against Monaghan.

The match itself will be analysed and discussed in the sports pages. All I can write is that Roscommon’s swashbuckling first-half performance was among the most exhilarating I’ve ever seen from the Rossies. It was easy to understand why the boy in the stand was so confident in his prediction.

However, football is a transformed sport now in which no lead is safe. Armagh were a different team in the second-half as their plundering of Roscommon’s kick-out gave them the platform to launch a comeback. A disallowed goal for the visitors and a priceless third Rossie goal proved pivotal.

Anyway, after Roscommon’s tremendous victory, I ambled home. If the pre-match narrative was all about the Armagh throngs descending upon the Hyde, the journey home was dominated by a deluge of biblical proportions.

The fans felt sorry for the players who were buffeted by the elements in their pre-match warm-up. Little did I realise I would be drenched by a similar apocalyptic dam-burst on the way home. I live within a 10-minute walk of the Hyde. Just as I reached the hospital the heavens opened with a mixture of hailstones and rain.

The worst conditions I’ve ever experienced at a match were at the Fuerty-Keel All-Ireland junior club semi-final many moons ago in exotic Rathkeale in 2014. The most vile weather at a Roscommon match was Anthony Cunningham’s first game in charge at MacHale Park in Castlebar in January 2019. However, last Sunday was probably the worst drenching I’ve got when going home from Hyde Park.

A friend has a pithy phrase for such moments: Better wet than bet. As the hail lashed down, I consoled myself with the warm glow of Roscommon’s memorable victory. Bad weather at league matches is a badge of honour for the cognoscenti; it distinguishes them from the fair-weather fans, literally as it turns out. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but muse about the rain that has lashed the country over the last two weeks.

It is rare indeed that the east coast gets worse weather than the west and midlands. The sight of people in North Dublin having their vehicles submerged in car-parks and residents in Wicklow suffering flooding in their houses is heart-rending. However, it doesn’t mean that Roscommon and adjoining counties haven’t suffered too. The rain that fell in the 24-hour spell from about 11 p.m. on Wednesday onwards was momentous.

During a week in which a US president and his administration have all but dismissed climate change as a hoax, one is tempted to paraphrase the words of another US president whose soaring rhetoric belongs to a different age: Let them come to Ireland, let them come to Roscommon.