Where have all the preachers gone?

WHILE we here in Talking Sport Towers don’t usually get into flogging a dead horse, sometimes you feel the whip in your hand and think, well, there’s another few stripes to be laid across the haunches.

Like you, gentle reader, we were astonished to see the blow received by Tipperary hurler Paul Curran last Saturday in the All-Ireland qualifier game against Dublin in Parnell Park. The incident removed Curran from the game and it’ll be surprising to see him in the blue and gold again this season. His jaw is broken so badly that his manager, Babs Keating, said it was one of the worst facial injuries he had ever seen.

Given that Babs soldiered through a far-from-zero-tolerance disciplinary regime in the sixties, that’s some statement.

Watching the incident again — youtube is your best option — the stroke from the Dublin player is wayward at best. Curran is focused on the ball and facing outfield, while his opponent pulls low and doesn’t come close to the ball. During the week Curran himself referred to the incident in this newspaper, wondering what his opponent was aiming at: “I don’t know what way he was pulling to be honest — I saw the incident on tv on Sunday night and if he had connected with the ball he would have driven it out over the sideline.”

What’s also interesting about last Saturday is that those media outlets which led the charge for players from Clare and Cork to be suspended after the row in Thurles last May have been oddly silent on this issue.

While obviously a player doesn’t have to be seriously injured in an incident for it to be worthy of disciplinary action, the outbreak of joulting in Semple Stadium — strict orders from on high prevent us from comparing it to a woman’s accessory — left nobody unable to play in the game which followed. As Clare boss Tony Considine said after the game, nobody needed sticking plaster.

Paul Curran had an operation this week on his jaw. The man who hit him, got a yellow card but isn’t suspended. Nitpickers may point out that that means the matter was dealt with at the time. The substantive issue is surely that those in charge of hurling should be seen to deal with dangerous play, however. At least that’s what we were told following what happened in Thurles. We were informed ad nauseum after that row that these were disgraceful scenes, that you had children present, that it sent out the wrong message.

What kind of message do you think Paul Curran got this week?

It’s disappointing that those media outlets which lectured the country up and down about what was and wasn’t an appropriate level of punishment for the four Clare and four Cork players after the Semple Stadium row haven’t been as vocal about Curran’s injury.

Since last Saturday there hasn’t been quite the same firestorm of protest we were treated to after some lukewarm grappling. Is it because the match wasn’t the major game featured on RTÉ? Or because the state broadcaster only had the one camera at it and nobody had the luxury of multiple replays from several angles?

Or is it something to do with one of the teams involved? There’s been a feelgood vibe to the Dublin hurlers all this season, ever since they held Kilkenny to a draw in their first league outing, right through their defeat of Galway and a gallant loss to Wexford in the Leinster championship. A side from Castleknock won the Feile na nGael; the Dublin minors won the provincial championship. It’s all good news.

Maybe some of the people you’d expect to hear laying down the law are afraid to prick the balloon and deflate the magic. They shouldn’t be. After all, their brave and unbiased advice on the Clare and Cork hurlers served everybody well a few weeks ago.

To give them their due, Dublin fans themselves aren’t blind to what happened. One of them, posting on the biggest Dublin GAA websites, described the Curran incident as ‘disgraceful stuff’; others said the player involved should never play for the county again. It’s a shame some media outlets based in the capital don’t have the same clear-eyed view of what happened last Saturday.

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