Common sense takes week off — now that is a dealbreaker.
It being exactly two centuries since the birth of Charles Dickens tomorrow, you’ll forgive our leaning on the old master this morning.
Three of the sides playing in this weekend’s Waterford Crystal senior hurling quarter-finals have managers from one club, St Finbarr’s of Cork.
If both teams or participants are praying to God before a game or contest, and only one wins, doesn’t that prove that God is on one side but not on the other?
WHEN Bob Lipsyte was a kid in New York, he went to a total of two professional baseball games.
Stephen Ferris takes questions with a look of calm, if not outright satisfaction.
WHEN it comes to solidarity, it’s hard to beat intercounty managers.
SOME things haven’tchanged at the basketball.
SEVENTY years ago Billy Conn, weighing 174 pounds and fighting out of East Liberty, Pittsburgh, took on the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis, for the heavyweight title.
AFTER years of success with Glanmire in ladies basketball, Mark Scannell realised his appetite wasn’t what it used to be.
THEY say every man thinks less of himself if he has never been a soldier.
IF YOU’RE a sportswriting fan – and given what you’re holding in your hands, you probably are – you’ve noticed the recent explosion in the number and variety of Irish sports books.
OVER the last couple of days you could probably hear the sighing of thanks all over the country as GAA hacks exhaled their gratitude for Michael Ryan’s decision to drop Eoin Kelly from the Waterford senior hurling panel.
MM: How important is a winning pro franchise to a city?
USUALLY, the end of year column runs along lines as familiar as the main tracks from Kent to Heuston.
EVERY now and then Irish sports journalists of a certain vintage get wistful.
MAYBE the parallel universe exists where Joe Montana is an out-half, and not a quarterback, or where William ‘The Refrigerator’ Perry is a loose-head prop rather than a defensive lineman.
A CERTAIN amount of background noise seems to have been building in recent weeks about TV coverage and sport, and the quality of that coverage in particular.
RECENTLY your columnist played a soccer game with his colleagues, an inconsequential matter among good friends which was more about opening the lungs than the result (won by the ‘oldies’ 4-2, though: in your face, youthful exuberance!).
JIMMY BARRY-MURPHY didn’t dawdle when the call came.
TEATIME wasn’t progressing too well that evening last week – negotiations with the two-year-old on blueberries as a viable dessert had broken down irrevocably, it seemed – when a half-heard comment at the end of the radio sports news seeped through.
MEDICAL sources said last night that a trapped nerve injurytypically produces numbness, pain or deadness in the limb.
A COUPLE of weeks ago, Shay Livingstone was chatting to a friend about his impending move from Cork to Galway.
WHEN the All-Ireland camogie champions began looking for ways to raise funds recently, they weren’t long hitting on a new idea.
WE’RE aware of the arguments from the other side before we even hear them outlined.
THE sports autobiography follows a generally predictable arc — promise, achievement, graceful decline — so it’s good to come across a book that breaks out of that strait-jacket.
THE Ballinacourty footballers are an experienced bunch who’ve dealt with plenty of heartbreak in recent years.
YOU know by now that Donal Óg Cusack is the new Cork senior hurling captain. Of course you do.
WE had our topic nicely selected for this corner well ahead of time: The GAA County by County, a typically handsome production by Con Collins and his colleagues at the Collins Press.
A COMMUNAL green area in a Cork suburb doesn’t look like an obvious theatre of dreams.
CALL it karma, call it coincidence, call it the circularity of history, but if anyone in the FAI was tuned in last weekend for Wales versus Ireland in the Rugby World Cup, their hearts must have skipped a beat when Shane Williams touched down for that crucial early try. And we don’t mean skipped in a bad way.
JOHN ALLEN said yesterday he was “flattered and delighted” to be approached to manage Limerick, having been ratified as senior hurling manager of the Treaty County on Tuesday night.
EARLY start last Saturday morning, to get the City Special edition out on the final whistle of Ireland-Wales at the Rugby World Cup.
ANYONE who reads The Guardian will be familiar with John Crace’s ‘Digested Reads’, where the journalist takes a well-known book and compresses it down to six or seven hundred words, a process that tends to isolate the good — and bad — aspects of the tome in question (try his filleting of Philip Roth’s ‘Exit Ghost’ for a taster).
A GENERAL or a chairman? The number of empty bainisteoir bibs in the inter-county hurling world is unusually high at the moment – at the time of writing Antrim, Galway, Laois, Clare, Wexford, Cork, Waterford and Limerick have changed or are about to change. There are merry-go-rounds, and then there are merry-go-rounds.
IT’S in the nature of the GAA beast to get all post-modern when it comes to All Star nominations: what’s not in the text, hidden codes, all that jazz.
JETLAGGED he may be after a flight home to London from the States, but Simon Garfield can still summon enough energy to talk, to engage, and to condemn.
The scoresheet in the hurling included an unlikely name: M. Moynihan 0-2, (0-1f). The World Cup comes around every four years.
WE had our plans about what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go but circumstances overtook us, as they overtook quite a few people last Saturday.
HAVING visited Carton House in recent weeks, where the Ireland rugby team has been stationed for its pre-World Cup training, I can say this.
IN the end the only nosebleed was suffered by the referee, not the favourites.
THERE’S no point in beating around the bush: the stand-out flashes of genius in the hurling and football championships have come in the last couple of weekends.
Economist Jim Power is a proud Waterford hurling fan who believes sport can lift the mood of a nation
EVENTUALLY it sank in, the significance of the array of cars parked at the curve of the Ballinlough Road, their tucked-in queue following the line of the footpath so closely.
AS EXPECTED, mental frailty was exposed ruthlessly in Thurles yesterday.
THERE are five top-flight senior intercounty hurling games left in the season — next weekend’s two quarter-finals, the two semi-finals and the final — and now is as good a time as any to take a quick look at what 2011 has brought so far.
THE texts and mails weren’t long in beeping themselves into consciousness on Saturday evening, an hour after teatime.
Waterford face one of the most potent attacks in the modern game in tomorrow’s Munster hurling final. Déise selector Pádraig Fanning answers three key questions
THE perils of writing about women in sport are easily delineated, yet hard to avoid.
THERE is a reason for the grey hair you see in the accompanying picture.
HERE IN this corner of the paper we don’t claim to have a monopoly of wisdom on any subject, apart from what is now an uncomfortable level of expertise on Martin Amis’ sex life (has anyone who ever met this man NOT written a book about his “legendary” intimacies?).
ANYONE who has ever held a hurley in his hand has had the dream, or some variant of the dream.
YESTERDAY’S defeat at the hands of Tipperary brought more pain and frustration for Cork supporters, who only 12 months ago enjoyed a double-digit hammering of the same opposition.
TIPPERARY defender Paddy Stapleton says the Premier County’s preparation for last year’s Munster SHC clash with Cork wasn’t at the required level. The bad news for Cork fans is his belief they have remedied it this time.
IF YOU are reading this, then congratulations on surviving ‘The Rapture’, which American lunatic fundamentalists had pencilled in for last Saturday at 6pm.
IT DOESN’T take as long as it used to do when Shamrocks GAA club members lock up their dressing room after training sessions.
YESTERDAY Dromina, a little village in north Cork, had its day in the sun — or scouring rain, to be more precise — as the hurlers of Cork and Laois rolled in for a challenge to mark the opening of new GAA facilities.
THE angry man in the queue for chips last Saturday night wasn’t sparing the blame.
IT was James Herriot who said that enthusiasts are appealing, but fanatics are irresistible.
THE dream factory off the South Circular Road, down the lane that runs alongside to the National Stadium, is not what you’d expect.
ABOUT midway through the first half in Sunday’s league clash between Cork and Dublin, one of our press box brethren wondered aloud how close the home 15 were to the starting side in the championship.
BELIEVE it or not, ladies, I’m turning 30 soon.
LAST Saturday Thomond Park hosted the latest meeting of Munster and Leinster in the Magners League, a game hyped in the usual terms: a huge battle, with unflinching confrontation. You know the drill.
CULTURED individual that you are, dear reader, it will not have escaped your notice that there is something of a Clifford Odets revival going on.
THE CLOCK was running down on Martin Johnson’s post-game meeting with the media last Saturday when a last hand went up at the back of the Aviva press room.
IF you’d like to know what it feels like to start the most controversial minute’s music in Irish sporting history, there’s someone you can ask in the Phoenix Park.
SOME of you may have noticed a pretty distinctive-looking character on the Dublin football team in recent weeks.
THE crowd was still pretty sparse, the lights in Semple Stadium hadn’t been switched on, and your columnist was nestled about five rows from the back of the stand, wondering whether he should have stayed in the car himself and listened to the new Elbow CD.
QUESTION: when do you put away the All-Ireland trophy?
NOT A great week for clubs in rugby, if you look at the headlines.
ONLY yesterday morning one of the great cliches was set free once again and allowed to snort its way across breakfast tables everywhere.
PULSELESS and saurian have been my adjectives of choice for the last few days, having come across them somewhere or other the weekend before last.
YOU CAN get cynical in this game pretty easily. You meet idols with feet of clay, the clay ending somewhere in the mid-thigh region.
AT SOME point this morning a middle-aged man in Northern Ireland will look in his wardrobe for a particular item of clothing, one that’s kept for specific occasions.
ON THE surface, Saturday in Temple Hill was business as usual in the All-Ireland League.
GIVEN IT’S the first week of January we thought we’d spare you the usual – looking back at 2010, looking forward to 2011, you know the drill – and talk about aging a little bit.
THE Guardian’s elegant columnist Frank Keating had a typically sharp piece in his newspaper last week, a simple concept butexecuted with precision and wit.
ON ONE hand, writing about Munster playing at home in the Heineken Cup is the simplest assignment in the world.
THE grey-haired man looked down into the tar barrel. The fire was dying and the warmth ebbing away, so he drew his hooded top a little closer and rummaged in his bag.
YOUR columnist has been colder than he was yesterday in Pairc Ui Chaoimh, but not often. Thurles Sars and De La Salle played in what Sylvia Plath called the light of the mind: cold and planetary.
AFROS and handlebars on Tuesday, side-creases and smooth chins on Sunday.
THE eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that Tipperary outfit Aherlow collected a second Tipperary SFC title last weekend.
RAYMOND WILLIAMS, the Marxist scholar, had an interesting take, not on sport per se, but on people’s attitudes – one that could easily be applied to the non-stop erotic cabaret on offer across the water in the Premier League.
“LET’S HAVE a chat,” said the sports editor, who, newly returned from holidays, usually has a new broom air about him for the first couple of days back in harness.
THE departure of Seán Óg O hAilpín from the inter-county scene is one of those events that comes along to remind you that you’re getting older, not younger.
AT TIMES of turmoil like these, we usually go to Breandán O hEithir for consolation.
JUST LAST week Tony Blair visited Ireland to publicise his autobiography.
THE late Gerald Goldberg, Jewish Lord Mayor of Cork, lawyer and politician, was once asked rather pointedly by an interviewer if he had ever experienced prejudice in Ireland.
THE discussion about fencing Croke Park rumbles on and on, flooding the airwaves and the papers, rolling out, spilling across, very much like a... well, like a pitch invasion.
ANOTHER week, another one-side hurling semi-final?
YOU will have no problem identifying the Cork people in your vicinity today.
THE scene: the Burlington Hotel, Dublin, last Saturday night.
ANOTHER piece of childhood vanished for a lot of people over the weekend with the death of former world snooker champion Alex Higgins.
THE WEEKEND of the British Open, which is detailed elsewhere in these pages, is a perfect cue for talk of tradition and the past, though the (doubtless) heroics of various slacks-wearing, v-neck sporting super-athletes need not detain us here.
EVENTUALLY you surprise yourself by saying 30 years ago about your own life.
A COUPLE of weeks ago we noticed that there was a very unfortunate metaphor being trotted around by political pundits as Fine Gael was convulsed by a leadership challenge.
THE old cricket verse, At Lord’s, puts it better than we ever could: O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago.
THREE cheers for the man who suggested, long before Cork and Kerry even took the field in the Munster football championship this year, that a ‘Justice for Paul’ campaign be started to save time.
THERE is a seismic shift occurring in the realms of the GAA.
AND SO to Waterford on a sunny weekend. We spent most of Saturday afternoon at a GAA club function in the Crystal City, which was conducted half al fresco and half al taverna, if you’ll forgive the pidgin Italian. The al fresco part was the most enjoyable, given the variety of delights on offer.
NOEL Connors can go back. Maybe not way back, but far enough. He can recall watching the Waterford hurlers in 1998, though that’s a pretty prosaic description to use. Idols would be closer.
THE INK in the obituarists’ pens dried up at about the time Séan Óg O hAilpín encountered Declan Fanning underneath the covered stand in Páirc Uí Chaoimh yesterday.
HARD TO imagine, but we met someone during the week who actually spoke some sense about the free-to-air debate.
YOU MAY have noticed last week that Minister for Communications, Eamon Ryan, is thinking of designating Heineken Cup games as ‘free-to-air’ events, which means that Irish viewers would be able to watch same without going through Sky and having to pay.
NOT A good day for southern reds all round, then.
PROBABLY not the week to invoke the atmosphere, even in jest, but here we like to mix it up a little.
CONTROVERSY continues to bubble, if not quite rage, following Tiger Woods’ comeback at the Augusta Masters last week.
EVERYBODY we meet this past couple of days is interested in either a) getting to San Sebastian for Munster v Biarritz in one of the Heineken Cup semi-finals or b) getting to Toulouse for Leinster v Toulouse in the other semi-final.
I’M AFRAID there’s a bit of a problem with Munster’s Heineken Cup semi-final against Biarritz, which is now slated for Sunday, May 2, in San Sebastian, in northern Spain.
WHEN you’re in a hole the best thing to do is ... stop digging.
ERICH SEGAL died recently, classics professor and author of ‘Love Story’.
IRISH rugby supporters’ long wait for the Grand Slam goes on, following the late defeat by Scotland last weekend in Cardiff.
GIVEN that it was Brian O’Driscoll’s 100th cap last Saturday, and all of a sudden everybody has a Brian O’Driscoll story, we thought we’d share ours.
THERE are a lot of dressing-room doors looming large in our mind this weather.
THE image isn’t well-known to hurling followers.
GOD, you’d have thought we were past all that at this stage.
IF YOU’RE looking for a single word to sum up something that requires lengthy description in English, chances are you’ll find it in another tongue.
TUESDAY, and the Killiney Castle Hotel for the announcement of the Irish rugby team to play Italy in Croke Park tomorrow.
FIRST things first. The next time Munster play Northampton, in the Heineken Cup quarter-finals, there better not be fog.
THIS COLUMN doesn’t share that much with William Goldman, the acclaimed screenwriter responsible for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men and the Princess Bride.
NEWS will have reached you that former baseball star Mark McGwire recently confessed to using steroids, though news may not be quite the right word.
WELL, what else is there to talk about? If the national finals of the tiddly-winks federation were taking place this weekend, the organisers would be inundated with spectators, there’s so little sport on offer anywhere else, inside or outside.
FOR THE love of God can everyone keep IT DOWN back there? Shh. Less of the noise and so forth.
WELL, you’re probably familiar with the story but we’ll air it again anyway.
CHANCES ARE you still feel a bit queasy, a shade of green inching up around the gills this morning?
SO there we were sipping coffee in the Burlington Hotel lobby yesterday, waiting for the Springbok press conference to start. Wondering if we had the hotel right.
BECAUSE EVERY reader of this column is an intelligent cosmopolitan with his or her finger on the zeitgeist, you are all no doubt aware that next week sees the release of the new movie in the multimedia phenomenon known as the Twilight series, New Moon.
“I SUPPOSE,” said a sarcastic pal of our acquaintance, “you’ll be writing about your old pal Levi-Strauss this week and how his anthropological innovations underpinned modern French thought in a variety of fields.”
IT NOW appears that Kerry footballer Tadhg Kennelly has joined former NBA star Charles Barkley among the select group of sportspeople who have claimed they were misquoted in their own autobiographies.
FOR any sports club or organisation, producing a history is more than a way to link the past with the present. It’s a way to save the word ‘tradition’, a term which often becomes ossified through overuse and ends up scoured of any meaning.
IT WAS county final weather in Páirc Uí Chaoimh yesterday, and county final conditions.
THERE probably isn’t enough ink to do justice to an afternoon with Stuart Barnes. The former England international and Lion rolls out the stories and anecdotes — the late Keith Floyd figures in a few — in a steady stream.
IF YOU came down this direction to get refuge from the John O’Donoghue furore towards the front of the paper, don’t take flight because you see his name printed here.
THERE’S a moment in Ken Burns’ outstanding documentary series, ‘Baseball’, when Buck O’Neil, an old coach and manager, muses on the impossible glamour that was Manhattan in the 40s and 50s with a faraway look in the eye.
LAST weekend Nicholas O’Leary won the Irish Sailing Association Championships in Cork Harbour.
They’re already here. – Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, 1957.
THEY walk among us. They talk and eat and love as we do, and yet they are different.
BEYOND the ice baths and recovery sessions, the careful diet and early nights, the final whistle in an All-Ireland title still has the power to turn a man’s focus to mush.
IN ONE sense, South African rugby star Jean de Villiers didn’t time his arrival in Ireland that well.
IS THERE any irony to be mined from the tributes being paid to Cork County Board secretary, Frank Murphy, falling on the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II?
SPARE a thought this morning for the domesticated fauna of the state of Minnesota. News broke this week of an incident involving a goat, some paint and an electric razor which was enough to bring tears to the eyes.
LIAM HAYES patrolled the middle of the field for Meath for many years, and now his weekly column in The Sunday Tribune is essential reading.
LAST Wednesday, I rang a pal who’s seen more than his fair share of inter-county training sessions with a proposition.
WHERE did your preconceptions about Waterford-Kilkenny start and end last weekend?
THE first thing that probably strikes you looking at Munster’s best hurling team of the last 25 years – an initiative between the Munster Council of the GAA and the Irish Examiner – is the illustration of various eras within the province.
TONY BROWNE plays for Waterford against Kilkenny this Sunday in the All-Ireland SHC semi-final. He’s 36.
IMMORTALITY comes with a reddish crew cut. Waterford beat Galway yesterday by the width of a singlet, with John Mullane’s late, late point putting a spear in maroon hearts, as their manager said afterwards.
IN THE gloom outside Semple Stadium late last Saturday evening, the two buses were being boarded. A small group of enthusiastic Galway fans on one side cheering on their heroes, and knots of quiet Cork supporters on the other, watching their hurlers troop out of the ground.
YESTERDAY at half-time, Munster championship-winning captains from the last 25 years lined up in the middle of Semple Stadium.
WHEN the Labour Party subsumed Democratic Left into its numbers a couple of years ago, the photo opportunity of the day showed Labour boss Ruairi Quinn hugging Proinsias De Rossa in a gesture which could be interpreted as saying: welcome home, kid.
WE’RE going to kick off proceedings with the most unlikely call to arms you’re going to hear this week: let’s hear it for Peter de Villiers.
A LEADING economist has likened Premier League football clubs to investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns – financial giants which have recently gone bust.
ROBBIE KEANE thinks we should vote yes in the Lisbon Treaty referendum re-run, soon to come to a ballot box near you.
THAT put us rightly in our place.
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