Retirement question the dirtiest of all for sports journalists
Brendan Cummins was the most recent departure, but Noel O’Leary beat him to retirement by 24 hours. Tomás Ó Sé hung up his boots the previous week.
Tasty may not do them justice, on reflection.
It’s a tough call to make for any player, though at least the three examples cited above had lengthy, fulfilled careers and were able to leave on their own terms, rather than having the end-game dictated by injury.
It can be a tough call for a journalist to make too, by the way. If you know a player well enough to ring him up and ask about his future plans, then you’re probably on friendly terms with him at least.
It’s the original sin of sports journalism to consider yourself a friend of the people you’re writing about, but certainly there are categories of distance.
There are players you can chat away to on the phone; there are players who’ll respond to a message, anyway; and there are sportspeople who would probably decontaminate the SIM card if they thought it had been stained by a call or text from a journalist.
The sportspeople from that first category are the ones you end up having a tricky conversation with.
You start out with a few non sequiturs about Walter White, you kick on with a slagging over that tweet they sent about the San Francisco 49ers, and then you find yourself manoeuvring the question into the conversation with the ease of a drunk assembling an IKEA sofa-bed.
“So . . . next year . . . story?”
Here is the classic contradiction. The man you are speaking to has devoted years of his life to an ideal, like a Buddhist monk, though with a good deal more violence and bad language than that accompanying the Buddhist monks of my imagination.
He has stood in front of vast crowds and known the ripple of growing thunder through a stadium in appreciation of his deeds.
For years, perfect strangers have nodded at him as he has walked past on the street, pointed him out to their children, approached him in the aisle in Tesco for an autograph.
And now here you are, with the call that heralds the end. If not now, soon.
However he saw it finishing, he surely didn’t envisage it coming as a reporter cleared his throat on a scratchy mobile connection and asked him about ‘next year’.
If truth be known, the reporter didn’t envisage that either. Janet Malcolm said one time, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
That’s a little over-the-top in terms of describing a routine phone call: you’re only inquiring about someone’s plans. It’s a legitimate question.
Why is it you feel a little dirty afterwards?
Not to belabour the point or anything, but I see Nate Silver had something to say during the week about journalists and statistics.
Readers of this column will know of our fondness for Silver, whose “rock-star status in the world of data journalism” is now well established.
That quote comes from a Poynter Institute story about a talk Silver gave. The Poynter Institute is devoted to improving journalism and they outlined some of the interesting points Silver made about hacks using numbers.
Predictably enough for someone who focuses so much on concrete data, Silver suggested journalists question their assumptions, and broaden their pool of sources, which is fairly standard advice.
What was telling for this observer was the importance Silver attached to context: giving the facts and figures you cite the necessary background.
The difficulty, of course, is that if you give the appropriate exposure to the context you risk drowning the facts you’d like to zero in on (hence, incidentally, the smart title of Silver’s book, The Signal And The Noise.
Don’t worry: I’m not about to resurrect my long-standing obsession with counting wides in GAA games (for which much thanks — sports ed.).
But it does tend to loop us back to the original query that tends to be fired at statistics in sport.
If you give everything the necessary qualifier, how valuable are they?
By that I mean simply that in most open field games — soccer, rugby, GAA games — there’s a lot of broken-field activity compared to baseball, which is so beloved of sports statisticians.
Whereas the context is eternal and unchanging in baseball, and gives an ongoing basis for comparisons, that doesn’t apply in others. Why? Context.
This centre-forward has lost three puck-outs in a row. Why? Well, his opponent beat him superbly for one, but the other two were landed just beyond the two of them and neither were favoured to win it, though if you look at it that’s down to the goalkeeper taking those two puck-outs too quickly. According to the stats, should the team stop using him as a target?
Here’s an out-half with a 100% record kicking from over 50m: but he’s only taken two of them, and both of those came on his home field with a strong wind behind him.
Does that mean he shouldn’t take 50m kicks at goal in away games? Or that he should?
I see Martin McHugh was out during the week about Gaelic football, or Martin ‘Football Is Back’ McHugh, as I like to call him.
The Donegal man had a good deal to say about football in Cork, suggesting that new manager Brian Cuthbert was looking at a massive weights programme for his players.
These are the Cork players known for being massive, of course.
Unless by ‘massive’ he meant a lot of work geared to slimming them down.
Maybe.
McHugh also said that Brian Hurley, the Castlehaven forward who scored 0-12 in the Cork SFC final last Sunday against Nemo Rangers, wouldn’t have enjoyed the same freedom in the northern province.
Ulster. Which supplied exactly one county to the All-Ireland semi-finals, Tyrone, who were beaten by nine points.
In fairness, they supplied four counties to the quarter-finals. Tyrone beat Monaghan by two points; Kerry beat Cavan by six points; and Mayo beat Donegal by 16 points, a game in which Cillian O’Connor of Mayo got 3-4.
Martin’s probably right. If the game had been played in Ulster then O’Connor would probably have been restricted to just the 12 points.
Late to the party here, but indulge me: I see there was quite the fluttering about a brief exchange between RTÉ’s Tony O’Donoghue and temporary Republic of Ireland manager Noel King last Tuesday night.
What yours truly took out of it was the undercurrent of Noel not being someone to be trifled with, following a long League of Ireland career.
This gained credence with suggestions that he and Eamon Dunphy had had some kind of set-to when the latter fell back into the domestic game after his time with Millwall. I feel compelled to point out here that as a Lough Rovers old boy I doubt there would be much going backwards in Tony O’Donoghue.
Anyone who clashed with the fine Lough team which also featured players like Pat O’Donoghue, Bertie Lane and Stephen O’Donovan would be willing to lay bets that maybe Tony wasn’t the man who got away lightly.
