NOW that the exhibition football is over, it is back to the real stuff. The stuff of the heart’s core. Last weekend, we were up at Ballaghadereen to watch Knockmore against Ballagh (as the locals call it) in the first round of the Mayo Senior Championship. It was a very poignant day, the first Ballagh […]
WHEN Colm McCusker died last week, a piece of Ireland died with him. He was 91 years old and lived a life that will never be seen again. His first job was as a gardener in Upperlands with Clarkes, the big house protestants. Later, he became a weaver working in their linen mill. He saw […]
LAST Saturday, after they had just beaten Clara in a wonderful game of hurling, I walked into the O’Loughlin Gaels buoyant changing room. When the noise subsided, their manager and legendary Kilkenny hurler Brian Hogan said, “Joe, what can be done with the football?”. The room went silent. “Ban it,” I said. The place erupted. […]
THE vast roar that greeted the throw-in merely symbolised the triumph of hope over reality that grips the viewer. Immediately, the game settled into the familiar pattern, the endlessly rehearsed formula where nothing is unpredictable. So, both teams began the ‘you score a point, we score a point routine’, which has almost become a gentleman’s […]
ARMAGH must be Clare, not Donegal. Gaelic football has become two dull defensive formulas competing soullessly, with all the emotion of a game played on X box. The resemblance to modern soccer is uncanny. Everyone looks the same, plays the same, sounds the same. Great sport, in the end, is about courage, imagination, intuition, self-expression, science […]
NOTHING happened in the Donegal Galway game. Just two dull defensive formulas competing soullessly, with all the emotion of a game played on X-Box. In this type of game, a mistake or a fluke decides things. Galway got the fluke, a weird goal that gave them three points out of thin air that they didn’t […]
After Galway had beaten Sligo in this year’s Connacht semi-final with a last-minute goal, Padraic Joyce was asked why his team had been so listless. He said, “It’s very hard to motivate these players to play on a Saturday evening.” The good news for Padraic is that Galway don’t have to play Donegal in Croke Park […]
CIARAN Foran, Dave’s brother from the great Dublin team of the ‘90s, taxied me to Croke Park on Saturday. “Where is your wife from?” he said. “Mayo,” I replied. “I was the first man that ever wore white shoes in Mayo,” he said. “I wore white loafers with a tassle on them at a dance […]
IT was as if the last eight weeks were a bad dream. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, our boys woke up on sunday morning in their own beds, their mothers waking them up with a cup of tea and buttered toast. There were very few Derry fans at the game in Castlebar. I […]
MAYO’S efforts against Dublin in the modern era have been as successful as Enoch Burke’s court cases. Another Mayo man who seems to be cursed. Yet, for all those defeats in big games, Mayo remain the most popular and entertaining team in Gaelic football. Like a happy labrador lining up in the traps against a […]
