Danger in allowing athletes to just talk

In October 1983, as she sat down to write her 301st column for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Diane Shah had a dream.

“Having just written my 300th column, I find I am besieged by athletes begging me to interview them. Yesterday morning, no sooner had I reached my office when the phone rang.

“‘Yeah’,” I said. ‘Er, Miss Shah? This is Steve Carlton with the Philadelphia Phillies. I was wondering …’

“‘I haven’t even had my coffee yet’, I grumbled. ‘Don’t you guys ever sleep?’

“‘I’m sorry,” said Carlton. ‘It’s just that I was, er, wondering if you would have time today to interview me’.”

The rest of a funny column continues to turn tables and is worth checking out online. But 31 years on, the dream is no nearer reality.

Journos are still chasing chat like dogs after cars. Maybe the whole thing is set up back to front.

You could interpret an eventful week in Gaelic football chat in two ways.

On one hand, it might be safer to stop talking about Gaelic football altogether, such was the horror and outrage in Mayo at a few remarks from Cork about tactical fouling; the horror and outrage on Des Cahill’s face and across the land as Martin McHugh attempted to compare two footballers; and the horror and outrage in Paul Grimley’s house at sinister attempts to infringe his basic human rights by asking him questions about football.

A sport this sensitive to the contaminative power of talk might benefit from a long and reflective silence.

Or, you might decide that it was great gas altogether and look forward to more weeks when the people talking had something to say that they wanted us to hear.

Might chat be that bit more interesting in a buyer’s market?

“Hello, Miss Shah. Have you got a few minutes to discuss how it’ll be a tough test Sunday against a seasoned team, but we’ll be giving it everything?”

“No, sorry. Bit busy here picking my fantasy league team.”

“Ok, what about passing on a slightly incendiary message to Sunday’s referee?”

“Oh all right, shoot...”

What made this week different; loquacious and reluctant talkers alike were all, presumably, selling something.

McHugh might have been auditioning for a long-term Dunphy slot on The Sunday Game — a role, unfortunately for him, for which there is plenty of competition.

You would need to be operating at an advanced, near-Mourinho level in the area of mind games and trickery to figure out exactly what James Horan was selling, with his lecture on shame and disgrace. But he was up to something, you can be sure of that.

Grimley was probably plugging away at the mind games too, though he might still be back on the Big Sam chapter. Whatever his game is, in telling us he had the right not to tell us anything, he told us more than enough to be getting on with. So we must surely shy away from any attempts within the GAA to find ways of making Armagh talk. We will hear nothing any good with that approach. And maybe, indeed, we should stop coaxing anyone to talk and wait, instead, for the phone to ring, or for fellas to seek out a microphone.

Unfortunately, there are pitfalls to this approach too.

“I’m going to rip Dustin’s head off. Dustin thinks it’s all talk but when he wakes up with his nose plastered on the other side of his face, he’s gonna know it’s not all talk.”

If you simply give athletes a platform to get their message out, you could wind up in a situation where this kind of thing, from Conor McGregor, is being cited as evidence that we are dealing with one of the nation’s finest orators — a genuine master in the trash talk big leagues.

No, for the new way to work, you’d still need Diane Shah to occasionally hang up the phone. “Not today, Conor. I’ve got human rights too.”

Blowing full-time on career Webb’s best call yet

Howard Webb was a huge beneficiary of the disconcerting rise in the profile of football referees, but also a victim of Alex Ferguson’s tireless and very public search for strong referees; that is referees strong enough to give all the decisions he wanted in Manchester United’s favour.

The viewing public, used to Fergie getting what he wanted, could only assume, so they made jokes. And they didn’t even know, at that stage, about the belt hanging in Fergie’s study.

In a recent interview with You Are The Ref, Webb’s father Bill had a theory why his son didn’t make it as a player.

“Self-preservation was the thing with Howard. If he went to head a ball and the centre half or the centre forward went up against him, I knew who was going to win it.”

In the latter years of his refereeing career, Webb appeared to have fallen back on his first instincts and tried to keep out of harm’s way as much as possible.

A study of his decisions, carried out by The Daily Telegraph in February, found no club bias, but found that Webb, since the 2010 World Cup final, was less likely to make ‘big decisions’ that influence games (late penalties and early sendings off etc.).

He was also less likely to award penalties against the home team, or send home players off.

In short, perhaps Webb was no longer quite as strong a referee, which is what Fergie was after all along.

Rugby is ugly, but it has served equality

In her new book, The Breakaway, retired British Olympic champion cyclist, Nicola Cooke describes the reality of competing at the top level of women’s sport.

With one chance, annually, to get on TV during the world championship road race, she noted a problem.

“The male commentators never followed the women’s sport.

“To get around this uncomfortable unfamiliarity, the commentators tended to talk about something they knew about — the men’s race coming up next.”

We heard this week of a “watershed moment in Irish sport” and of “the greatest ever result by an Irish team”.

Of course, you feel for the women involved — that they had to pack up the sports they enjoyed, like hockey and sprinting and Gaelic football, and take up this unsightly practice to gain some recognition.

But if anything can change perceptions and pecking orders here, you suspect it will be their progress, given the hyperbolic grip the sport now has.

In that, maybe the Ugly Game will finally do some service.

HEROES & VILLAINS

STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

Seán Mac Eil: Credit to the Mayo News for carrying the wisdom of the Mayo Bord na nÓg secretary on certain GAA clubs’ tolerance for a loose cannon in their backroom ranks: “If clubs have a fella they think should be locked up or tied to the gate, they shouldn’t have him involved with teams.”

Damien Richardson, pictured above: “Sitting contemplatively under the bowing branches of my heavily-laden pear tree…” Rico’s first programme notes back in harness didn’t disappoint.

HELL IN A HANDCART

Mark Cole: The BBC exec set the bar high for new signing Phil Neville by telling us that “Alan Shearer has established himself as one of the top pundits in the UK.”