The Year in Sports

Shane Lowry was, naturally, a popular choice for RTÉ’s Sports Personality of the Year. The nation sees itself in Lowry – smashing them off the tee, showing nerves of ice on the green, and lorrying porter on the 19th. Fine girl you are.

He wasn’t the right choice though. The Sports Personality of the Year Award should have gone to Stephen Cluxton, goalkeeper of the Dublin football team that won an unprecedented five All-Ireland titles in a row.

That there wasn’t more talk of it is a reflection of Lowry’s popularity, and the fact that Lowry’s own GAA-credentials are first class. But it was still the wrong decision.

If not naming Cluxton footballer of the year earlier, or not naming him as the All-Star goalkeeper earlier, were scandalous, then how much more scandalous was the lack of acknowledgement of the great gouges in the history books with which Dublin have carved their names? And how often can it be that one team can be summed up in one player, a rock on which all subsequent edifices are built?
And how often do we see a player absolutely redefine the very concept of his position, as Cluxton has done?

There are two arguments contra Cluxton. The first is that Sports Personality of the Year is an annual award, rather than a body-of-work award. The second is that Lowry’s achievement in winning the British Open was greater than Cluxton’s in winning five All-Ireland titles in a row.

The first argument is bogus, because annual awards are about bodies of work as much as they’re about any particular year. Did Paul Newman win an Oscar for The Color of Money because Color of Money a better film than The Hustler, say, or because Newman acted better in The Color of Money than in The Hustler? Was John Wayne really better in True Grit than he was in The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? Come on, now.

We’re on trickier ground when we come to comparing sports, of course. Lowry is the third Irishman to win the British Open. Five straight All-Irelands have never been won before, and there were some pretty good teams that won four. Five was beyond all of them.

And then the third and, for your correspondent, clinching argument. This year is the 35th running of the RTÉ Sports Personality of the Year. Lowry is the ninth golfer to win it. No Gaelic footballer has ever won it. Bejabbers, but the nation must be fierce gone on the golf all the same.

And speaking of rugby, there was some harrumphing about no rugby player having been nominated for that Sports Personality list this year, harrumphing that was easily silenced by asking who, exactly, had covered himself in glory in the year gone by.

Rugby is in a strange place right now. If, as its critics would argue, every game outside of a World Cup match is a friendly, then international rugby becomes the Brigadoon of sports, rising from the mist only every now and again. And the worst thing for rugby is that scheduling is the least of its worries.

Nearly a quarter-century from the advent of professionalism, the new reality hasn’t bedded in at all. Players are torn by the competing demands of club and country, the need to physically survive so attritional a game, and the hope that they won’t end up in homes for the bewildered in their old age, their brains having been battered about like Moore St oranges for ten or fifteen years.

In praising the new breed of lock forward in his Sunday Times column, Stuart Barnes put his finger on another problem of the game, which is its increasing homogeny. Rugby used to be a game of many dimensions, with room for big men, small men, fat men and thin men.

Now, like motor cars, science sees us thundering towards the one streamlined super-player, fast enough to be a back, strong enough to be forward, and all looking the same from one to fifteen. If the players are all the same then the gamed will be all the same and the élan and artistry and sheer drama that international rugby served up for over one hundred years will all be lost and gone with the wind.

Not that you’d know that from the rugby press here. Your faithful correspondent was rather taken aback as different rugby scribes aimed kicks at Joe Schmidt once Schmidt was safely on a plane to the other side of the world and couldn’t hold it against them. The start of the Andy Farrell reign, where the IRFU gave the press a list of list of approved journalists and press accepted being dictated to like lambs and slaves, is not a hopeful sign. It’s the job of the media to tell the people what’s going on. It’s not the job of the media to act as an adjunct of the IRFU’s PR department.

The story of the decade of course is the one that can’t be reported. The FAI are fifty-million Euro in debt, and they say they don’t know how it happened. How can you end up in a fifty-five million Euro hole unbeknownst to you? Fifty-five million is a considerable amount of potatoes. If you were five million in the red, you’d say things were bad. Fifty-five million is Department of Health level stuff. Complete systems failure.

And the public will, as is traditional in the land of Erin, be the last to know. The top brass of the FAI has had legal eagles ready to swoop at any vague hints that there might be funny business going on for the past twenty years and it is a fact that Irish libel laws protect and favour the interests of the strong over those of the weak.

Don’t think that anybody will see prison bars over this either. We don’t do white-collar crime well in Ireland, I’m afraid. The FAI will probably be bailed out by a government too chicken to let nature take its course. Small fry will be put on the dole as a result of that bailout, but the parties responsible will pack up and move to retirement in sunny Spain, and get season tickets for Barca, maybe. It stinks, and it’ll continue to stink for quite some time.

Happy New Year.

The Year in Sports

The businessmen who run Croke Park are not noted for their wit. A pity; should it be a thing that Dublin win a fourth All-Ireland title in a row, wouldn’t it be funny if the traditional post-match playing of Molly Malone were swapped for Linda Ronstadt’s rather super cover of the Everly Brothers’ classic When Will I Be Loved? It would seem to strike the correct note.

The apparent disdain in which the team is held isn’t easy to understand. Pilar Caffrey’s Dublin, with their notorious Blue Book, were difficult to love. But the Gilroy / Gavin generation are the real deal. They are legit in every way a GAA team can be legit, and yet still Ireland withholds its heart.

Part of this may be jealousy. It would be nice to think there’s more too it than that, but there probably isn’t. Would Kerry of the Golden Years be held in the same regard as they are had they not be rendered mortal by Offaly in 1982?

When Meath were in their dark pomp in the 1980s they were hated. Has time humanised them, or was it the loss to Down (not to take anything away from that fine Down team) in 1991 that had the same humanising effect on them as Offaly’s win had on Kerry?

Those greybeards who remember when snooker was a big deal may remember Steve Davis was never loved until he was past his prime; then he became the Grand Old Man of the Green Baize. Is Ireland waiting on Dublin to lose, to return to the mortal realm, before forgiving them for being so much better than the rest? And when is that to happen, exactly?

Reader, I’m damned if I know. Mayo are in pole position among the challengers for the crown, but the trauma of thinking about my own beloved county actually winning an All-Ireland and all that would imply would reduce your correspondent to writing with crayons on greaseproof paper behind high walls and under medical supervision, so let’s not go there just yet, while the season of brotherhood and goodwill is still with us.

The reality is that it is hard to make a case for anyone living with Dublin, to say nothing of beating them. Leinster is a wasteland and, no more than Mayo, Monaghan and Tyrone can only knock on the door for so long.

Kerry remain Kerry, of course, and the impact of the disgraceful Super 8s remains to be seen, but it’s very hard to imagine any team better suited to a Super 8 structure than the current Dublin setup. Tradition, legend, values – may I introduce you to the Almighty Dollar? God help us all.

Hurling

When historians get around to recording and passing judgement on these changing times, will the publication of Jackie Tyrell’s book be seen as the most significant event of 2017 in hurling? We’ve waited for over a decade for an insight into Kilkenny in the Cody era. Now we have it, does it take from the achievements of that great team? At what stage is a title not worth winning? At what stage can you say a team has gone too far, and it becomes necessary to remind people that sport isn’t life and death; sport is what we concern ourselves with when we need a break from life and death. It’s something to think about.

Rugby
As Gaelic Games slide further from shamatuerism to fully-blown professionalism, it’s interesting – and horrifying – to look at rugby, which has been professional for 22 years. What has survived, what has thrived, and what has gone by the wayside.

Who would have thought, for instance, that domestic French rugby would set the standard for the world game, and that this club standard would come at the expense of the French national team, once the personification of a way of looking at the world that is quintessentially French?

The current situation cannot last, but what will come in its place nobody knows. The fruits of the banal weekly brutality of the professional game is also a harvest that has yet to be gathered, and will not be nice when it is. Dónal Lenihan made this point very well in his very thoughtful and under-estimated autobiography, released last year.

The Lions Tour, once described by the late Frank Keating as a cross between a school tour and a medieval crusade, was one of those institutions marked for doom when the game went professional, but went from strength to strength instead. On the balance sheet, anyway; neither the heads nor the hearts of fans seem quite sure what to make of the Lions, just as they don’t quite know where club competitions, Six Nations Tournaments and World Cups fit in relative to each other. In the light of Seán O’Brien’s strident opinion of the second-most successful Lions tour of New Zealand in over 110 years, maybe even the players are struggling to keep up. Or it could be all those bumps to the head, of course.

Rugby fans in Ireland are at a particular disadvantage as Irish rugby journalists take the notion of fans-with-typewriters to new depths. What Martin O’Neill wouldn’t do for the coverage Joe Schmidt gets, even though Martin O’Neill has nothing like the talent available to Schmidt.

Certainly, Schmidt’s artisanal style of rugby has never got the abuse that O’Neill’s hearts-on-their-sleeves, lead-in-their-boots soccer team habitually get, even though Schmidt has a better selection. And that’s not even counting the chaps who make Michael Flatley of the Clan Flatley seem as Irish as the very Blarney Stone itself.

The Year in Sports

Dublin’s All-Ireland title, their third in five years, makes a strong case for Dublin’s status as Gaelic football’s team of the decade. Not least as there could still be more titles to come.

This is not to say that they are invincible. And if anyone wants to quibble with Dublin’s achievement he or she could point out to the poor quality of opposition Dublin have met in finals – Mayo in 2013, and Kerry’s extraordinary collapse. There is also the continuing embarrassment of Leinster football, an embarrassment that looks set to continue with a bizarre venue having been chosen for Dublin’s first Championship away game since Biddy Mulligan was a slip of a girl.

But these are pointless cavils. Dublin are the best team in the country because they have the best players. And those best players don’t look like they’re going anywhere just yet.

Who can challenge them? The stark division between haves and have-nots continues, as mortal counties are crushed between the twin rocks of the back-door system and that most exclusive club that is Division 1 of the National Football League.

Kieran Shannon of the Examiner has made the point this year that addressing the League structure would be far more helpful than codding ourselves that the Championship will – or can – be changed. The Croke Park grandees have paid this not one blind bit of heed, and seem determined to bring back the unloved B Championship. Sigh.

Of the potential challengers, Tyrone may have overtaken Donegal in the pecking order, but otherwise it’s as-you-were for the Big Four. The people of Mayo will wonder if Stephen Rochford is the long-awaited Messiah but the reality is that the team is now manager-independent, really. Unpleasant though it was, the putsch of the previous management team shows that this Mayo panel is now complete in every way.

Everything you read in the papers about Mayo being short a forward or being too loose at the back or not knowing what to with Aidan O’Shea is just paper-talk. Only some truly poxy luck has kept Mayo from winning an All-Ireland since the revival of the 1990s, and luck has to change sometime.

Christy O’Connor had a typically excellent piece in the Indo a few days about the Kilkenny Hurling Imperium, and how it continues even though the playing standard is not what it was. The kings will be kings until someone rises to challenge them, but who that someone might be is anybody’s case.

Your correspondent is a great fan of the Banner County but, although far from a hurling expert, I will eat every single hat I own if Clare win the All-Ireland. Although hailed in the media as a triumph, the inclusion of Dónal Óg Cusack in the Clare back-room team is a sure-fire recipe for disaster. Neither Dónal Óg nor Davy Fitz are noted for their ability to get along with regular people. How in God’s Holy Name they are meant to get on with each other is a Sixth Glorious Mystery. It’ll all end in tears before the hay is saved.

Speaking of tears, it is a generally odious thing to say I told you so, but this is the still the Season of Goodwill so I will chance my arm. This is from last year’s sports review piece in this space:

Reader, Ireland have never won a World Cup playoff game in the seven times the competition has been held, including two years, 1999 and 2007, when Ireland couldn’t even get out of their group. The Irish rugby public should think about crawling before thinking about walking.

And lo, it did come to pass. It was speculated here before the event that the Rugby World Cup would be a crashing bore, something that did not go down well with the public at the time. It wasn’t a crashing bore, but anyone who’s paying attention and is brave enough to be honest with him or herself can see that the game is changing massively, both in the way it’s played and the way it’s organised. The question, then, is whether the change is evolution or devolution.

Rugby has generally been the best of all sports in adjusting its rules to remain true to the spirit of the game as teams seek every edge, but it’s behind the times now. There are too many games decided by penalties at the breakdown which, when it comes to great sporting spectacles, make for rather Hobbesian viewing.

A sign of that evolution – or devolution – was in an offhand comment from Brian O’Driscoll while holding a mic for BT Sports during the recent Ulster v Toulouse game at Kingspan Ravenhill. O’Driscoll has a keen eye and praised Vincent Clerc for taking up a particular defensive position at one stage in the game, and that’s great. But nobody every paid in to watch Simon Geoghegan defend, or David Campese or, God save us, Doctor Sir AJF O’Reilly. If rugby isn’t about running with ball in hand it’s about nothing. Dangerous times for the ancient and glorious game.

Rugby has ruled the roost as the Nation’s Choice for the past number of years because people like winning. Martin O’Neill’s achievement in getting Ireland to the European Qualifiers may challenge rugby’s dominance. It was funny to note all the soccer journalists second-guess O’Neill all they way until the team actually qualified, by which time the u-turn was made in a cacophony of screeching brakes and stench of burning rubber.

As it was with the players, not least the much reviled Glen Whelan. It is worth closing, then, by noting that not everyone was derelict in his or her duty by Whelan when nobody was singing because nobody was winning. The great Keith Duggan wrote a marvellous piece in the Irish Times about Whelan, his role for Ireland and the nature of the professional soccer player back last June. Treat yourself friends, and check it out.

The Sporting Year

This year, for what must be the first time in the history of the Gaelic Athletic Association, Dublin struck a blow for the little guy.

At the start of the summer the Championship looked like it would be played between The Big Three of Cork, Kerry and Tyrone, with the other counties supplying cannon fodder when required. As Kevin Egan has often pointed out, long shot winners do not generally win All-Irelands. Your correspondent has no figures to hand, but it’s a reasonable guess that Dublin were the longest price All-Ireland winners since Armagh in 2002.

Kerry left the game behind them of course, but Dublin still had to complete their part of the bargain and pick it up. Kerry have left games behind them before, but teams have not had the wherewithal – or the Kevin McMenamins – to take advantage. Sligo come to mind in 2006, as do Limerick in 2004. Good for Dublin, who are deserving champions.

Kerry do not wash linen in public, but it would be wonderful to know how they’re analysing this loss at home. How do they view Jack O’Connor in the Kingdom?

O’Connor has won three All-Irelands but those were won against teams – Cork and Mayo – whom Kerry expect to beat as a matter of course. In a county with so many wins, those will be taken for granted.

Against teams whom Kerry do take seriously, O’Connor’s record is played three, lost three – two against Tyrone, one against Dublin. There’s huge pressure on O’Connor and his aging team to make up for this next year.

From a parochial standpoint, Mayo had a superb season. James Horan was extremely lucky not to get sucker-punched against London but other than that he didn’t put a foot wrong during either League or Championship. Mayo are looking forward to another crack at it in 2012 – county board shenanigans permitting, of course.

In hurling, Kilkenny and Tipperary served another epic All-Ireland Final with Kilkenny proving there’s life in the old cat yet. The only pity was that the hurling Championship did go according to script, and there were no counties able to keep up with the standard set by Kilkenny and Tipperary.

Galway blew up – again, Cork’s civil war continues and the revolutionaries of the ‘nineties now struggle to keep their heads above water. Anthony Daly had another superb year with Dublin but it still seems somehow easier to see Galway beating Kilkenny twice than Dublin. And it’s more or less impossible to see Galway beating Kilkenny just the once.

The Rugby World Cup is struggling as a tournament. The balance is incorrect. There are ten top-flight rugby nations in the world – the Six Nations, the Tri Nations and Argentina. The other ten are making up the numbers – and are quickly put in their place if they dare to point that out, as Samoa’s unfortunate Eliota Sapolu discovered.

This means is that there are three weeks of group games at any Rugby World Cup that whittle ten teams down to eight. That’s not very effective. It also makes for extremely stilted rugby in the knockout stages, when the terror of losing dominates. The balance between the relatively carefree group games and the all-or-nothing knockout games is wrong.

The final itself is proof positive. New Zealand is the greatest rugby nation in the world and nobody with any feeling for the game could begrudge them, but 8-7 is a scoreline from the 1950s, not the 21st Century professional era. The only thing anyone will remember from this tournament is relief for the New Zealanders, and not much else.

Ireland’s win over Australia is bittersweet, looking back. Ireland had never won a quarter-final before the tournament, and they still haven’t. Irish rugby is at an extraordinary crossroads right now. If rugby can transition from the golden generation of BOD, ROG and POC, then it suddenly becomes reasonable to assume that rugby can overtake the GAA in popularity.

On that point – the chaps on Newstalk’s Off the Ball were floating an idea back in November that, if New Zealand could host a World Cup then so could Ireland, using GAA stadia for the games. They never quite explained why the GAA would want to sign its own death warrant by facilitating the tournament though.

Maybe they’re saving it for next year. An Spailpín will be listening closely, as ever – shirts don’t iron themselves, you know, and listening to Off the Ball remains the best way of dealing with the misery. Here’s to 2012.

The Sporting Year: Review and Preview

Hurling is a game in crisis. The League doesn’t matter to anyone, and the Championship has so very few meaningful games. Even worse, not only is hurling not growing in the non-traditional (football) counties but the ancient game is in clear and visible decline in counties that are not only considered hurling powers, but that have won or contested All-Ireland finals in the past fifteen years. None of this is good.

And despite this litany of disaster, hurling still provided the greatest sporting moment of the year when Tipperary overcame Kilkenny in a game done scant justice by such weak adjectives as epic, magisterial, unforgettable, monumental. The 2010 hurling final showcased everything that is great about hurling, right down to the post-match singing of the Galtee Mountain Boy, singing that showed exactly what makes the GAA great – the perfect synergy of people, place and culture.

What this means for hurling in 2011 and beyond your correspondent cannot say, not being a hurling man, other than to remark that if this is ever lost, there will be a hole in the country’s soul that can never be filled.

The football final was not as good, but the football Championship was outstanding. The Championship started as an exclusive club where twenty-nine teams were warm-up acts for a Big Three, but Down reminded everybody with eyes to see that the great prize is there to be won by those who dare, rather than ceded by those who dare not. Small consolation to them as they lost their first ever football final, but a beacon to the rest of the country.

We will hear a lot in the first six months of next year about how that beacon shines for Dublin, something that annoys the country outside the pale more than somewhat, and does the least service of all to Dublin and Dublin GAA. This isn’t because of hype – talk is cheap, after all – but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the game.

If Dublin are to survive using their new system, they will revolutionise Gaelic football with their three man forward line and twelve backs. An Spailpín Fánach doesn’t believe this tactic will work, but it is certainly going to be one of the stories of the year. Until the system is found out.

2011 bubbles with anticipation. Can Mickey Harte build a Tyrone 2.0 as the new generations comes through and his great servants retire one by one? Can Cork push on or was this the last hurrah for the weight of their panel? Can Sligo recover from their shattering Connacht Final loss? Have Roscommon finally turned a corner after a decade of misery? How much longer can Padraic Joyce carry Galway?

Every country has its narrative. James Horan’s first Mayo team will line out against Leitrim in Ballinamore on January 9th. An Spailpín hopes to be there. The road goes ever on.

In rugby, after reports of their demise were greatly exaggerated some years ago, the Golden Generation are finally gathered in the Last Chance Saloon. Declan Kidney’s mission for 2011 is to nurse them to the World Cup in October, and a last hurrah in a World Cup quarter-final. To get to a semi-final, something Ireland have never done, would be an outstanding achievement, and a fitting finale to several careers.

And possibly the last hurrah for quite some years; despite what the IRFU-istas write and would have you believe in the papers, the future is not bright. Scotland is on the rise, the deep and unaddressed flaw in the system that sees players not being developed because it makes better short-term sense to buy foreign props or stand-off halves, and the sheer weight of English and French money make the future challenging in the extreme for Irish rugby. It was fun while it lasted.

The World Cup was terrible for anyone outside of Spain. It would have been impossible to believe twenty years ago, but the World Cup itself may be in danger. Newsweek’s respected political columnist Jonathan Alter tweeted earlier this year that Qatar paid €7,500,000 per vote to stage the World Cup in 2022. It’s the only way the thing can be understood. The super clubs are on the rise and international soccer is on the decline. This is the future.

And finally – Irish sports lost their voice this year when Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh announced his retirement. His like will not be seen again, but there is hope for the future. It’s not likely, but maybe now wouldn’t be a bad time to get the ball rolling.

RTÉ Radio ought to try a little lateral thinking and appoint Seán Bán Breathnach of Raidió na Gaeltachta as their chief Gaelic Games commentator. Hector Ó hEoghagáin tweeted about this before Christmas, and it’s the only way. SBB is an outstanding commentator and, while English is his second language, Seán Bán is considerably more fluent and passionate in English than some of the current RTÉ men with microphones. The campaign begins here.

The Sporting Year in Review and Preview

Rugby swept the boards at RTÉ’s sports shindig last night, and it was very hard to claim injustice over it. The Kilkenny hurlers may feel a little hard done by after their four in a row, while Giovanni Trapattoni must have been in with a shout for Alchemist of the Year, nearly making gold from some extremely base metals indeed.

But when you look back on the year you realise that rugby in Ireland has never had as good a year as it’s had this year. Or anything even vaguely like it.

Things looked dim this time last year. Declan Kidney had finally been given the keys to the car, but the team looked very much like the Over the Hill Gang in the autumn internationals. And then Jamie Heaslip went on his remarkable gallop against the French and really, rugby hasn’t stopped galloping since.

An Spailpín Fánach is firmly of the opinion that if Gavin Henson, rather than Stephen Jones, had taken that final penalty in Cardiff the campaign could have ended on yet another downer, but screw it. Ireland had enough bad beats over the years. The team were due this break.

Not least Brian O’Driscoll, their captain and inspiration. Rolling Stone magazine’s Peter Travers famously wrote of Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven that, in all his years in the saddle, never had Eastwood ridden so tall. So it was with O’Driscoll this season.

It was reasonable to assume – and the assumption was certainly made on this blog, and more than once – that O’Driscoll was shot, that he would hang up his boots unfulfilled. The events of the 2005 Lions tour seemed to have left their mark and O’Driscoll looked like a man playing out the string in recent seasons.

Instead, he compensated for the effects of age on his speed with some tremendous tactical application, he remains Ireland’s best forward as well as back, and ever single time that Ireland needed something this year it was either O’Driscoll who started the fire or put it out.

And he won a Heineken Cup with Leinster and was the Lions’ best player in South Africa too. Would we were all over the same hill.

The Kilkenny hurlers were the only other contenders for team of the year, securing their fourth All-Ireland in a row in what must surely have been the best hurling final of the decade. Some people, including your correspondent, left Croke Park thinking that the best team had not won, such was the awesomeness of Tipperary display, but Jamesie O’Connor put it in perspective on Newstalk’s Off the Ball the week after the game. Jamesie made the point that while he didn’t think any Tipp back played badly, Kilkenny still ran up 2-22. Somebody must have felt the blade somewhere.

The tragic thing is, of course, that while Kilkenny march imperiously on and Tipperary rise as worthy adversaries to their neighbours, the actual game of hurling is dying on its feet. While the GAA busied itself with the dog and pony shows of the Christy Ring and Nicky Rackard Cups, the noble game is in crisis in counties that are just behind the big three of Kilkenny, Tipp and Cork.

Wexford, Offaly and Clare have all won All-Irelands in the past fifteen years but they’re failing apart now. Nobody can follow who’s beaten whom in the Byzantine current Championship structure while the county that is in most danger from the rise of rugby, Limerick, seems seem intent on committing hari-kari. It’s tragic, and heartbreaking.

Tragedy and heartbreak were two words that were being bandied about after Thierry Va-Va-Voom became the Thief of Saint Denis. An Spailpín isn’t buying it. Ireland had their chances to win it, and didn’t take them. You can’t hang Henry and then say you’d have done exactly the same thing yourself, as so many Irish players have said.

Giovanni Trapattoni deserves a world of credit for getting the team as far as he did, and the RTÉ soccer panel, once the finest in the business, were craven and disgraceful in their condemnation of il vecchio italiano during the campaign. One the panel spoke with neither fear nor favour; this time, it clear that Eamon Dunphy had an agenda because the soccer team had been grousing about what Liam Brady said about them while a panellist himself. But Eamon knew that Trapattoni was a free shot, and he took it. Shame on him.

Finally, there was on constant in a changing year, as Kerry took Cork’s candy from them again. Nobody seems to realise (bar the Kerrymen themselves, and they’re far too cute to let on) that in Kerry the Munster Championship is simply an extension of the League, and they act accordingly. No other county targets August and beyond as the Kingdom do, just as no other county who have a star playing in Australia could bring him home to get him his medal and then ship him back again to the kangaroos and koala bears. Pearse Hanley please copy, God help us.





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The Sporting Year in Review and Preview

One of the many stings of the current recession is the memory of what was. The squandering and the waste of the riches that once were, and are no longer. As far as the rugby public of Ireland are concerned; you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The cold hard fact of the matter is that Ireland and Italy are the only countries in the Six Nations that have not won the Championship in the past twenty-three years. And not only have England, France, Wales and Scotland won multiple championships in that time, each of them has at least one Grand Slam as well in that period. What have Ireland to show for this? A few devalued Triple Crowns and a lot of old blather about rugby in Croke Park and Paul O’Connell pyjamas.

That was the good news. The bad news is that it’s about to get worse. The lack of foresight that characterises Irish government is also becoming clearer as the golden generation ages in Irish rugby. The rise of the provinces – well, one of the provinces – as an entity in the international game comes at a cost. Time was when the clubs were the next level down from the international team; a provincial cap was not a necessary precursor to an international cap. Now the gap is too wide, meaning that there are now only three teams from which Ireland can choose her international side. There is a ragbag of exiles, parental rules and Hell-or-Connacht, but the reality is that the Irish pick of players has never been so small.

Look at the current out-half situation. If Ronan O’Gara slips coming out of the betting shop some frosty January morning Ireland do not have anyone who can replace him. Nor is one likely to appear; in the professional game, the choice between accepting losses as the cost of developing young players in specialised positions and flying in some nearly-was from Australia is a starkly simple one. Munster is now in danger of eclipsing Ireland as an entity in the national sporting psyche – did you notice how both Ronan O’Gara and Anthony Foley were pictured on the front of their autobiographies in the red of Munster rather than the green of Ireland? – but in ten years’ time, how many Irish eligible players will be playing for the Irish provinces? Grim times.

Thank goodness, then, that the Championship still rolls on, giving the summer meaning and definition year after year. The football championship was another classic this year, as Tyrone confirmed their place as the team of the decade. Kerry’s team of all talents lost focus over the Galvin affair, and the behaviour of former Kerry greats in defending the disgraceful antics of their former captain did the proud county no favours. Perhaps if Kerry had cut Galvin loose the Monday after the Clare game they would be All-Ireland champions today? Hubris is Greek for getting too big for your boots.

And how wonderful it is that Kerry have responded to Tyrone’s victory by recalling Jack O’Connor to the colours. O’Connor has a chip on his shoulder the size of the rock of Gibraltar, and he is brought back solely to put down the Ulster rising. How delicious would it be should Kerry meet Mayo in another All-Ireland final? O’Connor’s frustrations would be Olympian. Mayo would get hammered out the gate, of course, but the weeping would be louder in the Kerry dressing room. A backwards sort of victory for the heather county, but at this stage we’d take it.

Not that Mayo should worry about September too much in 2009. Worrying about September, in fact, is partly what has got my beloved native heath into this mess in the first place. It was common in Mayo to remark, in the post-five o’clock agonies of another Final defeat, that we would have been better not getting out of Connacht. Now that wish has come true, how odd that the gloom has darkened rather than lifted.

One of the reasons behind the remarkable momentum of John O’Mahony’s return was the idea that Johnno was the man to take the team “the final step.” Instead, Johnno has dismantled that fine team of 2004 and 2006, and what is to come in their place is far from clear. Falling to a risen Ross in June would find a far less forging Mayo public.

In hurling, the black and amber imperium extends the boundaries of its empire. Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh – who else – said it best when the third goal went in against hapless Waterford in this year’s All-Ireland final. “Kilkenny are going after this three-in-a-row,” he said, “like they had never won anything before.”

An Spailpín Fánach notes with sadness the way Kilkenny are being portrayed in some quarters as being “bad for hurling.” What’s bad about taking the game to new heights of excellence? How can that be bad? It’s up to the other counties to match them, rather than have Kilkenny fall back to the chasing pack. If anybody wants to win anything, they have to stop feeling sorry for themselves first.

Speaking of which. The Cork dispute has extended now to the footballers. The Cork County Board’s choice is clear. They must enter teams in all competitions as usual, staring in January, or else absent themselves from competitions. If some players don’t want to play, that’s their privilege. There is no slavery here. The Cork Board should simply find someone else and play them, or else not enter competitions, just as Kilkenny, say, don’t enter the football or Mayo don’t enter the hurling championship. It’s quite simple, really. I’m sure I don’t know what all the fuss is about.

Finally – An Spailpín seldom bothers with the soccer, due to the high preponderance of cheats, cowards, spivs, divers and other wastrels in that game. But I am an unabashed admirer of Giovanni Trapattoni, and the more he digs in over the so-called Andy Reid controversy, the more I like him.

The fact of the matter is that Ireland just do not have any world class players right now. Andy Reid is not a world class player. He isn’t. So Trapattoni has to take what he’s stuck with and he’s making the best of that. Seven points out of a possible nine is good going, and the home support getting anxious because of an overly-defensive style just don’t realise that they’re dealing with a man with a completely different way of looking at the world. Catenaccio isn’t a type of pasta you know.

Perhaps they’re like this fellow over on the right, pictured after Trapattoni’s Italy lost in World Cup in 2002, who demands that Trapattoni be hanged with his fecking catenaccio. I translate out of the fear that as most of those boys who would criticise the vecchio Italiano struggle through their Star of a lunch break, the language of Dante and Da Ponte is more than likely beyond them. Bulgaria are next up at home in March; if Trapattoni can get a result, Ireland have one foot on the plane to South Africa. No-one in the state will be able to afford the trip to go out and watch them of course, but still. It’s the principle of the thing.





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The Sporting Year in Review and Preview

The Irish Times reported on Saturday that the IRFU will have the results of their investigation into the World Cup debacle presented to its executive committee today. Whether or not the IRFU’s executive committee will go so far as to present those results to the great unwashed remains to be seen. It isn’t that terribly likely though. It is the nature of the bureaucrat to abhor revolution, and revolution could be the only possible result of the publication of the full story of how Irish rugby sank from its greatest heights since the days of Jackie Kyle to its current bleak prospects.

Sports historians of the future will surely puzzle to figure out just how the country was so willing to believe in the potential of the Irish rugby team and its spinmeister coach against the firm evidence of the facts. Ireland’s farcical win over England at Croke Park was presented as a combination revenge for Skibbereen and the re-heading of St Oliver Plunkett rolled into one. It was, of course, nothing of the sort. A fourth win in a row is not an epic event whose consequences ring down the centuries; it’s just something that happens every year, making it less like the Battle of Thermopylae and more like the Rose of Tralee. The destiny of the team had already been written when they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory against a very average French side indeed in the first game of rugby played at Croke Park. And even then, when a bizarre series of results left Ireland with a chance of, if not a Grand Slam, a Championship at least, something that hasn’t been won since the days of Ciarán Fitzgerald, they couldn’t even do that. Ireland humiliated themselves in running up the score on Italy, only to leave the door open and let in two easy tries at the death. It was humiliating, and it was lauded as some sort of triumph by a media blinded by God knows what.

The naked Emperor was exposed at the World Cup in a series of deeply humiliating games, and now a big, black cloud looms over Ireland in the coming Six Nations. The Golden Generation looks old and tired; it is the nature of the sporting god that old age doesn’t appear progressively, as it does in real life, but appears in a thunderclap. An Spailpín Fánach’s fear is the combined warnings of both Brian Moore and Oscar Hammerstein II about letting life’s golden chances pass you by have gone unheaded by the Golden Generation, and they will now have the rest of their lives to regret it. As for those waiting in the wings, well, while typing this a vision came to An Spailpín Fánach of Master Jonny Sexton being coursed in St Denis on February 8th next year by the sort of dogs of war that exist in French back rows, and it wasn’t one bit pretty. What a shocking pity. What a terrible waste.

The World Cup itself was a success, on the whole, after something of a shaky start. The format still needs work but the tournament did throw up its epic matches and had worthy champions. At a time of change in world rugby, it’s nice to note that, the scorching Bryan Habana apart, the stars of the Springbok team were its second rows, Victor Matfield and Bakkies Botha. For your correspondent, the lasting image of the World Cup final will be of Bakkies Botha slamming into a ruck and an Englishman shooting off at the other end, like the final ball in a Newton’s cradle. Deserving champions.

A title also neatly fitting the current All-Ireland football champions. Thinking about just how much Kerry dominate all conversation to do with Championship football is a strange reminder of how just how far the Kingdom had fallen in that bleak decade from 1986 to 1997. That barren decade is probably a live issue in the Kingdom itself, and they’ve making pretty darn sure that it’s not going to be repeated.

Kerry, like any imperial power, are good as assimilating the tricks and techniques of enemy powers in order to strengthen their own campaigns. The Romans adopted war elephants after the Punic Wars and, in rather a similar vein, Kerry have adopted a considerably harder edge to their football after their defeats to the Northern Powers of Armagh (once) and Tyrone (twice) in 2002, 2003 and 2005. Kerry avenged the 2002 final last year, but no-one will have been more disappointed than Kerry themselves that Tyrone were so beset by injuries as to deny Kerry the opportunity to claim full vengeance. No matter; Kerry have never been snobs, and are equally willing to dispatch both prince and pauper on their way to another All-Ireland title. An Spailpín has to confess to being rather pleased that, as Kerry prepare for a three-in-a-row quest, it is Paul Galvin that will captain them. Galvin symbolises the new Kerry resolution, but he suffers from something of a divisive image, nationally. As far as your correspondent is concerned, Galvin is An Spailpín’s kind of fella and would be deeply, deeply grateful if there were anyone approaching Galvin’s stature in the sweet county Mayo.

There is not, of course. An Spailpín has learned never to say never when it comes to the perpetuating torture and delight of following the Mayo football team, for whom the Grail quest of the Knights of the Round Table compares to a quick stroll to the shops for forty tea bags and a pack of Viscount biscuits. Johnno, TD, can hear that ticking clock louder than most of course, and he will deeply interested in knowing who from the old guard will be willing or able to put in another season in the lists. Johnno’s experiments last year in the Championship failed more or less utterly and the one nugget that did wash up is now in Australia. More luck to that young man – while we may miss his absence here ní maireann an óige, and he needs to make the most of it while he can. In the meantime, Connacht remains as treacherous as ever. Roscommon have the twin threats of their own fierce native pride in the primrose and blue and the fact that John Maughan is more than capable of putting one over Johnno, and certainly has done so in the past. Sligo have made a shrewd choice of manager in Tommy Jordan, a man that will know the Mayo players inside out and, in this grim GPA dawn, knows that a lot of those mystery men with bags of gold will be interested in hotshot young managers, and kicking Johnno’s ass would be a fine way for Jordan to present himself to the nation.

South of the Mayo border, the appointment of Liam Sammon is a deeply fascinating decision by the Galway football Board. It’s always rather narked Galway pride that they needed a Mayo missionary to return them to football’s top table, and how deeply happy they would be if they could prove they could do it without Johnno. A deep football thinker and good friend of An Spailpín Fánach is the opinion that the job has been there for Sammon for years if he wanted it, and he’s only taken it now because he’s retired from teaching, and therefore has serious time to devote to it. How interesting that will make things.

A quick glance at Paddy Power tells us that Kerry are an astonishing 6/4 to win the All-Ireland in September, and both logic and experience tell us that the price is just about right. Dublin, Tyrone and Cork are the next four contenders and then it’s 14/1 the field, which is the way things go when the favourite is so short a price. Whatever about Tyrone (and An Spailpín is very inclined to agree to agree with his friend JP that Peter Canavan’s retirement has been seriously under-estimated as a factor in Tyrone’s decline since 2005), your correspondent is pretty sure that neither bud not bye will be putting a paw on the silverware come September. Kerry are probably the best bet at 6/4 but, as people are greedy and fancy those big fat prices – maybe a tickle on Meath at sixteens is the answer? Stranger things have happened.

FOCAL SCOIR: An Spailpín cares little for soccer anymore, but the farce surrounding the appointment of the next Republic of Ireland manager means that it’s more or less impossible to resist boldly going where, it seems, everyone in country has gone before. Therefore, An Spailpín Fánach lines up to make his prediction of who will be presented with orb and sceptre, and plenty of soothers for the likes of such sensitive souls as Mr Ireland and Mr Robert Keane. To An Spailpín’s mind, there is only combination that, like Great Art, is both completely unexpected and utterly inevitable. The new Ireland manager will be, can only be, Roddy Collins. You heard it here first.





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