Last week Setanta Ireland ran a promo for their coverage of tonight’s action at Croke Park that featured Kieran Donaghy and Alan Brogan musing gravely on their first meeting since last September’s All-Ireland final.
PERHAPS in time we might come to view last Sunday’s breakthrough by Dublin as a defining day in the history of the GAA’s most fabled rivalry.
Players don’t inhabit their traditions and heritage as much as we would like to think. It’s all about the here and now when you’re preparing for an All Ireland final
WHEN asked his opinion of the Giant’s Causeway the 18th century English poet and critic Samuel Johnson said that it was worth seeing but not worth going to see.
MUCH like the Limerick game at this stage last year, this evening’s All-Ireland Football Qualifier against Down is a dangerous curve ball to be thrown at Conor Counihan and his charges.
IT’S been a bizarre week in the weird and wonderful world of GAA with the RTE staff deployment coming in for careful scrutiny, the use of social media such as Twitter rendering us all aflutter and then Waterford GAA secretary Tim O Keeffe advocating the introduction of a two tier system in football a few short years after many of the counties trying to make the breakthrough, including Waterford, railed against the notion of being consigned to the now defunct Tommy Murphy Cup based on their standing in the football hierarchy.
PERFORMANCES and results... the new mantras of the GAA world assail the ear as if the top coaches in the game have now ransacked the language of the market. How many times since the championship started, only a few short weeks ago, have we heard the managers’ cant of asking their team for a performance and expecting the scoreboard to “look after itself”?
THERE are few things in life less likely to set the pulse racing and the nerves jangling than the first round of the Munster football championship.
THIS, we are told is good for the GAA. The goose that lays the golden egg versus the All-Ireland and League champions.
IT has become almost axiomatic that the Cork senior football panel is by far the strongest in the country. We didn’t need them to win the league and championship double last year to inform us of that but there were signs right throughout last season that their cliché strength-in depth was being used to telling and tactical effect to swing matches their way in the last 10 or 15 minutes.
Luck is not chance, it’s toil; fortune’s expensive smile is earned.
— Emily Dickinson
KERRY football followers aren’t sure what to make of this year’s Allianz Football League.
ONCE more with no feeling for the game! The whole drama of any All Star announcement is often more about who is left out rather than who is left in but with yesterday’s announcement of the 2010 football selection (or football laugh-in depending on your opinion) should generate some high stool debate and a certain amount of trick question specials at table quizzes over the next few days and weeks.
ONE of the first intimations I got of this being a landmark year for Down football was a brief chat I had in Dingle in February with Maurice Hayes, former Down GAA secretary and man of vision when Down made their breakthrough in the 60’s.
THESE are interesting and enlightening times for serious students of modern day midfield play.
THOSE Limerick footballers in whom hope still survives and whose hearts have remained unwarped after a decade of tilting at the windmills are a redoubtable bunch.
RECONCILING the mediocrity of Meath football since 2001 with the fact that they’ve appeared in All-Ireland semi-finals in two of the last three championship seasons makes tomorrow’s joust with the Dubs all the more beguiling.
Munster SFC Semi-Final
Kerry v Cork
Tomorrow, Fitzgerald Stadium, 4pm
WALKING up from the local and European election count in the Killarney Sports Centre to Fitzgerald Stadium for last year’s Munster football semi-final just didn’t feel right.
ULSTER SFC (Quarter-final): Antrim v Tyrone (Casement Park, tomorrow 4pm)
OF ALL the issues ventilated on the subject of Tyrone football these past nine months, few have received as much consistent or as persistent attention as the question of Tyrone’s longer serving players’ hunger for further success on the field of play.
MUNSTER SFC Quarter-Final
Tipperary v Kerry
Tomorrow, Semple Stadium, 4pm
HOPE springs eternal in these giddy pre-championship days that maybe, just maybe for the first time since the cows went unmilked on a glorious July evening in Clare, somebody other than Kerry or Cork could win this year’s Munster senior football championship.
A COLLEAGUE of mine who has graduated in such matters has often been heard to utter the phrase “ní hionainn dul go dtí tigh an rí agus teacht as” — going to the king’s house and coming out of it is not the same thing.
WITH the start of championship only weeks away, this weekend’s Comhdháil Bhliantúil Cumann Lúthchleas Gael in Newcastle, Co Down remains a distant concern for many GAA people. There are, however, going to be certain decisions taken before close of business at 4pm today that may affect the mechanics of our games and our competitions for some time to come.
IT MAY have been missed in the debate ahead of tomorrow’s crunch National League tie in Killarney, but Jack O’Connor will be aware that the three years he delivered Sam Maguire in autumn (2004, 2006 & 2009) have also seen his teams win the league in spring.
THERE are those who would suggest that recently-retired Kerry goalkeeper Diarmuid Murphy’s greatest achievement as a footballer was finding a way of changing his kick-out technique over the course of his last season in green and gold.
PERHAPS the most striking aspect of Cork’s opening National League win in Scotstown last weekend wasn’t that the meanest defence in the country conceded 3-12 but that all 3-13 of the Cork total came from open play.
IF Bertie Ahern is entitled to an artist’s exemption on the grounds that a certain amount of creative and imaginative toil went into the production of his biography, then surely the humble hack tasked with previewing the National League deserves similar treatment.
IN A truly fascinating essay published last month on the effect of Celtic Tiger affluence, Declan Kiberd, professor of Anglo-Irish literature at UCD, said that “things are often studied only when they start to go wrong. The end of things is the moment we start to understand them: and only when they are understood do we begin to realise what might be lost”.
It may not be Friday the 13th, or Halloween, but what are the chances of Cork’s nemesis coming back to haunt them in Sunday’s All-Ireland final? asks Dara O Cinnéide
FOR Henry Ford, history was tradition and therefore “more or less bunk”.
ON the morning of the Sanford Memorial at Saratoga on August 13, 1919, Willie Knapp, the jockey of the hundred-to-one-shot Upset, turned to trainer Jim Rowe and said, “You know, Mr Rowe, we got a chance to beat Man o’ War this afternoon.”
WHILE the rest of the GAA world had been concentrating on the puzzling volatility of Donegal football after defeat at home to Antrim only a few short weeks ago, John Joe Doherty was in the business of renewal and regeneration.
PERHAPS it is only fitting that Cork footballers are finally getting due recognition for being one of the most consistent and durable championship performers over the last number of years but there is a bothersome reality buried underneath all the hoopla that followed their semi-final demolition of Kerry.
WITH the sterile nature of the 2009 football championship causing enough existential angst to keep the internet chat rooms whispering from here ‘til Christmas, the Sligo football team take their championship bow tomorrow.
GIVEN their pathological distaste for one another and given the nature of the most recent championship clash between Tyrone and Derry, it would come as no great surprise if tomorrow’s Ulster semi-final in Casement Park turns out to be another summer Sunday where we get to utter words like “manly”, “gritty” and “grimly compelling” more often than we would like to.
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