Wading into the endless Gaelic debate
It’s hard to see why the dissection runs in such familiar, predictable grooves. Congress, rule changes, player numbers, managers. You’d imagine that with the array of brains focused on football that something different would be unearthed, but no: it’s too early in the season to judge, it’s the reality of the way the game is played, it’s all Donegal’s fault.
Honestly, can’t anyone think outside the box?
what you are witnessing in Gaelic football is what happened in soccer in the late 50s and early 60s, when the realisation dawned that lining out man for man in a predetermined formation was a gentleman’s agreement which only required one team opting out in order for it to perish.
Bringing players back to defend in greater numbers than the forwards they’re nominally marking isn’t a sign of the apocalypse but rather an indication of sporting maturity.
Maturity isn’t the same thing as entertainment, but the interesting thing for this observer is that the conversation now taking place about Gaelic football tactics is about 40 years late.
unfortunately for Gaelic football, it is in direct comparison with a (very broadly) similar game, often played in the same stadia, which is far more fluid and attractive to watch.
Improvements in fitness and conditioning in hurling have increased the reliance on skill rather than reduced it; if a player does not have an instantaneous, adhesive first touch in hurling, then he won’t survive at the top level.
In Gaelic football, marquee skills such as clean fielding are less efficient because a sky-scraping catch can be negated by swarming on landfall, and given the way the game is refereed, the free can go either way.
Fifty-fifty is an incentivising percentage for the swarmers.
In this particular strand of the debate, the gleeful, mock-sympathy expressed by hurling snobs about football’s current predicament is an entertaining but not entirely fruitful area of study.
itearly enough to judge. Legislating because of one game, Dublin versus Derry, would be a mistake, but since when is it one game? Does anyone honestly think that last weekend in Croke Park was a nadir? You mightn’t actually be able to spot the nadir from that viewing point, but the day of a 0-1 to 0-0 scoreline can’t be far away.
The only guarantee is that when it happens, the usual suspects will still be telling you that it isn’t about entertainment, and suggesting something could be done at Congress, maybe, to improve things...
The poor souls who follow me on Twitter may have noticed a new development in my ‘followers’ — having favourited a few exercise tweets and followed the likes of Men’s Health, I have suddenly been inundated with followers such as Lifting is Life, dispensing cat-poster wisdom such as, ah, (checks quickly) ‘haters gonna hate’, or some such.
Mind you, one of those followers did point me towards a development which gave just the minutest wave of nausea: the arrival of the meat energy bar.
This is now a thing (apologies for the Twitter talk) in US gyms, which means it is coming to a workout station near you sometime soon.
Mostly bison or beef, apparently, the meat-loaded energy bar is typically organic, gluten-free and contains no added sugar. So if you detect a beef belch from the guy on the next treadmill at some stage in the coming months, you heard it here first. Just don’t ask for fries with that.
Bad news for fans of Joseph Mitchell, apparently. The man who had what can only be described as the greatest assignment in the history of journalism — namely, to stroll around Manhattan and environs and write about what interested him for the New Yorker magazine — is the subject of a new book.
So far so good. However, the author of that new book, Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel, has discovered that Mitchell’s non-fiction masterpieces weren’t entirely non and contained a fair bit of fiction. Mitchell conflated characters and sometimes invented material, contrary to reputable usage.
Does it affect his standing? You wouldn’t get away with that kind of flouting of journalistic standards nowadays, clearly, but in one review I saw Janet Malcolm, significantly enough, put up a reasoned defence of Mitchell’s casual approach to hard and fast notions of non-fiction (I say significantly because Malcolm is famous for saying, ‘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.’).
I’d have to see the evidence before making my mind up. Right now, I still stand over ‘The Old House At Home’ as an all-time favourite.
You’re aware of the fast-approaching marriage equality referendum — how you could not be, unless you were tunnelling from Cornwall to Fastnet for the last few months — and aware also, no doubt, of the sensitivity being shown by many large groups and organisations.
I was intrigued, given that context, to see a large organisation take a stand in the US in a similar situation. Recently the state of Indiana passed legislation, Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which has offended many who see it as potentially giving businesses in the state the legal right to refuse service to LGBT customers.
One large sporting organisation criticised the act — “We will not embrace nor participate in exclusion or intolerance” — and thus joined the ranks of the NBA, WNBA and NCAA in opposing the measure. That large sporting organisation is NASCAR, which runs the vast car-racing circuit associated with the southern states. The good ol’ boy image of the NASCAR has stood the test of time. Yet the organisation’s strong opposition to the Indiana legislation shows that times change, and so do large organisations, when it’s the right thing to do. The referendum takes place here on May 22.
