Enda McEvoy: In the event Mayo win All-Ireland, do they cease being good copy?
SILVERWARE BAGGED: Mayo players Diarmuid O'Connor, Jack Coyne, Jack Carney, Ryan O'Donoghue and Matthew Ruane with the cup after the Allianz Football League Division 1 final. Pic: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile
The week before last, Suzy Wrack, an English sportswriter and author, tapped out a fascinating thread on Twitter about her evening at Stamford Bridge covering Chelsea versus Lyon in the quarter-final of the UEFA Women’s Champions League.
Her theme was the nuts and bolts of covering a night match. How the reporter files a chunk of copy at half-time, some more on 70 minutes, then an opening and closing paragraph on the final whistle. “We do it like this so the sub-editors can work on it as the game is being played. When the final whistle goes they just have to edit a couple of paragraphs.”
This particular game went to extra time and penalties. More copy, more alternative intros (Chelsea winning in extra time, Chelsea on penalties, Lyon in extra time, Lyon on penalties), more hassle.
Fellow journos on Twitter loved the thread and understandably so. They’ve been there time and again. They’ve been that Suzy. For non-journos, moreover, the thread should be made compulsory.
Want to know how the column you’re reading right now came into being? Lay on, Macduff.
“Same again next Saturday please,” comes the command from on high. It is good to know these things early. Some reasonably interesting theme will surely present itself sooner or later.
And if it doesn’t, the National Football League final is on Sunday, and Mayo are in it, and Mayo are always good copy. And Vera Pauw’s Ireland are probably up to something and are in any case a certainty to be good copy for the rest of the year. And isn’t there some golf thing taking place in Georgia or Armenia or Azerbaijan later in the week..?
Once more the GAA’s great existential question of the age raises its head and once more it’s answered in the negative. Will Galway bate Mayo? Not if they have Kevin McStay. (Great. We’re up and running.) Joanne Cantwell’s guests on RTÉ’s highlights programme hymn Mayo’s aggression, defensive strength and composure. All well and good, except the panellists then proceed to discuss the black (or even red) card that wasn’t for Colm Reape and the five goal chances Galway created and failed to take. History is indeed written by the victors.
Yet what of it? To be having a conversation about how on another day Mayo might have lost is bracing and refreshing and novel. We’re usually left having a conversation about how on another day they might have won. Winner all right. Incidentally, in the event they win the All-Ireland at last, do Mayo instantly and automatically cease being good copy?
The morning after the evening of the long knives across the water, with Brendan Rodgers and Graham Potter walking the plank and West Ham’s win over Southampton giving David Moyes a stay of execution. It is easier to empathise with Potter, a modest man cast into the Boehly madhouse, than with Rodgers. A squad of 22 is commonly cited as the optimum size for a manager to deal with; Potter had to cater for a group which, because of the owners’ January trolley dash, oscillated between 33 and 40 players. Chelsea have become accustomed to thriving on clamour and glamour and big personalities. Their latest ex-manager, with his university degree in emotional intelligence, was the anti-Mourinho, the anti-Conte.
Rodgers, in his turn the anti-Potter, has always come across as a little too pleased with himself, his verbal fluency too often shading into glibness. Is this unfair? James Maddison’s tribute (“a top manager and even more importantly a brilliant and caring man”) would suggest so.
Besides, the Antrim man will always have the 2021 FA Cup, a signal triumph that through no fault of his was overshadowed by the club’s Premier League title. But Rodgers has been at the sharp end of management for over ten years now – and ten years constitutes the shelf life of even the best managers, give or take a Ferguson.
Vera Pauw gives call-ups for the double-header with the US to Tara O’Hanlon and Alannah McEvoy (no relation but clearly she has to be brilliant). The latter, a full-time student, had been working in her local Centra when she heard the good news. "I happened to be on my 15-minute break and I was just sitting down and that’s when the message popped up. I was just over the moon. I couldn’t believe it and I couldn’t stop crying. I was shaking and I just felt sick, it was just excitement.”
Naturally, Alannah couldn’t concentrate when she went back to work, so she called her family and then imparted the good news to her colleagues in the shop. “My 15-minute break turned into a 40-minute break because I couldn’t stop crying. Then I had to explain to my manager, 'Look, I’m not going to be here for the next two or three weeks.’” Vera Pauw’s Ireland. Good copy? Great copy.
Rory McIlroy says he’s in a good place for the Masters. Tiger Woods says Rory will win it sooner or later. Get to the final day in the hunt often enough and it’s true. Mayo will confirm. Or perhaps not.
Good start for Shane Lowry on -4. Poor start for Rory with three bogeys and a double bogey, albeit level par as a bottom line. No need to fret. They’re only passing halfway on the first circuit.
: Nearly ready to go. Look online for anything startling that has happened overnight. Find nothing. David Moyes is still in a job. Maybe that’s startling. Give copy a last once-over, deleting a phrase here, inserting a word there. Press Send. Collapse.
Now you know how it goes.
Turns out the bookies have already priced up Cheltenham 2024. Three weeks after the 2023 iteration.
Ewwww. Every time you think you’re out they keep dragging you back in, huh?
A Dream To Share leads the market for the Festival opener at 7-1. Impaire Et Passe and Marine Nationale are both 5-1 for the Arkle. Energumene is 11-4 to make it a three in-a-row in the Champion Chase. And so on and so forth.
Given that the all-important words Non Runner No Bet are nowhere to be seen, obviously these propositions are not to be touched with several bargepoles.
One item sticks out, however. Constitution Hill is 16-1 for the 2024 Gold Cup.
It is not a far-fetched scenario. Let’s face it, a Champion Hurdle hat-trick would be bloodless. Barring injury the only issue next March and again in 2025 will be Constitution Hill’s winning distances and the identity of the placed horses.
But trying to emulate Dawn Run by adding steeplechasing’s blue riband to hurdling’s blue riband — now that would be quite something. And given that the great mare was a novice in all but name when she won the Gold Cup, why should a lack of experience be allowed deter Constitution Hill?
The eternal allure of big challenges is the inherent difficulties.
Nicky Henderson recently revealed that his stable star has jumped fences at home and taken to them with aplomb. Go on, guys. You know you want to.
College basketball champions again despite an encounter between star player Jordan Hawkins and a dodgy dinner (calamari and steak) in a posh Houston steakhouse. He blamed the squid, not the cow.
Declared a fatwa against horse racing at the behest of the college Vegan Society. The sport may not survive this one.
Struggled for playing time at Chelsea on the alleged basis he was a ringer for Draco Malfoy. “Indirect free-kick for Slytherin!”
