Mr Blue Sky arrives too late to save Trim fixture

WEATHER WARNING

Well over an hour before last Sunday's NHL Div 2 game between Down and Meath the bus containing the Mourne County hurlers and mentors pulled into the carpark at St Loman's Park, Trim. The players were at the venue well in advance of the scheduled throw-in at 1.15pm.

That's normal practice. These days teams like to arrive at venues with plenty of time to spare so that they can go through rigorous warm-up routines that appear sometimes more energy sapping and gruelling than the actual contest itself.

The visiting players, in normal circumstances, would not have been expecting to head back up the road again until about two hours later. Instead they were packed and ready to go after about 30 minutes, if not less. They hadn't long arrived until it was announced - the game was cancelled.

Very shortly after the Mourne County hurlers arrived, another vehicle pulled into the carpark. This time a group of men got out and quickly made their way into the ground to avoid the heavy rain that was lashing down. This party of visitors included the match referee Sean Cleere and his umpires. They had just travelled up from Kilkenny.

The appointed match official didn't waste any time in inspecting the pitch. He wasn't happy with what he found. He felt the conditions were too dangerous for the game to go ahead, the surface was too slippy.

The Trim pitch is not your common-or-garden surface. It's a high-quality canvas designed to absorb lots of water and it normally does just that but everything has its limit. Climate change tests even the best of pitches.

The Trim game was the second inter-county clash Cleere cancelled on Sunday. Earlier that morning he had been asked to inspect Nowlan Park ahead of the high-profile encounter between Kilkenny and Limerick which was due to be refereed by another match official. Cleere had been always pencilled in to do the Meath, Down fixture but he was happy to help out where he could.

"There was a lot of surface water at Nowlan Park so we felt it best to call that game off, we made a call on that early," he told the Meath Chronicle.

"So we came up here and when we looked out on the pitch we didn't think it was too bad but when we walked it I felt there was a lot of surface water. Player welfare has to take precedence over everything else,"

The Kilkenny referee, who has taken charge of some high profile hurling games in his time on the referring beat - including the 2017 All-Ireland MHC final - pointed out that "a Co Board official or local referee" can make the decision whether to call off a game off or not and notify Croke Park.

With that in mind it was a pity that some Meath-based match official or Co Board official was not asked to have a look at the Trim pitch on Sunday although the vagaries of the Irish weather ensures such decisions are not as cut and dried as might at first appear.

The pitch was apparently in decent shape on Sunday morning but a heavy, persistent fall of rain around noon tipped the balance ensuring that Down's journey was a wasted one. The downpour arrived at just the wrong time.

The travelling contingent appeared philosophical rather than downcast or bitter about the whole sorry, soggy episode. "It's better not to take any chances when it comes to players' safety," one member of the travelling party commented as he left the dressingroom he had entered very shortly before that.

"We'll see you all back up here again in a few weeks," he added as he headed out to the bus.

The twist in the tale was that as the Down contingent headed out of St Loman's Park there was already a large batch of blue sky appearing in the western sky. Mr Blue Sky was on his way - but, alas, too late.