Don’t come gunning for me, I’m only an All Star selector
"I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”
Opening paragraph of The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
It’ll be about seven o’clock in the evening, late October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills of the Dublin mountains (or maybe not). I’ll be wearing a monkey suit I haven’t worn for 12 months, a dickie bow that may or may not fasten properly, black shoes and whichever pair of socks is on top of the pile. I’ll be neat, clean, reasonably well shaved, sober and reeking of Cacharel Pour Homme.
Next Friday I’ll be everything the well dressed All Stars attendee ought to be.
Yes, I’ll be going to the Convention Centre in Dublin along with hundreds of others. Who knows, play your cards right and I might even bring you along as my “And Guest”. I’ve this theory, y’see, that every GAA fan in the county should get to attend the All Stars once.
It’s an interesting night because you end up seeing players and managers you only ever see on TV or from a distance at a match.
“Oh look, there’s Mickey Harte!” “Isn’t Marc Ó Sé/Diarmuid Connolly/Michael Murphy a lot bigger/smaller in real life?” “I don’t know any of the hurlers without their helmets.” Etc.
You may well encounter a particular favourite in the toilets and exchange some polite meaningless words. Chances are you’ll get an autograph from the star of your choice or snatch a selfie with them. You’ll go home and dine out on it for ages and show the selfie to all your pals. You’ve been to the All Stars. A second visit is unnecessary. After the first they all bleed into one.
The switch of the big night from Citywest to the Convention Centre has brought a minor culture shock. The Convention Centre is several levels of cavern; Citywest was more intimate and personal and led to all kinds of high jinks. A decade ago the sight of players being dragged off journalists who’d annoyed them during the season was not totally unknown, while during the mid-noughties there always seemed to be a few girls from Ulster who’d managed to wangle an invite, were there with the express intention of snaring themselves a Tyrone or Armagh footballer and invariably seemed to get tipsy and tearful long before the end of the night.
One year at the very apogee of the Celtic Tiger I was departing at around 4am when I passed a table that had been abandoned but was still full of untouched Fat Frog cocktails. There was about ten of them standing there, at – say — €18 a pop. Those were the days.
If you see me there on Friday please take it easy on me. I’m an All Star selector and I have been for years now. And no, we don’t get everything right, but we don’t get it too wildly wrong either. My line of argument, frequently expressed down the years, is that if the selectors manage to pick a team with 12 players on it that any random punter would pick, then we’ve done our job. After that it’s subjective.
What would the selectors know, it’s occasionally asked? To which the reply is, we know what we’ve seen and what we’ve seen is plenty. This year I saw four matches in the Leinster championship, all five in the Munster championship, two qualifiers and all six matches in the All-Ireland series. Before that there’d been a league match per Sunday, culminating in a quarter-final, the semi-finals and the final. The attendance records of most of the other selectors are broadly similar. You may say that after all of that we still can’t tell our posterior from our ulna and radius, and that’s fair enough. But please don’t imagine we haven’t accumulated the evidence.
There will be hard-luck stories on Friday. There always are, a situation that will remain the case until some boffin designs a foolproof algorithm that identifies the best 15 players, line by line, in each code. I’m hardly pre-empting matters by suggesting that winning an award on the half-back line on the hurling team will be pretty easily achieved — it was not exactly a standout summer for men in that sector – whereas at least one deserving contender will lose out in the full-back line. The football team will have similar swings and roundabouts. Thus crumbles the cookie.
So if Cork don’t get a single All Star despite being Munster champions, and Tipperary get more than Kilkenny despite losing to them in both the league and the All-Ireland finals, don’t come gunning for me. I’m only a selector. With a dickie bow that may or may not fasten properly.
Not a lot of people noticed this but there was another Waterford man doing the rounds on Twitter last Tuesday.
An hour or two before Ferrybank’s finest did the needful in Gelsenkirchen it emerged that Seamus Prendergast had retired from inter-county hurling. You may remember him. Big lad. Red helmet. Usually wore the number 11.
He wasn’t one of the stars and his stickwork was never the slickest and he couldn’t do the things with the sliotar that Paul Flynn did and he didn’t have the magnetism of Mullane or Big Dan. But Flynner and Mullane and Big Dan couldn’t have done what they did had Prendergast – the incarnation of the strong, silent type — not been there working hard and putting himself about and passing them the bullets. Nor would Waterford have won four Munster titles. If John O’Shea did the state some service last week, Seamus Prendergast did their mutual county considerable service for the past decade.
That might not have been a spectacular victory for Together Forever in the two-year-old fillies’ mile at Newmarket on Friday but it was an engaging one.
She got the distance so well and hung on so gamely that a trip well in excess of a mile will surely be her thing next year.
“Start at a Guineas and go on to an Oaks,” mused Joseph O’Brien afterwards. Sounds like a plan.
Shane Long: Minimal contribution to 8-0 win.
Perhaps it was harder for Shane Long in Southampton’s 8-0 victory on Saturday than it seemed, what with Pelle playing ahead of him as a central striker – and Sunderland bearing more gifts than the Greeks. John O’Shea suffering a Gelsenkirchen hangover, Vito Mannone heaving shots over his line and the Unblessed Vergini scoring the own-goal of the decade.
But no goals and no assists in his 65 minutes on the field? Ronald Koeman may have spent yesterday reflecting £12m ought to buy a little more than that.
