More hurling begets better hurling
The plethora of games in the Munster and Leinster championships has been a feast for hurling fans — long deprived of regular feeding, now there are almost too many games to take in properly, but nobody is complaining.
Not really, anyway. I see some sniping because not all the games are on free-to-air TV, though that line is not used regarding the People’s Game over the weekend, or the other People’s Game, which recently moved in part to Amazon.
That needn’t detain us. What’s interesting to this observer is the amount of new games, and the amount of new data that comes with it.
Scores and frees, puck-outs and goals, substitutions and minutes played, hooks-blocks-tackles: All of it.
In previous years the sample sizes were so small that teams and players had artificial records. Cork hadn’t lost a championship game to Tipperary in Cork for decades until recently, for instance, but that owed more to Munster championship fixture norms than to the quality of the teams involved. Still, there were no asterisks in the record books.
Now there’ll be enough games to pick out outliers and trends properly. Last week Christy O’Connor dissected sideline-cut scoring records in a typically sharp piece for the RTÉ website and duly noted discrepancies in the number of championship games played by the sideline experts of decades past compared to current exponents. Point one.
Point two: O’Connor also got technical on Joe Canning’s sideline technique, which brings me to a parallel issue.
For such a technical game, it’s surprising still that so much of the commentary on hurling is of the ‘hurl away mad’ variety; saying one side keeps ‘pushing up on the puck-out’, or ‘these sweepers have no place in our game’ is not analysis. In any shape or form.
That’s why a clear breakdown of how Canning makes contact with the sliotar when he’s taking a sideline was so valuable.
It’s unlikely that any nine-year-old would want to run out the door with a hurley and ball to emulate a player described as a ‘beautiful wristy hurler’.
If that nine-year-old read Canning, as quoted by O’Connor, saying “I make sure that I get a good long stretch into the ball, like an exaggerated genuflection... at that moment, I’m concentrating on striking just between the ball and the grass... at a 45-degree angle,” well, there’d be something concrete to emulate at least.
I see more of this coming into hurling, with the raw data provided by the new, additional championship games. There’s even a template for becoming a lot more granular when it comes to analysing the game.
In baseball the use of radar equipment and high-resolution cameras has led to a capacity to collect information about the game that previously belonged to science fiction. Two of the new key statistical categories are exit velocity and launch angle, for instance.
The names do exactly what it says on the tin: Exit velocity measures the speed with which the ball jumps off the bat when struck; launch angle tracks the direction the ball takes once the bat makes contact.
It doesn’t take much to imagine combining these statistical categories in hurling, particularly in free-taking and penalties, and the consequent dividends for coaching and improvement.
A kid playing U12 knows if he or she skies the ball upwards at too sharp an angle it won’t carry too far, and teaching the optimum angle for making contact with the sliotar is a lesson likely to improve their striking exponentially. That’s one reason the new championship format is welcome.
Apart from the visceral thrill of extra games, the more hurling there is,the better hurling will become. The stats will prove it.
Bourdain: Gentle soul, gentleman
Anthony Bourdain’s untimely passing last week gave a lot of people pause.
The cook and TV host first came to prominence almost 20 years ago with a behind-the-scenes essay for The New Yorker, later writing books such as Kitchen Confidential which revealed the messy reality of a professional kitchen without indulging in the studied camp of the ‘volcanic’ TV chef.
He also fronted superb travelogue/food shows which took him all over the world, but Bourdain was never a food snob.
In the Dublin show, he finished a night with taco chips in a chipper on Wexford Street which, with all due respect to the fast-food outlets in that part of the capital, is no-one’s idea of haute cuisine.
If you want to read Bourdain you can try Kitchen Confidential or Medium Raw, but his thrillers, Gone Bamboo and Bone In The Throat, I recommend highly for holiday reading.
Once, at a book signing, a child with leukaemia asked Bourdain where he should go to eat when he’d recovered.
Spain, said Bourdain. Later, Bourdain contacted the family and helped arrange a gastronomic tour of Spain for the little boy when he went into remission, but his involvement was private — a friend revealed it last week. Rest in peace.
World Cup 2018 — it’s all cash in the bank
Elsewhere in your Monday-morning package of goodness
you can read our World Cup preview. I only participated on the understanding I’d be sent to one of the establishments I mentioned, Arzak in San Sebastian: I’m sure “Of course you can, yeah,” is a promise I can take to the bank.
Maybe Fifa should do the decent thing and front up the money for my outing. The 2014 World Cup generated approximately €4.074bn in revenue for Fifa, and a profit in the neighbourhood of €2.2bn, a neighbourhood we can all agree is very respectable.
After the MasterCard shambles of last week 10,000 meals for needy people for each Messi/Neymar goal in the tournament, aka an actual Hunger Games — I thought you’d like to know just how much the Fifa-gnomes put into the Zurich credit union four years ago.
Raging LeBron is human after all
I admire LeBron James, despite that errant capital in the middle of his first name.
Great player and unafraid of Donald Trump, rocks that goatee, never mind the photographic recall of games.
Why did the news that he broke his hand in a rage in the dressing room after the first play-off game this year cheer me up?
In a direct contradiction of James’s status as the ultimate team player and on-court sage, his anger at a teammate’s confusion in the closing stages of Game 1 led him to hit a blackboard in the dressing room, forcing him to don a soft cast in the remaining three games.
I have nothing against a man who performed so admirably a) over 15 years in the NBA, and b) in an Amy Schumer movie, but the fetishisation of James is enough at times to make you fan your armpits.
Happy to know, therefore, that beyond the pilates and VersaClimber there’s still a guy who’ll do something rash in the heat of the moment.
