Premier League deserves red card but the GAA is the only game in town

IT’S hard to get excited about the increasingly odious English Premier League soccer competition that begins this weekend, rioting and police response permitting.

Badly behaved players who get paid obscene amounts of money to regularly cheat, on and off the pitch, are not my idea of sporting heroes.

Yet the hype is relentless and we here in Ireland buy into it too, cheering players as heroes who are given frankly ridiculous pay packets of anything between £30,000 per week (that’s about £1.5 million each year) to sometimes as much as £200,000 each week (coming to about £10m), to dive, feign injury, and try deliberately to injure opponents.