Fitness issues force pundit Spillane into talking cramp

WHATEVER your opinion of Pat Spillane, you’ve got to admire the man’s consistency. The first weekend of the football championship might have served up two cracking matches but the Sunday Game presenter still wasn’t happy.

His displeasure at the lack of basic skills might have been an old bugbear for a new season, but he wasn’t alone in pointing out the frequency with which players in Pearse and Breffni Parks succumbed to cramps.

Surely, he said, it wasn’t too much to ask for a basic level of fitness from players in this day and age. Considering the amount of training inter-county players go through, he seemed to have a point.