a game from the gods

Originally published in the Menteur Magazine (2025)

Winter. Late. A sharp, cold night in February. Thunder claps across Paris. The indefatigable, monotonous rain falls, unchallenged. In Porte de Bagnolet, an otherwise silent part of the city, a sound rises up from ground level, travelling through the walls and floors of the surrounding buildings. A hum. A vibration. The raising of voices. A name fired out into the night. A call, a shout, a celebration, then an insult, hurled at an opponent with such force it could knock them over. Accompanying the voices, the sound of heavy breathing, the sound of sprinting. Boots in the mud; the dull thud of contact, bodies on bodies. The sharp crack of wood striking wood as it echoes up into the night. The clash of the ash. 

Rain hurtles down like an army invading, the roof of the sports centre drumming out a tattoo, as the rain beats its rhythm upon it. On the muddy grass pitch, a group of men and women struggle, as though unaware of the rain and the cold and the wind blowing through them. Unaware that it is nighttime and Paris is asleep.

The flood lights are on full, spurting brilliant light onto the pitch, like aliens come down to observe. Steam rises up from the bodies of the players into the air above them, as they come together in a ruck, their hurls smacking wood and shin and shoulder. The players toil, one pulling deep, desperate breaths into himself as he tracks back. Another falls and breaks the ice of a deep, frozen puddle. They play on. Searching for the sliotar. For a point, a goal, a good pass or just a biteen of skill to walk away with. The fastest field game in the world. 

They were Irish immigrants living in Paris, mostly. Lads from Clare or Kilkenny who’d moved across for a bit of excitement, to break the monotony of home, the prospect of living and dying in the same village they’d been reared.

There were French there too. Ex-students who’d done an Erasmus in Galway or Dublin. There were no Americans, interestingly. Their Irishness had limits, and the cold seemed a line uncrossable. 

This motley crew got together to play a game that’s been played the same way as long as anyone could remember. For the great Cú Chulainn, it made his name. For Diarmuid, it won Gráinne’s heart. For heroes and warriors and legends alike for 3000 years since, the game has been played.

Looking down at these madmen and women, you could be forgiven for thinking you were watching some barbaric ancient tribe fight for dominion over the land. 

Shorts and t-shirts, in mid-February. Slipping in the mud, feeling the sting of a badly caught sliotar, hard as a rock, the pain spreading like a shiver through frozen fingers. The vibration of contact with another hurl moving through numb arms. The sensation staying long after the game. But the pain is ignored. The focus is on getting past the opposite player, seeing the sliotar in the dark and snatching it out of the air, like a hawk snatching life from unsuspecting prey. 

John B. Keane called it a game from the gods. On this dark, cold night on the borders of the Banlieue, these men and women have indeed turned into beings from another world, no longer students or teachers or bartenders or lawyers, but warriors, the Tuatha Dé Danann returned in all their glory. A game from the gods. 

 And gods play it.