Michael Moynihan: Time off and the chocolate digestive

Time off - There’s slightly too much coffee, and far too many Dark Chocolate McVitie’s Digestives. And terrible daytime television

Being off work for a while can be soothing. There’s slightly too much coffee, and far too many Dark Chocolate McVitie’s Digestives. And terrible daytime television. And a dressing gown.

And there’s time, of course.

Time, which can act like a concertina, squeezing and stretching in alternate bursts, and what I noticed — when not indulging my late discovery of The Professionals TV show — was the value of a slightly detached perspective. When you’re not involved on a daily basis in scratching through the sports news, even as that news happens, your outlook is different.

It’s surprising how much time influences your perception all round — or rather, how our submission to the organising and agreed principles of time shape our perception.

The great Jill Lepore recently wrote a New Yorker piece on efforts through the ages to free us from the brutal hold of the seven-day week, for instance (‘How the week organises and tyrannises our lives’), which included a typically sharp aside on how sports fixtures conformed to a weekly schedule as far back as the 1850s, when “... New York’s baseball clubs played games on Mondays and Thursdays, Tuesdays and Fridays, or Wednesdays and Saturdays, because they shared a field”.

In my short period on the sidelines it was interesting to see — from the outside — how narratives flare and flicker, with dominant themes rising and falling.

An obvious starting point is Stephen Kenny, who seemed to be halfway out the exit door as Republic of Ireland manager a couple of weeks back.

At that point the impending arrival of Portugal seemed to have the Darth Vader theme music attached, with Cristiano Ronaldo cast as a zero-body-fat vision of the Dark Lord of the Sith.

Against Ireland, Ronaldo would surely gorge himself on goals and usher in the post-Kenny era?

Not so, of course, and the murmuring seems to have subsided.

I’m well aware that the patron saint of sports columnists is capable of orchestrating Kenny’s departure by the time this appears, but the point stands when it comes to the rapid restoration of his reputation. Your mileage may vary as to Kenny’s abilities as an international-level manager, but his standing i mbéal an phobail has improved out of all recognition compared to a few short weeks ago, which is not something your columnist saw coming.

The graph of Kenny’s popularity is all the more marked in comparison with the other international manager-figure in the headlines recently.

My brief sabbatical hasn’t made Andy Farrell less remote to me — the opposite, if anything.

When Farrell was announced as head coach of the Ireland rugby team one tiny nugget came back to me, an aside in an English newspaper’s account of Farrell’s late-career switch from rugby league to rugby union.

Farrell signed with Saracens in 2005 and in one feature on his impact, unnamed Saracens players were described as being surprised by how hard Farrell passed the ball to them, hurting their hands...

This rather dubious yarn remains the only morsel I associate with the coach, and his relatively low profile does little to change that. In the last couple of weeks I expected him to surface with a touch of personality, particularly with a win over New Zealand under his belt, but no: whether intentional or not on the part of the IRFU, Farrell seems a distant figure, to this observer at least.

The Kenny and Farrell cases don’t make up a huge sample size when it comes to the intersection of time and perception (then again, how many figures operate at their level in the country?).

But the spike in the popularity of the former, and the consistency in perception of the latter, suggest that perspective is the secret ingredient when it comes to reputation.

As well as a little time, of course.

Iron men and iron stomachs

Thanks for checking in on me while I was out. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say that the following resonated with me.

Michael Lundy of Corofin spoke a few years ago about his experience with appendicitis, when he had to go under the knife less than a fortnight before the Connacht SFC club final.

“I asked in 10 or 11 days’ time is there a chance of me playing, and he [doctor] said: ‘I wouldn’t rule it out — it’s not impossible, people have made returns’.

“So I was thinking that was a good thing.

“Once I came out of hospital, it was quite sore, it was bruised and tender at the time, and there were stitches in there.

“It was a Thursday morning I came out, and I literally sat on the couch for a week. I did some slight walking around, but I didn’t push it because I didn’t want to aggravate it.

“The doctor said the best thing I could do was to rest up for as long as you can.

Then, seven days later, on the following Thursday, I went for a run and got on the bike to see how I was.”

Lundy did indeed play in that club final 10 days after his operation. To which I can only say, using the same pronunciation as Will Smith in the first Men In Black movie: da-yum.

Crypto is exactly what it says

I know well none of us should be surprised at this stage by the shenanigans in professional sport but still, every now and again, something pops up that leads to a justified use of “well now, that beats Banagher”.

This week’s entry was Manchester City’s partnership with a cryptocurrency start-up firm, 3Key, so short-lived it didn’t make it to the weekend as the Premier League club decided to carry out investigations into its partner.

A report in The Guardian described the firm as ‘mysterious’ and went on to add: “...individuals named as 3Key executives on a recent press release do not have a digital footprint, while on Tuesday, two websites associated with 3Key went offline.”

Where do you start? If your local junior soccer team or intermediate hurling club was approached by an organisation about a commercial partnership, but said organisation was so mysterious that nobody actually knew who the people involved were, how would the chairman or secretary react?

Yet Manchester City, a professional sporting organisation with vast resources, named such an organisation as an official partner — a partner in “decentralised finance trading analysis”, granted — and is only now awakening to the power of the internet when it comes to puzzling out who people are. Is it too late to offer the services of Moynihan People-Googling Inc for a paltry €20,000 per day?

The Book of Charlie

Only one candidate for your book tokens this week, the Charles Haughey biography due to hit the shops in the coming days from Gill Books. Full disclosure: Its author, Dr Gary Murphy of DCU, is an individual well known to me, but I recommend this work unreservedly anyway.

Daniel McConnell gave a (relatively) quick precis of the Haughey career in these pages last Saturday, and even that snapshot brought back memories that are sure to feature prominently in the forthcoming book.

Contact: [e-mail]