The week of a thousand columns

SOME WEEKS you just don’t have enough space for everything.

Take a peek at the array of yarns which jockeyed for consideration here this week. The possibility that Croke Park might host the All Blacks next year? Normally be a front-page story. Not this week, though. The contest has just been too fierce.

Darren Rooney of Laois saying the Dublin players abused his county’s medics as they tended to injured midlanders? That didn’t make the cut either.

Joe Brolly’s description of a Derry corner-back “feeding farts” to an opposing forward, Conor Mortimer of Mayo, certainly came close to inclusion. Joe’s colourful dismissal of Mortimer leads us to a) think the Almighty was very good to spare us an upbringing as a Derry corner-forward and b) maybe standards of eloquence for barristers in the northern statelet aren’t what they might be. Don’t complain, Joe, you’re the one who brought people’s livelihoods into it . . .

Then you have the revelation a couple of days ago that ten of the 12 Leinster counties voted against Galway entering the hurling championship in that province. Is that turkeys voting for Christmas, or the opposite?

The fact that last year’s All-Ireland hurling finalists Cork dropped their captain, Kieran Murphy, earlier in the week, might have made it, but given Tipp skipper Benny Dunne’s temporary demotion during the Munster championship and Wexford captain Nigel Higgins’ total removal from the Model set-up, you’d have to wonder just how newsworthy that announcement is.

A close runner-up as a topic for inclusion was the sudden outbreak of bizarre GAA injuries this week. McGonigley of Donegal was ruled out thanks to an incident described as a freak paint-balling injury. What a run-of-the-mill paint-balling injury looks like we’d rather not say.

Paddy’s injury goes into the ha’penny place when set alongside Beano McDonald of Laois, however. McDonald is doubtful for this weekend’s qualifier against Derry because he was kicked by a horse during the week.

Reports that the horse goaded him afterwards by pointing at the scoreboard and giving him the two hooves haven’t been confirmed, however.

SO. INSTEAD of looking back this week we thought we’d look forward. To the weekend, to be precise. If you’re not vibrating slightly at the prospect of the four hurling games this weekend, then what exactly is your problem?

Any of these games on their own would be enough to construct a weekend around. The fact that the four of them are going on within (roughly) 24 hours of each other should produce the same reaction as novelist Kingsley Amis when he saw Ava Gardner appear in a movie: he’d lie on his back in the cinema aisle in adoration.

Where do you begin? The psychodrama of Wexford-Tipperary, as Tipp cope with being favourites. The emotional toll on Kilkenny. The Ger Loughnane factor. Limerick hoping to establish primacy along the banks of the Shannon. Clare making a last stand against the new power in the midwest.

And then — after all that, as if you’re not wrung out and drained enough — you have the hammer of the gods, Cork and Waterford.

Yes, we’ve heard the complaints during the week, that the teams have met before. Clearly these were the people who could also be heard a few years ago: “Ali is fighting Frazier again? Who the hell would be interested in that? Once is enough for me, I say, once!”

Yup, the same lads used to say that Navratilova-Evert was “the ruination of Wimbledon for Jaysus sake, any sign of some fresh blood, etc, etc” and that no-one would ever want to watch Steve Ovett and Seb Coe race more than once.

In conversation a few weeks ago Ger Loughnane remarked — almost in passing — that hurling was never better than it is now; take this weekend as your proof.

Enough space for everything? We had enough space for the only thing this weekend that matters.

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