Michael Moynihan: An All-Ireland final week with no debates

How can you have an effective debate about the match-ups next Sunday via Zoom?

Less than a week now to the All-Ireland hurling final, and at least we know for definite who’ll be playing in it, unlike the football equivalent (ducks, grabs tin helmet).

Traditionally this means the coming week will be shortened by various quizzes and quandaries, frenzied speculations which help supporters of both counties to count down the days to the game itself.

Those arguments seem of lower quality this time round, however.

One could blame Covid’s malign influence on social gatherings in part. How can you have an effective debate about the match-ups next Sunday via Zoom?

Perhaps this also explains why one of the few debates bubbling under ahead of the All-Ireland hurling final seems so wrongheaded.

It’s a debate which centres on Cork choosing not to start the joint top scorer in the 2021 championship from play next Sunday. In the biggest game of the year.

Shane Kingston’s display last Sunday week against Kilkenny has led to a discussion about whether or not Cork will start him against Limerick this coming Sunday.

Kingston came off the subs’ bench to hit seven points from play in the All-Ireland semi-final, as well as creating a goal chance for Alan Connolly. In total Kingston has scored 3-9 from play this season.

And yet some people seem to think he won’t start the All-Ireland senior hurling final?

As an example of how outlandish this notion is, just consider another Cork forward.

Jack O’Connor’s scorching goal against Kilkenny in the semi-final has already elevated him to cult status among Rebel supporters, who would probably march en masse on Pairc Ui Chaoimh if there were any suggestion that he wouldn’t start the All-Ireland final.

Yet O’Connor has scored less than Kingston from play this season.

There’s not much in it - at 2-9 O’Connor’s tally is just one goal behind the Douglas man - and as an indication of the form both men are in, consider that the last time a Cork player won Young Hurler of the Year it was Setanta Ó hAilpín, who ended the 2003 season with 3-7 from play.

It’s understandable that this kind of speculation is bubbling along because of the striking lack of topics we have to tussle with this week.

You could argue that Limerick have done pub lawyers (if such exist in the age of Covid) a huge disservice by progressing to a swift resolution of the Peter Casey situation: traditionally one would have expected that such a controversy would roll on into the wee small hours before the All-Ireland hurling final itself, entertaining us all with tales of dramatic late-night missions to disciplinary hearings in the capital.

Instead, Casey was cleared so early we barely got to pontificate on the rights and wrongs of his case(y). Where’s the entertainment in that?

It’s the same with the referee appointment, often a source of some grumbling and grousing (even if that’s rarely been as entertaining as the football appointments, which has allowed some past observers free rein with their paranoia).

This time, however, Fergal Horgan’s handling of the Cork-Kilkenny semi-final, in which he kept control of the proceedings while also allowing the game to flow, made his selection a foregone conclusion.

As a consequence, the search for talking points has fixed upon Shane Kingston, positioning him as a potential David Fairclough (ask your elders about the reference).

The fact that Kieran Kingston, Shane’s father, is the Rebel manager adds an attractive hue to all of this as a subject for discussion, of course, but that’s just a distraction.

Cork aren’t going to hold a player on the bench until he can come on - in his first All-Ireland senior final, against the best team of the last five years, who are forewarned about the threat he poses - and then expect him to win that final.

If Shane Kingston doesn’t start next Sunday’s decider I’ll eat a hat of my choosing. And broadcast same on the Irish Examiner’s social channels.

An Irish Field of Dreams?

I see that last week Major League Baseball had a Field of Dreams game.

By this I mean two professional teams - the New York Yankees and the Chicago White Sox - played a regular-season game in a near-replica of the Iowa venue in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams.

(I’m not going to get into an earnest description of Field of Dreams - “Likeable farmer has psychotic episode on tractor, builds playing area,” - but don’t pretend you haven’t watched it.)

Anyway Kevin Costner, the star of the movie, introduced the players for last week’s game, who entered the playing area through the corn on the perimeter, as happens in the movie: the 7,832 spectators saw Chicago win an exciting game 9-8. Even if the game hadn’t been an entertaining one, it was a stunning coup. Baseball has been overtaken by (American) football and basketball in terms of popularity, but heritage and tradition are its trump cards, and doubling down on them cast the sport in a rosy glow last week.

Lessons there for Irish sport? Maybe.

The ‘Olympics for Ireland’ countdown

Congrats to Kellie Harrington and all our Olympians, those lately arrived back on our shores as well as those who left last week for the Paralympics, which begin later this month.

The aftermath of the Olympics often includes some reflective thinking, and some interesting points were raised in recent days about the next scheduled Games in three years’ time.

Those Olympics will be held in Paris, and for the first time the projected construction costs - €3.3bn - will be lower than the estimated cost of holding the event itself - €3.9bn. According to current figures it will be cheaper than the London, Rio and Tokyo games, though some estimates for the final bill for Tokyo are hovering around €20bn, so Paris’s relative frugality may not be the towering achievement it first appears.

An element of common sense being introduced in Olympic planning is welcome: some facilities are planned for the often-troubled St Denis suburb north of Paris, with a view to retaining them for public use after the Olympics.

But the advent of a relatively affordable Olympics will surely get Irish minds thinking.

As a result, I await with interest the first acknowledged sighting of an ‘Olympics for Dublin’ speech. A dubious prize of questionable quality to the reader who spots the first entrant in this particular discipline.

The mesmerising WG Sebald

Tasty incoming treat alert. I see there is now a biography of WG Sebald on offer.

The author of books such as The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo and Austerlitz, Sebald was an obscure academic until he started publishing his mesmerising mixes of travelogue and memoir.

Now Speak, Silence: In Search of WG Sebald by Carole Angier arrives to tell us more about him, 20 years after his death in a car crash.

Among the titbits?

The Rings of Saturn was 2,000 pages long in its original draft but Sebald whittled it down to around 400.

One to savour, definitely.

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