Bringing down the house

ALL that was missing from last weekend’s All-Ireland football semi-final was Jim McGuinness’ trademark jet black curls and goatee, thus giving our commentators their archetypal GAA arch villain!

If nothing else, Jim and his ‘Tir Connell Globe Trotters’ certainly challenged the status quo of our game this year. Considering the level of public criticism and disdain, Jim must feel that somewhere along the way he had also asked the taxpayer to bail him out of a multi-million euro land deal!

Donegal and Dublin’s stand-off reminded me of a great book I read a couple of years back, ‘Bringing Down the House’. The author, Ben Mezerich, tells the story of how a group of MIT students from Boston formed a blackjack/21 card counting team, with the aim of winning huge amounts of money in the casinos of Las Vegas.