The Sporting Year - Review and Preview

After Mayo lost the All-Ireland Final to Donegal in 2012, a football man, a fatalist, and a personal friend of the blog remarked that this could be the beginning of an unprecedented era in Mayo football, where the heather county would manage an unprecedented feat of losing three finals in a row.

We’re two up on that now so those of you unlucky enough to be from somewhere other than the sweet county Mayo may excuse us if we’re a little twitchy in the year ahead, and whistle past every graveyard we see. James Horan has committed to another year, and the crusade will begin again in New York City in May. Fingers crossed.

The main story in Gaelic football was of course Dublin, who won their second title in three years and are showing all the makings of a dynasty. They have the best squad of players they’ve had since the 1970s, and the best coaching and management. They’re the team to beat in 2014, no question.

A rebuilt Kerry will be interesting, God only knows what Cork will be like, Tyrone are a team it’s hard to be fully convinced about and if you’re looking for a dark horse you could do worse than Galway, curse them.

It’s hard to see Donegal reaching the heights again, there’s no reason to expect Meath or Kildare to raise the bar in Leinster, which means that we could be looking at our first repeat matchup in the All-Ireland Final since 2009. Mayo are looking good for those three losses in a row alright.

In hurling, Clare were deserving champions as Davy Fitzgerald answered his critics for once and for all. To read the papers during the Championship was to be told that John Allen, Jimmy Barry-Murphy and Anthony Daly were the Balthazar, Melcior and Casper of hurling, while Davy Fitz was some sort of monkey that only recently swung down out a tree.

But Davy outgeneralled them all, tying Limerick in knots in the semi-final, playing an unexpectedly traditional lineup against Cork in the drawn final and then pulling a substitution masterstroke in the replay. Cork fought to the end and their iconic manager proved his class once more by looking on those two imposters, success and failure, and treating them just the same.

In rugby, the long-anticipated end of the Lions Tour was brought closer by Sky Sports’ genuinely awful coverage of the 2013 campaign. By the end it was hard to escape the conclusion that Will Greenwood would see a trip to the shops for a pound of tea as a timeless Odyssey across a desolate, barren plain, while Scott Quinnell would declare Samson bringing down the Philistine towers as one and the same with his opening the curtains of a morning. The level of hype was ridiculous, embarrassing and one of the reasons why so many non-rugby people find the Lions a joke.

Of course, the Lions touring Australia of all countries was half the problem. The Lions tour only works in countries were rugby is king, which means New Zealand or South Africa. Australia was only added to the schedule when South Africa was in its apartheid exile, and should have been swiftly removed once the Springboks returned. There is a better case to be made for the Lions touring Argentina than Australia. The Australian public could not give a stuff about rugby and indifference is a much greater enemy to the tradition of the Lions than countless hammerings at the hands of the All-Blacks.


As for the tour itself, there was shock, horror, hurt and genuine sorrow at home when Brian O’Driscoll was dropped for the third test but, in the bigger picture, the team justified Warren Gatland’s decision by not just winning, but by destroying Australia. A bad ending for O’Driscoll, but the correct call by management.

O’Driscoll is on his goodbye tour now – all rugby people’s one wish now is that this great man just doesn’t get hurt. It would perhaps have been better if he had retired, but Brian Moore was right when he said that if O’Driscoll were to retire, someone would have to retire him. A brave man fights to the end. We have been lucky to have seen him.

In soccer, the return of Roy Keane was best summed up by Ken Early of the Second Captains, who tweeted “my own feeling about the o'neill/keane combo is an unfamiliar and almost unsettling sense of excitement, anticipation and wonder” on the second of November, when the news broke. And even though Martin O’Neill is the manager, it’s Roy Keane who’s the story, as ever. The team isn’t any good and people who think it will get good when the players whom Trapattoni didn’t wouldn’t pick return may be fooling themselves. But throughout all this there will be Keane, O’Driscoll’s brother from another mother, and for that a nation will count its blessings.

The Future is Now - O'Connell Injury the End of the Golden Generation

Who remembers Ireland beating Romania at Lansdowne Road on November 26th, 2005? Jerry Flannery does; it was his first cap. Andrew Trimble might, as he got two tries that day.

But what makes the game stand out now, as news breaks that a knee injury sees Paul O’Connell ruled out for the rest of the Six Nations, is that routine autumn international was was the last home competitive match that neither Brian O’Driscoll, Paul O’Connell nor Ronan O’Gara started in the Emerald Green of Ireland.

There were summer tours to Argentina, Japan and the States that didn’t feature either BOD, ROG or POC, the Initials Gang of the Golden Generation, but generally whenever Ireland played in the last thirteen years one of those three was there to build the team around. One of those three played in 133 out of 146 international test matches. All three started in fifty of them, and they shared a pitch 68 times, counting appearances from the bench.

The last Six Nations game in which Ireland did not start at least one of the Initials Gang is so long ago the Championship was still played among Five Nations. Ireland lost by seventeen points to Scotland in Murrayfield on March 6th, 1999, the final game of that year’s Championship, and exactly thirteen years ago today to the day. The co-incidence is so great it makes you feel the Awesome Hand of Destiny, and shudder at your chances against All-Seeing Providence.

The final fixture of that 1999 season was a home game against Italy, who were due to make the Five Nations Six the following year. Brian O’Driscoll was on the bench that day, and stayed there. O’Driscoll won his first cap at Brisbane on the summer tour of Australia that year. Ireland got pasted but a legend was born.

O’Gara won his first cap the following year, against Scotland in Lansdowne Road on February 19th, 2000, and Paul O’Connell made his debut against Wales in the 2002 Championship. O’Gara tussled with David Humphreys for the outhalf’s jersey in the early part of his career while, Superman pyjamas or no, it took Paul O’Connell a while also to claim his pace in the second row.

Both O’Gara and O’Connell started on the bench when Martin Johnson punked the IRFU in the Grand Slam Game at Lansdowne Road in 2003. Humphreys played ten, and the locks were Malcolm O’Kelly and Gary Longwell. O’Driscoll had no challengers, and still doesn’t.

That 2003 Grand Slam game provides a good benchmark for judging when what’s commonly known as the Golden Generation began. Keith Wood was at the end of his career, raging at the dying of the light. Wood was a true great of Irish rugby, but his career was half and half amateur and professional. The alchemy happened to late for him.

The Golden Generation of the Initials Gang were the front of house players during the rugby boom in this country that coincided with the Tiger. There were other players there, of whom people would have fond memories – John Hayes weeping at every Amhrán na bhFiann, David Wallace, Gordon D’Arcy, Shaggy. The bitterly unlucky Peter Stringer, the man whose career suffered the most from the 2007 World Cup nightmare and who was among the least to blame. But the Initials Gang were the difference makers and one stood head and shoulders above the others.

Brian Moore made the point in the Telegraph that Ireland could have won on Sunday if Brian O’Driscoll had been there. Ireland could have won the Grand Slam in 2007 if Brian O’Driscoll had started against France. And if he’d been around in 1641 maybe the great man would even have given Cromwell a run for his money.

The Golden Generation should have won more, but we are grateful for the Slam they did win, and for the provincial success they enjoyed. Neither is likely to come this way again.

The game is evolving as quickly as ever, and the advantages Ireland enjoyed in the span of the golden generation, from the presence of one of the greatest ever to run with the ball to the way the international club competitions fell right for us, are unlikely to last. We are lucky to have seen the days of glory when we did.

FOCAL SCOIR: Player stats from Stats Guru at ESPN Scrum, a genuinely outstanding resource.

Post Saeculum Aureum: Where to Now for Irish Rugby?

Ireland’s World Cup was a failure. Anything you read elsewhere, about great memories and wins over Australia and the rest, is all blather.

Look at the picture of Brian O’Driscoll at the post-match press conference. He knows better than anyone just what the loss to Wales means. And it’s better for the nation to digest an unpalatable truth and move on than to remain in permanent denial.

This is the end of the golden generation. They shone their brightest in the twilight of their days, fighting on and on against time’s fell and inevitable hand. The golden generation were already over the hill when they won the Grand Slam two years ago. For them to still appear at the World Cup and to threaten so much is astonishing.

Even the term golden generation is misleading. It’s been O’Driscoll and the supporting cast. He had able subalterns in O’Connell and O’Gara but Ireland without O’Driscoll over the years of his reign were like low-fat milk or decaf coffee. More or less pointless. No emerald comet ever shone so brightly and for so long as O'Driscoll. He gave everything he had, and nobody can give more than that.

The depressing thing about the O’Driscoll era in Irish rugby is that the team didn’t win more. One Championship, a blessed Grand Slam, is not enough return. Celebrating Triple Crowns while Wales, England and France all won multiple Grand Slams was pathetic and betrayed a hopeless lack of ambition.

The wins over understrength and overconfident Australia and exhausted Italy in this World Cup were illusory. They simply papered over cracks. And when aging Ireland met young and hungry Wales there was no contest. Ireland were blown away by a much better team.

Seven countries have had podium finishes in the World Cups so far – New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, England, France, Argentina and Wales. Even Scotland managed to win a quarter-final, once. Ireland never have, and struggle to get out of the group half the time.

This time Ireland topped the group, and still couldn’t progress. The Irish rugby community tends to stiffen with pride at the thought of the successes of Munster and Leinster in the Heineken Cup, and expects that to transfer internationally. Maybe having only two first-rate club sides in our domestic rugby is actually a sign of lean times ahead.

And leaner they’ll get, not least when it makes more financial sense for the provinces to bring in specialist tight head props, openside flankers and stand-off halves from overseas than to suffer the mistakes of up and coming Irish players who must learn their trade.

In theory those young Irish players can learn their trade in Connacht, the “development” province. As such, you’d think all Connacht players should be Irish and under-25, with some leeway for local men to build a support base. Here’s the Connacht rugby squad – how do you think that one’s working out?

Rugby has had ten years in Ireland like it has never enjoyed before. The question facing the IRFU now is do they push on and grow the sport in the country, or settle back to the comfort of the alickadoo community?

The horrified and short-sighted response to former Minister Eamon Ryan’s proposal that Heineken Cup rugby should be free to air suggests that the IRFU are unaware of the need to keep promoting the game. Travelling hordes supporting Munster was always very well when it was novel and money was flush, but that’s not going to happen for a few years. There are dark times ahead, and the IRFU ought to prepare properly for them.

One way to start would be by giving the smug self-satisfaction a rest and publicly bemoaning that the golden generation didn’t win as much as they should have, and if Ireland's greatest ever player wasn't let down by his home union.

What would be very revelatory and cathartic would be if the IRFU came out and said that Ireland could have had Warren Gatland as head coach for the entirety of Brian O’Driscoll’s career, and we shot ourselves in the foot big time there. An Spailpín Fánach shan’t be holding his breath.

Our Chief of Men - Will Ireland Ever Know Who Brian O'Driscoll Really Is?

Brian O’Driscoll delivered a performance of extraordinary heroism last night, dragging Ireland to a one-point win over England by what seemed like sheer force of will alone. Watching him struggling to get his bearings after another cheap shot tackle it was hard not to think of Cúchulainn lashed to the rock, making one final stand for home and heartland.

At the start of the season there was a clamour to replace Brian O’Driscoll as captain of Ireland with Paul O’Connell, in whom the nation likes to see the embodiment of ourselves. O’Connell is perceived as very much a heart on the sleeve sort of man, whereas O’Driscoll is hardly known to the country at all.

O’Driscoll’s predecessor as Irish captain, Keith Wood, is an opposite sort of character. Wood was clearly devastated by the implosion of Ireland at the World Cup, and he was retired four years from the team. Even now on the BBC, from the comfort of the analyst’s sofa, you can see the agony on Wood’s face when potential Irish weaknesses are suggested to him.

O’Driscoll has never been like that. O’Driscoll does his media duty but he sups with a very long spoon indeed. The real Brian O’Driscoll is hidden far, far back while Public Brian churns out platitudes about how he and the guys are really enjoying their rugby and, you know, if we execute the game plan good things can come from that. This diffidence doesn’t sit well with the nation. The nation likes tears rolling down John Hayes’ face. It does not like fancy haircuts and model girlfriends.

The mask has slipped very rarely. Brian O’Driscoll was interviewed by Marian Finucane at the start of the international season back in Autumn, and he was happily batting back the questions until Marian referred to George Hook. O’Driscoll made a throwaway comment that he wouldn’t consider Hook much of an analyst. Marion seized on it, her nose for a story being always very good, and O’Driscoll spent some minutes under pressure on his five metre line before clearing his lines.

The disdain expressed for Hook was a flash of the real Brian O’Driscoll, the man who hammers into rucks with such fury, who swung Australia’s George Smith around by his dreadlocks, who was exchanging slaps with a precocious Benoit Baby of France at Lansdowne Road some years ago. O’Driscoll has been responsible for two autobiographies but the real man remains resolutely hidden, while an impostor is sent out to tell the media that he’s really enjoying his rugby and, you know, if we execute our game plan good things can come from that.

There’s tremendous goodwill in the country towards O’Driscoll, especially now the bleak ‘eighties are back and we’re relying on the current rugby team as we relied on Ciarán Fitzgerald back in the day. And there’s an unspoken understanding that once Ireland win the Grand Slam we’ll all be able to sit back and say “O’Driscoll? Great player. One of the best ever. Why, I remember back in ’09, he did this, he did that, he did the other.” And this is worrying because the sad fact is that Ireland are not going to win the Grand Slam this year, and the nation will be no closer to knowing this giant who has worn the emerald green with such distinction and such glory for so long.

If they do not win the Grand Slam, Ireland may well still win the Championship, which would still be a considerable achievement. Every other nation bar Italy has won since Ireland’s last Championship twenty-four years ago. It puts things in perspective.

Scotland will be seen as something of a pushover in a fortnight’s time, even though they have won the Championship twice, in 1990 and 1999, since that last Irish win. Ireland should still beat them, as Scotland seem to have adopted worst of the Home Nations to professionalism. But if Ireland do successfully avoid a tartan banana skin, they still have to win in Cardiff to win a Grand Slam and it’s very, very difficult to see that happening.

Wales got cold-cocked in Paris on Friday night. These things sometimes happen. Ask New Zealand what the French can do when their tails are up. But Wales are richly talented, expertly coached, fiercely proud and want the Lions places they were done out of in 2005. The fault lines in the Irish team are becoming more and more obvious and the Welsh at home are just the boys to spoil a party.

Ireland could lose in Wales and still win a Championship on points, and that would be good. I seem to recall the Welsh and Scottish both winning Championships after losing their final games in the ‘nineties, and there are no asterisks in the record books because of it. And when he’s asked at the press conference afterwards if he has any regrets about not winning a Slam, Brian O’Driscoll will tell the media that Wales are a really great team, that he and the guys are really enjoying their rugby and, you know, if we execute our game plan good things can happen.

An then he’ll get up and thank the media for their time and walk off into the shadows, almost certainly into retirement if he chooses not to tour with the Lions this summer, or is too smashed up to do so. And we’ll never really have known him at all, Brian O’Driscoll, this latter day Cúchulainn, this chief of men.





Technorati Tags: sport, rugby, Six Nations, Ireland, England, Brian O'Driscoll

Metal Fatigue - Has Irish Rugby's Golden Generation Turned to Rust?

So this is it, then. Butch and Sundance are in Bolivia, Sam and Ilsa are at the airport, Romeo and Juliet will live happily ever after at Mantua. Time is being called on Irish rugby’s Golden Generation, and this Six Nations Championship is surely their last hurrah, their last chance to finally close a deal.

Eddie O’Sullivan, head coach of the Irish rugby team, will name his starting XV for Ireland’s first game of the 2008 Six Nations at half-past one this afternoon, and Eddie is under a little bit of pressure – this time last year, he was Lions coach-elect; now, he’s a man with a reputation in tatters, facing an expectant nation and surely aware that two of his guests this year, Mr Nathan Hines of Scotland and Mr Warren Gatland of Wales, will be rather looking forward to renewing acquaintances with the loquacious Corkman.

So what’s Eddie to do? The sad fact is, there’s nothing he can do. O’Sullivan’s religious commitment to short term goals means that, as the nation expects change after the horrors of the World Cup campaign, Eddie now finds himself in the position of Old Mother Hubbard. Where he hopes to find the cupboard stacked to bursting with pastas, pulses and high carb foods, he finds only a few tins of Heinz beans, and a shameful packet of Super Noodles, hidden at the back for emergency munchies.

An Spailpín Fánach hadn’t quite realised just how very bare the cupboard is until the week before last, when a good friend of this blog and a great rugby man forwarded me his team to face Italy at Croke Park this coming Saturday. And what was noticeable about it was that the usual suspects were all there, just as they will be tomorrow when Eddie announces his team. Maybe Eoin Reddan will be in for Peter Stringer, even though Reddan suffered rather at Munster’s hands last Saturday week in Thomond Park; the lesson of the World Cup is that when something goes wrong, Strings is to blame it seems.

But otherwise, the team picks itself, really. Geordan Murphy may be as popular with Eddie O’Sullivan as Miss Angelina Jolie is with Miss Jennifer Aniston, but with the Piper Hickie retired and Shane Horgan injured, Murphy is there by process of elimination. Andrew Trimble on the other wing, Dorse and BOD in the centre, yadda yadda yadda. In the pack, despite the good press he gets (really, reading the Irish papers, one could be forgiven for getting the impression that the Leinster back row is comprised of Fionn MacCumhaill, Cúchulainn and Mannamán Mac Lir), chances are Jamie Heaslip will not start on Saturday, actually, and the only change will be Mick O’Driscoll understudying for Paul O’Connell.

So, although we can expect huffing and puffing about the team selection and questions about why Heaslip or Luke Fitzgerald aren’t starting, the fact is that while those young men may be playing well, they are not challenging the incumbents for their positions on the national team. At all. Brian O’Driscoll might be careworn and weak from toil and disappointment, but he’s still the most talented player in the Six Nations. He’s going nowhere. You could drop D’Arcy, put Trimble at twelve and one of either Rob Kearney or Luke Fitzgerald on the wing, but really, how much of a difference would it make?

Golden generations do not come this way often. Just for pig-iron, An Spailpín went surfing for the Irish team that started the Six Nations – or Five Nations, as it was then – against Scotland ten years ago, on February 7th, 1998. These are they:

Conor O’Shea; Richard Wallace, Kevin Maggs, Mark McCall, Denis Hickie; David Humprhies, Brian O’Meara; Reggie Corrigan, Keith Wood (c), Paul Wallace; Paddy Johns, Malcolm O’Kelly; David Corkery, Keith Dawson, Eric Miller.

Not quite a golden generation. And a controversial selection at the time, because of the amount of new and untested players – O’Shea, Maggs, Hickie, Humphries, O’Meara, O’Kelly, Dawson. Try picking a best-of team between those and the Irish XV that faced Argentina in the final game of the World Cup. Here’s my stab at it:

Girvan Dempsey; Richard Wallace, Brian O’Driscoll, Kevin Maggs, Denis Hickie; Ronan O’Gara, Eoin Reddan; Marcus Horan, Keith Wood (c), John Hayes; Paul O’Connell, Donnacha O’Callaghan; David Corkery, David Wallace, Denis Leamy.

A bit harsh on Miller, a bit kind to Richard Wallace, maybe. The Maggs/D’Arcy debate is too long to go into here, but otherwise the choices seem clear. The Golden Generation dominates. And that’s what we mean by a Golden Generation – they stand out in the parade of history among those that have worn Emerald Green, not only because they had exceptional talent, but because they all arrived at the same time. But the Last Post is blowing for the Golden Generation now and An Spailpín is most mortally afraid that not only have the Golden Generation left it behind them, but misguided selection decisions during their reign, when the autumn internationals and summer tours were cynically used for CV padding rather than future planning, mean that Irish rugby will be in the doldrums for quite some time. The Golden Generation has not delivered, and over-reliance on too small a core of players has cost Ireland the future. Brent Pope told Tom McGurk on the telly the other night that he believed Ireland could win the Championship, that they were ideally placed. If we were to search Brent Pope’s effects, would we find a bookie’s docket for Beef or Salmon to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup in the optimistic Kimi’s wallet?

John O’Mahony likes to quip that the opportunity of a lifetime only lasts as long as the lifetime of the opportunity. The opportunity is on the life-support machine now and if Nick Mallett’s gamble on the tyro Italian half-backs pays off on Saturday at Jones’ Road, the Golden Generation could be on the scrapheap even sooner than worst fears would indicate.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, sport, rugby, Six Nations, Brian O'Driscoll, Golden Generation

Sucker Punch

Paul O’Connell wrote in his Sunday Times column today that the Irish rugby team and management were totally shocked by the violence that broke out in the game against Bayonne on Thursday night. Hmm. How odd that, among such rugby folk, none of them received a copy of that reliable of Christmas presents, Rugby’s Great Heroes and Entertainers, by the BBC's former voice of rugby Bill McLaren?

Everybody’s favourite Scotchman relates an anecdote about a friend of his that left Scotland for the weekend to referee a French club game. Bill met him when he got back, and asked him how he got on at the game. “It’s not a referee those fellas want,” said the ref, “it’s a missionary.”

No less distressing, the Irish rugby intelligentsia seem equally unaware of the ill-fated Irish tour to South Africa in 1998, when rugby was still at something of a nadir here. Ireland got their hats handed to them in the first test, and they were getting something of a shelling in the second too. Just like Bayonne during the week, they were being met by an immeasurably superior force, and they had a choice – they could lie down and take it, or they could stand up for themselves. Punches flew, there was a certain amount of huffing and puffing in the media afterwards, but it was hard not to be sneakily proud of Painless Paddy Johns and his men at the time. An Spailpín isn’t proud of it as a moment in Irish rugby, but he’s not ashamed of it either. What happened in South Africa nine years ago and in Bayonne last week were inevitable in a game as violent as rugby. Mismatches are dangerous. Whatever about the wisdom of that particular tour, Thursday’s visit to Bayonne was like walking around the city of Limerick roaring “drug dealing is wrong!” or “girls never kiss guys who participate in gangland hits or associated criminality!” at the top of one’s voice. Only disaster can ensue.

And so it did, in the form of the injury to Brian O’Driscoll. What sighs of relief were heard across the nation when a relieved Czar Eddie told his faithful people that O’Driscoll only had a broken sinus and not a broken cheekbone as initially feared. So that’s all right then.

An Spailpín’s old friend BT was making an interesting point last night – the sinus can’t actually be broken. It’s a medical impossibility. The sinus is a cavity between bones – a cavity is empty by definition. You can’t break what ain’t there. You can look it up if you don’t believe me.

So, if O’Driscoll’s sinus isn’t broken, what is?

Here’s An Spailpín’s guess, and it’s only a guess of course. I hope I’m wrong, but I get a bad feeling about all of this. My guess is that all this chat about O’Driscoll’s sinus is an exercise in news management. In a fortnight, when the excitement has died down, the IRFU will release a press release to the effect that BOD’s sinus is, worryingly, not responding to treatment. The nation holds a breath, speaks to Joe, hears Hookie huffing and puffing unduly. Then, on the eve of the World Cup a downcast Eddie O’Sullivan, with solemn music bought on the cheap from the former Soviet State funeral back catalogue playing in the background tells a waiting world that, sadly, for BOD, the World Cup is over just before it’s begun, and his position in the squad is to be taken by anyone but Jerry Stauton. Marion discusses it if she’s back from her holidays, Eddie looks kindly on the media, who can only pray to be someday able to appreciate his impossible genius, and the media in turn offer to kiss his Episcopal ring. Even the Ulster boys, who are cheered that Paddy Wallace is now at twelve, Dorse is at thirteen and Sir David Humphries has been drafted in to answer Ireland’s Call once more.

An Spailpín has said it before and will say it again. O’Sullivan out, Frank Hadden for the Lions. It will be a mantra soon.

FOCAL SCOIR: What in damnation were Ireland doing playing in blue? Since when did the Emerald Green of Ireland become replaced by the powder blue of … where, exactly? Key West? A visit to the IRFU site tells us that the Irish don’t even wear emerald green anymore; “IRFU dark green” is what you should ask for now from your local Dulux supplier. Jesus Christ. It’s no wonder the weather is as it is.







Technorati Tags: Ireland, sport, rugby, Bayonne, punch, Brian O'Driscoll, news management