I WILL let you in on a little secret.
At any championship game, I can generally tell if there’s been a score a second or two before the majority of people in the ground know.
It is not because I have a time machine or that I come from the future or that I just had laser-eye surgery.
Rather, it is because unless I’m right in line with it, I do not watch the ball when it’s in flight towards goal.
I watch the umpires.
You come to learn that umpires are quite excitable.
In football, they could be standing there freezing for long periods of time.
When their opportunity to shine comes along, they are going to repay the trust that’s was handed to them in the form of that white coat.
You will notice that is almost always the younger umpire who is on white flag duty.
The only thing younger umpires love more than a summer’s day where they get to wear their pristine short-sleeved shirts and sunglasses is a good, excited run to the flag, like a dog whose owner just got home from work.
If they’re giving it wide, they’ll run a good two or three yards outside the post.
And it will be a slower run, more of a jog.
Sometimes, to build the tension, it becomes a walk. Two arms down by the side, no indication either way.
But there are always clues.
If it’s a score, there’s just no disguising the run. They can’t contain themselves. It’s a sprint. Head low, back bent right over, reaching for that flag.
You can see almost them out at umpire training, sprinting between two cones four metres apart, reaching down to touch each of them.
Game-based training.
‘How will the world know if it’s a score unless I get to that flag within 1.4 seconds?’
Test it out this weekend.
Watch the umpire, not the ball.
Then you can join me in smugly knowing before everyone else.
It is at its most useful when you’re on the wrong side of the field to judge a shot for yourself.
On Sunday, there was no need to watch the umpire.
And that’s when it struck me – it is time for the GAA to segregate supporters.
How, you might ask, did you arrive at that conclusion?
There was no need to watch the shot because the Cushendall fans on the far side told you long before a shot had arrived at its target whether it was going over or not.
Clumped together from one end of the steps to the other, a whole village knew instantly if it was a score, and they let the Dunloy fans housed exclusively on the other side know in unison.
It created a fantastic noise that bounced back and forward.
They walked in together and walked out together, shook hands and went home, but for the hour’s hurling, they stuck to their own.
That creates safety in numbers, which in turn allows for the shedding of inhibitions.
It created a crackling atmosphere.
The absolute best sound of a GAA summer is that delayed roar from a big crowd.
The one where they’re on the wrong side and they don’t know yet to study the umpire’s movements (they will now).
And so the ball might have rested on the catch-net a good few seconds before the official takes command of the flag, at which point the roar rises up out of the collective.
When they are huddled together, it creates a sound that feeds electricity into championship fare.
It’s one of the reasons why first-time county finalists often bring a great atmosphere.
In their excitement, WhatsApp groups are created for anything and everything.
One of them will inform the club’s fans, newfound and traditional, to congregate in a certain area of the ground.
New fans will think it’s great.
Traditionalists will scoff and tut at the idea of being told where to sit, and then they’ll sit where they’re told.
Their painted faces and their flags and their horns and their flares can breathe a fire through their soldiers down on the battlefield.
Sports psychologists refer to it as “audience effect,” which is a type of “social facilitation”.
Beyond the parameters of sport, for instance, a 1937 study showed that show worker ants will dig three times more sand for every additional ant that is present and also digging sand.
There is a natural human reaction to the presence of other people that feeds into sport through the crowd.
And a crowd is at its noisiest and most partisan when it is segregated.
We do not need segregation from the point of view of any bother. The opposite. We’re just almost too happy to sit beside the enemy.
There’s a cycle there where a good game builds an atmosphere that contributes back into the game by driving energy into it.
It’s not hard to do because people will generally go along with it.
A lot of clubs are already doing it themselves anyway, except sometimes plans overlap or aren’t well enough known by everyone.
If the counties hosting finals this weekend were to tell the two clubs which side of the stand and which side of the terrace to take, publicise it so that everyone knows, then you’d find most people would be happy with it.
There’d be nothing to stop Glen people sitting on the Newbridge side but would they want to? Best to just go with their own.
It’s such a simple way of adding to the game.
To create that noise that Cushendall and Dunloy brought to Ballycastle by going their own separate ways the minute they had their tickets scanned.
It doesn’t mean they can’t still be friends.
It just means you won’t have to learn to study the umpires quite as well as me.