The blue and gold

 

The unique colours and jersey of your team is an essential part of sports fandom. Team sponsors and kit manufacturers may change from season to season, but team colours and jersey designs remain pretty much the same. And on the rare occasions when team colours change dramatically, supporters tend not to take it well, e.g. Cardiff City changing from blue to red:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/jan/09/cardiff-red-to-blue-kit-vincent-tan 

As the GAA club season powers on so successfully through this pandemic, we are all now starting to think ahead to an intercounty GAA championship, with All-Ireland finals a week or two before Christmas and the prospect of the Tipperary senior hurlers retaining the All-Ireland title for the first time since 1965 and hopefully the underappreciated Tipperary footballers having a good run too https://www.the42.ie/gaa-7-5203045-Sep2020/

Programme from the 1965 All-Ireland Senior Hurling final - the last time that Tipperary managed consecutive All-Ireland wins, a feat that will hopefully be replicated around Christmas 2020

And that gets me thinking about the Tipperary GAA jersey, among the most iconic of them all: that blue jersey with a gold hoop has inspired generations of players and fans through good times and bad.

Longford and Wicklow GAA county teams have jerseys made up of blue and gold, but not in the blue jersey/gold hoop design. And there’s Roscommon, with their combination of blue and primrose yellow. Our neighbours across the Shannon in Clare have jersey designs the mirror opposite of Tipperary, with a blue hoop on a yellow jersey that is described not as gold but saffron.

Then there are club teams within Tipperary (e.g. Kiladangan) and outside of Tipperary (e.g. O’Donovan Rossa) with actual blue and gold jerseys in the Tipperary design.

Seamus Calanan - Tipperary senior hurling captain for 2019

The jersey of Kiladangan GAA club, based in north Tipperary and recent winners of the Tipperary Senior Hurling Championship for the first time in their history: https://www.rte.ie/sport/gaa/2020/0920/1166341-kiladangan-win-first-tipp-title-with-last-gasp-goal/

O'Donovan Rossa GAA club, of Belfast and Antrim

Going further afield in the search for blue and gold team colours, there’s an almost endless list, including the LA Pacers in American basketball, the LA Chargers in American Football and the West Coast Eagles in Aussie Rules.

Indiana Pacers (American Basketball)...

LA Chargers (American Football)...

West Coast Eagles (Australian Rules football)

But while many other teams around the world wear the blue and gold combination with pride, there is only one team that I know of from outside GAA circles that has the Tipperary design of a blue jersey with gold hoop and that team is the famous Argentinian football club Boca Juniors.

Boca Juniors are probably the top team in Argentinian club football, although fans of River Plate, their Buenos Aires rivals, would contest that. The record for Boca Juniors speaks for itself, with 34 Primera League titles (just behind their arch rivals River Plate) but leading the way in national and international cup competitions. Among the superstars who have played for Boca Juniors are Martin Palermo (top scorer), Roberto Mouzo (most appearances) and a few who have lit up European football, such as Carlos Tevez and Diego Maradona. 

Carlos Tevez, a player whose Premier League career was full of footballing brilliance and transfer related controversy, here wearing the blue and gold of Boca Juniors

Diego Maradona in his Boca Juniors prime

Maradona enjoying his retirement

And then I recently learned that, aside from the Tipperary jersey, Boca Juniors also have another strong Tipperary link in the person of Paddy McCarthy from Cashel. Born in 1871, McCarthy emigrated to Argentina in 1900. There he worked on the docks and excelled in boxing. In fact, he won the first professional boxing match ever held in Argentina in 1903 with a 4^th round knock-out of Italian Abelardo Robassio. McCarthy then went on to teach English and Physical Education. He is reported to have met a number of visiting dignitaries to the country, including Theodore Roosevelt (from whom he received a gift of the Yale sweater seen in the photograph below), the Duke of Kent and the Prince of Wales.

Paddy McCarthy from Cashel: footballer, boxer, teacher, coach, referee 

and a key figure in the foundation of Boca Juniors

However, Paddy McCarthy’s greatest sporting legacy was in helping inspire a group of young Italian and Greek immigrants to found the Boca Juniors football club. He then went on to coach the team for several years and he also had a successful career as a referee. In fact, despite his Boca Juniors connections, McCarthy refereed in 1913 the first meeting of Boca Juniors with their city rivals River Plate in a now supercharged contest that has come to be known as the ‘Superclassico’.

https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/soccer/soccer-angles-the-mysterious-irishman-who-helped-build-boca-juniors-1.3048949

McCarthy lived to the grand old age of 92 and left an indelible mark on Argentinian sport and society. However, his story has become forgotten with the passage of time. It appears that McCarthy was one of many Irish and British immigrants who introduced their native sports to Argentina at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. For example, the Lobos Athletic Club was founded by Irish immigrants in 1892 and hurling was also introduced by the Irish http://gaathenandnow.com/hurling-in-argentina-118-years-ago/.

Finally, it would be nice to think that Tipperary man Paddy McCarthy inspired Boca Juniors to adopt the blue and gold hooped jerseys of his native county. The truth is not so romantic. The generally accepted story (also perhaps apocryphal) is that Boca Juniors were looking for new team colours around the turn of the 20^th century. This was some years before Tipperary GAA teams adopted the blue and gold of Tubberadora as the county jersey https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/08/lena-rice-and-tubberadora.html. Someone suggested that Boca Juniors adopt as their colours those on the flag of the next ship to come in to Buenos Aires. And when the ship came in, it was carrying a blue and gold flag, not of Tipperary, but of Sweden.

A gold Nordic cross on a field of blue: the flag of Sweden

The Rock of Cashel, bastion of Irish kings for centuries and the home town of Paddy McCarthy, who would inspire the foundation of Boca Juniors, a bastion of Argentinian football.