Dubs deserve to keep full funding
How else to explain Dublin football boss Jim Gavin’s comments last week? A quick refresher: “What’s surprised and disappointed me is to hear, in the week of our semi-final game I think, that there was proposed cuts to our funding for games development in Dublin,” Gavin said. “I’ve great admiration and respect for them but this is very disappointing and is short-sightedness on the part of the financial review committee who have proposed to cut funding.
There were some comments in the summer in terms of the financial clout that Dublin have and it having a direct correlation with the senior county team’s success.
“Most of that money goes back into the clubs. I and any of the managers in Dublin have a very strict budget and outside of that, like, we do no overseas camps, take very little camps away.
“It surprised me (the funding suggestion). I suppose it’s a lack of understanding on some people’s behalf to suggest we have something that we don’t.”
While not all Gavin’s arrows hit their target — it’s a mistake to separate the funding of coaches who serve clubs from inter-county success, surely — his general theme raises tough questions for the GAA.
Every sports organisation needs to be strong and visible in the capital. The GAA is no exception. Dublin success in hurling and football is therefore a vindication of the GAA’s funding policy, surely?
In addition, the success of the Dublin County Board in raising additional revenue, whether via innovative commercial partnerships or lucrative sponsorship deals, is aided by the fact the capital is where most of the country’s wealth and commerce is concentrated. Yet the Dublin County Board would be (rightly) castigated if it wasn’t availing of those opportunities: isn’t this the definition of a no-win situation?
Gavin’s sideswipe about holiday camps and so forth is worth examining, too. When counties along the western seaboard organise training camps and so forth, there is no criticism, but rather admiration for having the organisation and the contacts — and organised diaspora, in some cases — which can facilitate that.
When the proposal to reduce Dublin’s funding was first aired at a meeting in Croke Park, the capital representatives were forcible in their opposition. It looks like they continue to be.
I can’t pretend to be the expert on American football I used to be, or even the expert I pretended to be when I lived in California.
Yes, there was the time I was invited to try out for a semi-pro team in Fremont, with an offer of a party at MC Hammer’s mansion afterwards to sweeten the deal, but I declined.
To be honest I didn’t leave the Golden State with a deep understanding of the nickel offense. Or is it defense? As a result, I wasn’t really aware of the man-dinosaur JJ Watt of the Houston Texans for a long time.
I clocked him, though, in one of the Hard Knocks series on Setanta, which show NFL teams as they prepare for the season ahead.
The Atlanta Falcons were gearing up to play the Texans in a pre-season game and one of the impressive Falcon rookies was warned about the ominous day he faced opposing Watt, who came rampaging across the screen to what a friend of my brother’s used to call “ominous Deus” music.
And of course Watt knocked the rookie back into the previous week.
Even though it was just a friendly.
A few days ago, I stumbled across a clip of JJ on the magazine site Slate: it was embedded in an article which purported to debate the physical training merits of the box jump, but really served to show JJ’s terrifying awesomeness, as he box-jumped almost 59½ inches. Vertically.
(Check it out here: http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/12/j_j_watt_box_jump_is_the_internet_s_favorite_exercise_a_worthwhile_training.html ).
JJ is six foot five and over 20 stone. I think I made the right call declining that invite to be a kicker.
Before I leave American sport, Mario Cuomo died last week in his 80s. Cuomo was Governor of New York State and one of the many men who were regarded in their politicalcareers, as possible Presidents.
Cuomo was a superb speaker – his speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention did serious damage to Ronald Reagan at a time when the President was riding high – but he was also a talented baseball player.
In 1952 he was signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates for $2,000 – a sum he invested in an engagement ring for his wife-to-be, and $900 more than another youngster got to sign with another team. Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees was the other player. Cuomo dropped out of baseball soon after signing on in Pittsburgh when he was struck behind the ear by a pitched ball.
Mantle stayed in the game and became a great, saying later: “The two dumbest scouts in baseball were the one who signed me and the one who signed him. The one who signed me gave me $1,100 and I went to the Hall of Fame. The one who signed him gave him $2,000 and he never got out of D league.”
The other evening, after a fourth sighting of It’s A Wonderful Life and a 17th appearance by Indiana Jones, I stumbled across Charlie Brooker’s recap of the year in current affairs on one of the Saxon channels.
What caught my eye in the documentary was an offhand reference to a new Adam Curtis documentary soon to air on the BBC.
Curtis is the man who made The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares, documentary films on various aspects of modern life — the unconscious in PR, the need for villains in political discourse, and so on.
In any case, Curtis’s new documentary is called Bitter Lake and is about the strange new approach to political discourse pioneered by a former conceptual artist now working for Vladimir Putin, how those discourses are now non-linear and often contradictory...
Curtis himself says part of it has to do with Afghanistan, for instance, and people’sperception of that country: “They couldn’t see the complex reality that was in front of them — because the stories they had been told about the world had become so simplified that they lacked the perceptual apparatus to see reality any longer.”
I won’t pretend it’s got a lot to do with sport, but it’s worth your time.
It airs on BBC Iplayer on January 25th.
