Emmet Moloney writes for the 'The Irish Farmers Journal' and is a former sports columnist with 'The Kerryman'.

Christmas is just around the corner and sport and GAA enthusiasts are in for a treat, writes Emmet Moloney...

We’ll have our usual quota of sports books and quite a number of GAA missives to get through this Christmas. I’m going to save you all a bit of shopping time: go out and get Christy O’Connor’s 'The Club'. Read it yourself, then give it to granddad, dad, your brother, sister, son or daughter – anyone you know who has an interest in the GAA. Because this book is important.

Why is it important? It is so because at last someone has managed to capture exactly, warts and all, what life is like inside a GAA club and put it on paper for the world to see. It is some achievement and a must-read for anyone who has ever been inside a dressing room or – better again – been outside a dressing room when the roaring starts from inside those four walls. It’s serious stuff.

We’d better get some conflicts of interest out of the way first. I know Christy O’Connor and I like him. When his brother Jamesie and himself moved to Clare back in the very early ’80s the first thing the two boys did was hare out the door and find the local GAA pitch in Roslevan, Co Clare. It was across the road from my house and it was where my mates and I camped, morning noon and night. I was there that day and can still remember the two young fellas coming in the gate with their hurleys. “The tall one isn’t too bad,” I remember thinking, “but that small fella (Jamesie) won’t do at all!”

Of course another conflict is both Jamesie and Christy have written articles for the Farmers Journal and indeed Christy also held down a slot here on 'An Fear Rua - The GAA Unplugged!'for a while - so now we’re all conflicted! No matter. I think this book is fantastic and isn’t it great when someone you know performs such a service for the public.

Back to the book. Without giving too much away, the background to the book is tragic, yet uplifting. Christy’s club, St Joseph’s, suffered terribly in 2009. It lost one of its spiritual leaders in Ger Hoey – a young man in his early 40s. I wrote about Ger on these pages around the time of his sudden and untimely death. His loss casts a shadow throughout the pages of The Club, as did a loss within Christy’s own family – a newborn baby girl who survived a precious few short hours.

Like every community in Ireland, when loss strikes to the core of the parish, the GAA is there to help. The local club came together to throw their arms around the Hoeys, to throw their arms around themselves. This is where The Club begins. We then spend an entire year with a senior hurling team. The reader is literally in the dressing room with the team. Characters emerge, speeches are given, matches are won and lost. Sliotars go missing, meetings upon meetings are held, underage structures debated, splits emerge and a few pints are had. Chats take place in houses, car parks and pubs. Votes are taken, demands are made, demands are dropped and Jamesie makes a comeback. Paul O’Connell walks into the dressing room one night at training, local rivalries are explained, nicknames expanded upon and the team, Christy’s team, goes through the highs and quite a few lows of a GAA season. It is riveting.

What takes place happens in every club around the country. Coming up to the AGM, there is always something going on beneath the surface. Fellas are approached, cajoled and shafted. It’s the GAA way. It’s the Irish way.

That’s why I enjoyed this book so much. You don’t need to be from Clare to do so, you will identify and come to love the heroes that emerge. If ever there is a real GAA movie to be made, then The Club is the screenplay.

It takes a brave man to put his own club and life down on paper like this. Christy is to be admired for his honesty. I left that parish over 20 years ago so I am no longer a member of St Joseph’s, but I can imagine there will be some people who might have an issue with some of the revelations that come out. Christy will have to deal with that and I’m sure he will.

But this book had to be written. Wouldn’t you love to hear what a team says in a dressing room before a match? Christy’s recall is impressive. The banter between players, referees and umpires. It’s all there.

One anecdote I loved concerned Anthony Daly from my own club, Clarecastle. Anthony was playing St Joseph’s in a championship semi-final years back in Cusack Park when Joe Considine ambled up to him. Joe was playing centre-forward and Anthony was centre-back. Now, Joe was also a tidy footballer who played with Clare, and he knew Anthony Daly as Clare captain and the sound man that Dalyo is. So Joe offered the handshake. “What are you doing here? F*** off back to West Clare,” was Dalyo’s introduction, followed by a dunt! Joe came into the dressing room at half time and said to Christy: “I thought he was a nice fella!” Christy told him he was, but they were playing Clarecastle and that means war.

The chapter unravels and we discover that Clarecastle could always beat St Joseph’s in close games for a number of years. When that hoodoo was finally lifted, who was standing at the door of the St Joseph’s dressing room, shaking hands with every man as he came off the field? The one and only Dalyo. That’s the kind of thing we love to hear because it’s insider information. These stories drip off every page of The Club.

Christy was a tidy goalkeeper in his day, still is, and St Joseph’s had a serious team, backboned by three legends of the game in Jamesie O’Connor, Seanie McMahon (who features prominently) and Ollie Baker. As a club, they won back-to-back Munster club titles and an All-Ireland title in 1999. But that was then, this is now. The how? The why? The who? It’s explored in The Club.

Christy O’Connor has done us all a service with this book and if you’re involved in any way with the GAA you’ll love it.

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Linked article:Henry Martin reviews 'The Club'link title