Learning to play in the moment
They might continue to make the same demands, but now, thanks to Darragh Ó Sé, we have a better way to get the measure of these fellows.
Praising Kerry manager Éamonn Fitzmaurice, Darragh wrote: “I always say that if I shot somebody in the morning, Fitzy would be the first call I’d make. He’d know what to do and how to handle it.” Think about it. You know, instinctively, whose numbers you’d want.
Who’d ring Roy Hodgson, for example, in that kind of emergency? Unless you figured his panic might somehow create the opportunity to frame him. You’d be surprised, on the other hand, if Mourinho doesn’t have a dedicated mobile for such calls.
Tomorrow’s pair. Would Cody go to the gardaí straight away, or take care of business like Winston Wolf? Maybe it would depend on how you hurled the last day, or hurled that evening in training.
Eamon O’Shea? You’d definitely have to sit down and tease out why you pulled the trigger and what that told you about yourself. And before long, you should be in a calm enough place to either turn yourself in or to stop wasting time and ring Fitzy.
How does this help us call the final? We need not worry about Kilkenny’s state of mind on Cody’s watch. But O’Shea has returned serenity to a Tipperary panel who may as well have gone on a murderous rampage, such was the reaction, in some quarters, to defeat by Limerick.
All year, he has fielded every enquiry about pressure with a look of compassion for his misguided inquisitor, greeting triumph and disaster as imposters in an arena where all that matters is finding purity in your hurling.
It was the right thing to do. The way to handle it.
You’d nearly believe him if it wasn’t for the explosions of release in those Mick Shannon windmill celebrations when Tipp hit the net.
You could almost believe him this week too, as he casually greeted the possibility of defeat and waved off its relevance. “The result might fall one way or the other, but I’m not losing any sleep over it.”
He even assured us last year’s qualifier defeat in Nowlan Park was a joy to be part of. The message has dampened a county’s natural hubris; perhaps best encapsulated in the work of Tipp’s poet laureate Johnny B. In 2010, Johnny was ‘throwin’ a party for Liam MacCarthy’; this time he’ll only go as far as to speculate that “this could be our year”. A serious attitude adjustment.
But does it suit them? What of other tilted rivalries? Bolt-Blake, Kerry-Dublin, Taylor-Barney. Sampras-Agassi, which wound up 4-1 in major finals. As Agassi once put it: “No matter how much you win, if you’re not the last one to win, you’re a loser. And in the end I always lose, because there is always Pete.”
Agassi got preoccupied with Sampras. The night before their last match, the 2002 US Open final, Agassi lost sleep. “I can’t help but think of all the different times I thought I was going to beat Pete, knew I was going to beat Pete, needed to beat Pete, only to lose,” he recalled in his autobiography Open.
Agassi remembered the time he ate across a restaurant from Sampras, watched him leave, collect his car from the valet and drive off. He rushed outside to coax truth out of the young lad. Forty mil in prize money and Pete tipped you one buck? “As I fall asleep the night before perhaps our final final, I vow that the world will see our differences tomorrow.” It had got a little personal.
Sampras had this to say about that match. “It was all about the moment for me, it was all about the tennis we would play over the next two or three hours, and that was always how I liked it best.”
The Cody mantra. The present moment. The next match needs no context.
As Agassi went to the net next day for the handshake, he’d seen that expression before. “Here’s a buck, kid. Bring my car around.”
Other years, Eamon O’Shea might want his players to remember the look on JJ or Jackie’s face the last time, or the time before. The savage hunger. But maybe he doesn’t want them preoccupied by Kilkenny. Maybe he’d rather they remember their own part in those great shootouts. It seems the right thing to do. The way to handle it.
Kenny Cunningham: Correct on the igNoble chase, for me. Isn’t international football becoming irrelevant enough without stripping away more of its last relevance; identity?
The Reply All button: Even egg-chasers have feelings. Surely email application providers could have prevented the unfortunate day they would get hurt.
Paul McGinley: Only five assistants appointed so far. They’ve to deal with two lads each. Hope he’s not taking shortcuts.
When Monday’s transfer deadline ticked by, what else passed with it?
As the crowds gathered to wave adult paraphernalia and roar obscenities behind Sky reporters; you couldn’t help think we were witnessing the last, grim belches of the bantz age.
Then, Radamel Falcao’s three-car convoy drove us far beyond old romantic notions.
When a guy qualifies for the Champions League three years in a row, then immediately leaves for a club not in the Champions League, there is almost an admirable honesty in his chase of cash.
The United fans didn’t care that, two days earli\er, the Bernabeu was the theatre of his dreams. They just looked forward to seeing him score goals. We’re all in a more mature place.
Tony Stewart returned to a Nascar track last weekend. So I did what I’d avoided over the past three weeks, I watched footage of the crash. The sanitised one, which pauses before the horrific impact.
To recap; Stewart was racing a sprint-car event in upstate New York a month ago, when he spun Kevin Ward Jr’s car into the track wall.
The video stops with Ward, a 20-year-old kid, marching towards oncoming traffic to remonstrate. A split-second later, he will be dead.
In the last shot on the video, we see some of the things that make up the great sportspeople. Passion. Rage. Bravery. Pride. Invulnerability. The very same things that can undo the best of them, but rarely at a cost such as this.
It is the most terrible, sobering waste.
