Via: Medical Insurance
Waiting for flight home, but saw this cool infographic at the Hoop Doctors.
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When the thin red line of Shelbourne players file out of the Dalymount Park tunnel before they face neighbours Bohemians in an FAI Cup tie this evening, it will evoke a time when cash slushed around domestic football.
Bohs’ future was tied up, like a lot of things here during the boom, in property.
The bottom ultimately fell out of their dreams and the club faces seasons of austerity ahead.
Across the Tolka, Shelbourne speculated on shooting for the stars too. The then-chairman Ollie Byrne felt the warm breath of Champions League football on his neck but Europe’s big league ultimately remained tantalisingly outside the club’s grasp.
Sadly, the charismatic Byrne died. The famous club almost imploded. But it lives on, still.
Now Shelbourne enjoys a vital role in the community. Its youth teams are performing well and the senior side plays honest football which will no doubt see them retake a seat at the top table sooner rather than later.
And if the days characterised by long, liquid lunches in silver-service Stephen’s Green eateries, queues for €500,000 house purchases in Navan and day trips to New York’s shopping malls are now alien to the club, so too Oscar Sibanda knows a very different Ireland.
Recent Shels signing Sibanda will sit on the bench tonight, if he doesn’t actually make his senior debut, on the famous piece of football real estate in Phibsboro.
On each occasion that the 22-year-old winger tugs on a Shels jersey he knows that it could be his last outing for the famous Airtricity League First Division side.
The Zimbabwean is facing deportation at any time after a three-year battle to seek asylum.
Sibanda fled Zimbabwe to join his mother and siblings in Ireland. They had left Zimbabwe because their mother was a member of the opposition party and feared persecution at the hands of Robert Mugabe’s regime.
Despite working as hard as his team-mates in red, Sibanda cannot be paid by the club. Like all asylum seekers here, he is only entitled to €19.10 a week.
A number of former players and managers including former Ireland boss Brian Kerr have signed a petition urging the Irish authorities to grant Sibanda asylum. So far their pleas have failed.
While he can visit his mother, two sisters and one brother who all live legally in Drogheda, Sibanda is living his life in time added on.
Ken McCue, founder of Sport Against Racism, insists Sabinda’s cause is pockmarked with injustices.
“He’s living in Hatch Hall hostel now in Earlsfort Terrace and he’s playing away with Shels now. He lived in Mosney for some time but he was removed recently with about 100 others and put in Hatch Hall. The next stop is deportation,” says McCue.
“There’s a good chance he’ll be deported in the next few weeks. There’s a whole series of mistakes in the asylum process he went through. The final one is the refugee appeals in which they determined he was from South Africa.
“He speaks in Ndebele, which is the same across the border in parts of South Africa but it’s like the Donegal gaeltacht version of Irish compared to someone from Waterford or something.
“And they made up their mind based on that but if they had looked at his mother’s file, they’d know. We are using the channel of the Minister for Equality – Mary White – to put pressure on the justice ministry but she hasn’t responded at all,” he adds.
While in Mosney, Sibanda organised and trained the kids in the asylym seekers’ centre into a football team named after the South African Albert Johanneson who once played for Leeds United.
The side took their place amongst local sides. Now however, they face having to withdraw as Sibanda can’t afford the transport costs to Co Meath from Dublin city centre and so the teams have lost a trainer.
“They had entered into the Drogheda and District League and it was great for the kids. The arts and sport have been proven and internationally recognised that it’s the best way to integrate. And now that a lot of workplaces are gone and people have more time for recreation, sport is even more important. He can’t get down – especially on €19 a week – so the team are struggling.”
If he does get on the pitch tonight, Sibanda will hug the touchline and hope to show Dublin’s soccer fans a frightening turn of pace that he first showcased with SARI’s own side.
“He’s a winger, he’s very fast and is a great attacking midfielder really,” says McCue who helps organise the organisations football sides.
“He was in our academy and he played some great stuff.
“We call our football African-flavoured, we play on a Saturday morning in Ongar in a place where we’re squatting really, I don’t know how long we’ll be there.”
Neither does Sibanda. But Shels fans will hopefully see him play on regardless.
adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Friday, August 27, 2010
While I’m away, check out the first few episodes of HBO’s Hard Knocks – the documentary series which this year joins the New York Jets’ training camp.
There’s such gems as Rex Ryan’s ready-a-classic motivational talk and Antonio Cromartie tries to remember how many kids he has.
Amazing stuff.
The long, sticky days hang on two tent-pole training sessions at the moment. One in the morning. One in the evening. Between gulps of warm tea, those sitting recently outside ther Esplanade Hotel or on the strand in Bray, feet stretched in front of them towards the sunshine in the past few weeks, may have noticed a busy, little shape buzzing up Bray Head. Up, up, up towards the large concrete cross; a one-woman Good Friday procession.
And when the sun didn’t shine, and the rain rolled out a welcome mat on the steep incline while no-one was there to notice the town’s most famous daughter? She ran up it anyway.
Last week’s quiet pilgrimage to the brow of the well-known hill was Katie Taylor’s last before the World Championships in Barbados. No harm. The torturous and boring routine is the least favourite element of her training schedule, though as the devout Christian knows and must sometimes reflects in the shadow of the cross: you reap what you sow.
Now, as Hugh McIlvanney wrote of Ali: ‘the hours are peeling away and soon he will have to grasp the bare wire of what that Wednesday morning will mean to him’. It’s almost show-time again.
In the afternoons the 24-year-old sits back in the passenger seat of her father’s car. Peter — a Liverpool-born man who is also Katie’s coach — points the motor towards the National Stadium on Dublin’s South Circular Road, though it could surely find itself there automatically at this stage.
The high performance gym is hunkered down next to the stadium itself. Four blue boxing rings run side-by-side towards a well-used weights room at the rear. The block walls are brightly painted and tagged with inspirational words from those who’ve ducked and weaved under these lights before. “Don’t follow your dreams —– chase them”. Roll of honour: Egan, Carruth, Sutherland, McCullough et al.
Taylor looks at home in their company. I poke my head around the door at Wednesday lunchtime.
Taylor, her father and female light-welterweight Allana Murphy of the East Side club are sitting on the nape of the nearest ring, chatting. Murphy is relaxed and jokes naturally with Taylor; don’t mind her, she’s a slagger, Katie tells me. But later that day, game-face on, Murphy books her ticket on the plane next to her friend for the world championships when she wins her box-off in the ring next door.
Taylor, our brightest Olympic hope, is expected to take her third world title on the trot in the Caribbean. We sit on a weights bench in the back of the hall before her second session of the day, where the only sounds in the hall will be instructions from her dad, the thud, thud, thud of the heavy punch bags and the whirl of her feet constantly dancing around the familiar ring. This is the fun part.
“We usually never train with the radio here. I don’t know why that is. In my own club we have the radio on,” says Taylor — a Paolo Nutini fan, “But it could be anything — I could be sparring to politics or something.
“I listen to all the same songs before my own fights though — my Christian songs mostly I suppose — and I read the same verses of the Bible and just to get into the zone that way. It’s all part of having a routine.
“I won’t get to see much of Barbados itself really — it’ll just be training and hotel rooms and boxing — same as usual really but at least it’s not flying into Ukraine or Russia for a change I suppose. That’s what we usually get.”
She speaks from experience. Two successful trips to world championships before have taught thought her about preparation; like what to pack in the suitcase next to the bandages and spare training gear.
“We’ll bring some of our own food. The usual stuff — Nutrigrains and little small things like cereals or pastas or whatever to keep you going.
“The weight thing is always a struggle for me, like most boxers. I’ll have to make 60 kilograms in three weeks and at the moment I’m in and around 62, 63 so there needs to be a little bit done. But no matter what, it’s always about the last kilo, that’s the real killer.
“The night before will sometimes be all about the wrapping up and sweating it out, you’re just trying to dehydrate yourself, it’s horrible,” she shrugs.
Taylor too of course has been an international-class attacker with Ireland’s ladies teams in the past. There’s no time to fill a green jersey pull on a pair of football boots at the moment.
“I played a few club matches this year for Peamount (a Dublin club) but I can’t fit in the international games at all. It’s getting harder and harder to do both. It’s all about the balance now.”
So after another one of the six day in which she wraps her hands to work is done — in two gyms and in two counties — she’ll crash out in the family home in Wicklow for the evening.
One day closer to Barbados. And then perhaps another title closer to London in 2012. She’s certainly working towards it.
adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
This column first appeared in the print version of the Irish Examiner newspaper
To become faster in your sport, download the adidas miCoach app and run in Supernova trainers. Visit facebook.com/adidasrunning to find out more
Picture, with thanks: Nick Bradshaw / fotonic
I spent some time in the high-performance gym at the National Stadium, on Dublin’s South Circular Road earlier today with our brightest Olympic hope and multiple title holder, Katie Taylor.
Check out Friday’s column in the Irish Examiner to see which one of us picked up two penalty points on the way home and which one is going to Barbados to fight other women soon.
In Abba’s under-rated song The Day Before You Came*, Agnetha references the print media twice in one three-minute, melancholic song.
She reads the editorial in the morning newspaper (possibly the Irish Examiner), while on her train commute to work.
Later, on the way home from the office she picks up the evening paper.
* I realise referencing the Swedish four-piece may be percieved as uncool – but this particular song came to my attention when included on the Pitchfork 500. I was also living (temporarily) in a loft in New York’s Chinatown at the time. So I’m still MOST CERTAINLY COOL OK? **
**I’m borrowing this asteriks and italics thing from Joe Posnanski’s excellent blog
Anyway, the point is that now they might also sing about the latest iPhone app as Agnetha fiddles with her smartphone on the Metro journey to the office every morning.
The top-flight English soccer season got underway on Saturday and as I was out and about I had to rely on my soccer Saturday app for info on how badly my Fantasy Football team were doing.
And, to paraphrase Carrie Bradshaw’s clunky sex-column writing: that got me thinking… what other sports apps are worth a download. Here’s the few I have installed and if you’ve any suggestions, do let me know.
For any Dublin fans *spit* looking for news on their doomed build-up to the All-Ireland semi-final this weekend or canny Cork fans *high-five* who want to view the Blue hype for themselves than the excellent new Hill16 app is a must.
I like a bit of baseball and the MLB at bat app, left, is pretty class – especially when the Yankees and Red Sox games are stretching to almost four hours these days.
When the GAA aren’t busy constructing an eight-foot tall fence in their underground lab, they’re creating a nifty little app. How can one organisation take so many backward steps and live in the past so often, and at the same time be the most progressive and forward-working organisations – preofessional or not – in the country? Anyway, it’s a good app.
I also use Livescore, RTÉ GAA news, ESPN and Sports Illustrated. Any other recommendations?
NOTE: I’d hoped to include screen grabs of all these but Flickr is absolutely wrecking my head. All of a sudden it won’t let me link an image through the URL onto WordPress. Embedding is still fine but then everything is centred. The one I did include is uploaded straight from the PC here. But Gavin Sheridan told me, when helping me set this blog up, to firstly not feed the Gremlins after midnight and secondly, use FLickr to upload pics or else a server in southern California will suddenly explode and kill many, many Apple fanboys. Is this correct?
I realise I’ve now pulled back the curtain, reader, and spoiled any mystique which surrounded the magical process of operating this little corner of the internet.
Some more cool viral advertising – this time from Roger Federer and Gillette.
I’m waiting for the Paul Galvin fish-hook version.
Via Stephen O’Leary again.
Mind your heads while I throw in the first cliché, if I may; in sport, there’s no gain without pain.
Mostly however, there’s no gain despite the pain. Just ask a Waterford hurler.
I pulled on a pair of running shoes and fell in behind almost-greatness as he lapped the local GAA pitch these past pregnant days before the season’s end.
Running alongside Dan Shanahan, we drew right angles in the corners of Dungarvan’s Fraher Field as if Davy Fitz himself was watching us on Google Maps on his laptop back in Clare.
A relaxed Shanahan did not seem like a man marching inexorably towards his last game. After 13 years on the inter-county dance floor, the final game of his Waterford career is now rising in the east.
If he was frisked on the way through the Croke Park gate on Sunday morning, the Garda would toss four Munster championship medals and three All-Stars onto the floor beside the Lismore man’s wallet and car keys. I’m sure he doesn’t carry his National League medal around.
Later that day, a defeat to Tipperary in Dublin will see the curtain fall at last on the Lismore man’s time in the national spotlight — after almost a decade and a half of wonderful goals’n’gums.
But defeat their near neighbours and rivals and the blue and white roadshow stays on the tracks as Kilkenny’s freight train whistles into sight again.
If it ends there — a casualty to history while the Noresiders park the drive-for-five — Shanahan will know he’s trained as much as any of those marching behind the Artane Band. You control that much. And live with the rest.
Now, he’s trotting down the sideline in an Argentina shirt, distinctive tattoos flicking from beneath his short three-striped sleeves. Like Marco ‘Matrix’ Materazzi — the Italian centre half/footballing assassin who commemorated his World Cup and Champions League victories with vivid tats of the respective trophies — Shanahan will surely have to ink a painful portrait on his body of the Liam MacCarthy Cup if Tipp and then the Cats are accounted for?
“My god,” he laughs, “You can do it yourself — full size and on my back or something, with the date underneath it .” Silence for a moment, “That’d be nice.”
But, no pain, no gain — in tattoos and sport.
This is supposed to be a day off the training for Shanahan. He was put through his paces by Fitzy and co last night. And the same tomorrow. After this run he’ll go back to work. Tonight he might grab a quick massage or a swim.
“The sport now is a completely different ball game compared to when I started . The stuff you would have got away with wouldn’t happen now for sure,” he day dreams.
“You could go out every night and still play a match — the speed of the game, the skill, the mental side has all changed since myself, Ken and Tony started I suppose 12 or 13 years ago. But it’s changed for the better.
“Players are much faster and much stronger. When you see what has to go into it to even stay competitive… It’s certainly semi-professional. Games are harder to win.
“I do a lot of my own. You get a programme at the start of the year. I kept back on the weights this year and concentrated more on the flexibility and core work; that’s all the rage at the moment.”
And has ‘Dan the Man’ filed into the local community centre for a yoga class, like Roy Keane?
“I’ve never done the bit of yoga — you wouldn’t have the time — with your own training and your hurling training with Davy then and the selectors. It’s time consuming.
“I’m lucky enough to be in full employment at the moment. So it’s hard to fit in all the training. Your family suffers, to be honest with you. I’ve a daughter now who’s 11 and she’s never been on holiday.
“But I’ll call it a day after this season — it takes up an awful lot of time — but I love it. I absolutely love it, I don’t know what I’m going to do when I finish. If I’m not playing I love encouraging the lads when they play and stuff like that.”
The sweat, as we head past the grandstand again, is now hopping off one of us. (I’m reminded of Carla’s response, when Norm admits he ‘may perspire a bit’, in Cheers; ‘We could grow rice’) Shanahan however seems as cool as one of his finishes in to the far corner. He looks like a man who’d stand up well to harsh studio lights in a life after sliotars.
“I’d like to get into the media side of things after I finish. I know the game having played it up to now. The speed of the game and everything. Some people can’t see things on the line that should be seen and I would be interested in that now. Radio or television… it would be interesting.
“It’s nice to put your point across, to give players that aren’t maybe getting the thanks for runs that aren’t seen or whatever, rather than the players who are getting the points and then the credit.”
After running less than a mile in his shoes, we sit back into Shanahan’s car. the familiar tattoo flashes across his forearm: “If you don’t know me, don’t judge me.” If the last full stop in his artful career is inked on Sunday, we will certainly feel we’ve known him. But maybe his final hurling judgement will come in September.
Dan Shanahan uses the adidas micoach. To become faster for your sport, download the adidas miCoach app and run in Supernova trainers. Visit facebook.com/adidasrunning to find out more
Adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
This story first appeared in the print version of the Irish Examiner newspaper
Father, ladies and gentlemen…
Tomorrow afternoon in a beautifully-dressed and very full hotel function room, half choked by a stylish, grey cravat and shaking in freshly-polished shoes I’ll push back my chair at the top table. Then, at last, I’ll slowly step into the nightmare I’ve been playing out for months. The best man’s speech.
Mawwige: it's what has bwought us togeva today
Many of you will understand and appreciate the ordeal. More still will have gambled on how long someone else’s will drag on. But we’ve all sat through one – and this, my first, will not be easy.
While my good friend and his beautiful bride to be have undertaken the real and often unseen work of organising a modern Irish wedding-day – cars, hotels, music, flowers, whatever – I’ve been watching speeches on YouTube, made a list of his most embarrassing moments and talked to people, like a workaholic postman, about my delivery.
Those at sport’s top table, of course, are called upon often to grab the mic, pull a cue card from inside the blazer and offer speeches to teammates that are at times emotional, inspirational and even funny. Well then, who better to chat to this week than men who’ve spent several successful lifetimes swaddled in the dressing-room and hopped footballs or hurleys off table-tops in order to jab an emphatic full stop in a blood-bubbling piece of oratory.
Ray Silke is never short of a few words. In the wonderful documentary about Galway’s historic All-Ireland-winning year of 1998, A Year ‘Til Sunday’, it’s clear their captain is comfortable in taking the floor to offer a few words – be it on the training ground in midweek or as the studs are clip-clopping out the tunnel on match day. So, what’s the trick?
“The most important thing is conviction, you have to believe what you’re saying,” Silke said this week when I rang him, “I’m a big believer in if you have something to say, say it. It’s important but keep it short – there’s fellas in every dressing-room who go on a bit.
“But a good speech does make a difference. You’re trying to touch all the chords – there needs to be a bit of humour, a bit of love and maybe some advice – it’s the same in the dressing-room really, there has to be a mix.”
Tony Considine, the former Clare boss, has filed from buses to locker rooms with some of hurling’s most vivid characters – particularly those in the famous Clare team of the mid-90s.
“We didn’t really go in for the roaring and shouting in the dressing-room to be honest. I think a lot of the time that’s over-blown and not very productive.
“But we did have men in there who could talk well – Anthony Daly as the captain would say a word and then Ger [Loughnane] maybe have the last word. But the trick was always to put the arm around the guy who’s going a bit white and say ‘jaysus, get the bucket for this fella’ and maybe give another guy a stronger word in his ear.
“I’ve given best man speeches at weddings before, certainly. When you get up on Saturday morning, the most important thing is to not get it into your head that you’re going to make a balls of it. Like sport, just stay positive.
“When you look down at the crowd they’re all going to have the same two ears, eyes, the same nose as you. And then just focus on a point in the crowd and just clip away.
“You’ll find something funny on Saturday morning on the way to the wedding or on Friday night when ye’re having the few pints. So include that – the most important thing is to keep them laughing. That’s all anyone will remember at a wedding.”
Al Pacino: this is a war gentlemen
Donal O’Grady – a manager who led Cork to an All-Ireland in 2004 using short-puck-outs more than long-winded speeches – agrees with Considine: no-one expects Brian Lenihan on Budget Day.
“My big thing was always to keep it tight and get your points across. Time is a big factor in a dressing room so you just want to speak clearly and succinctly,” says the St Finbarr’s man.
“Players expect a speech a lot of the time. It’s the same as a best man, if you got up tomorrow and said ‘I’m not going to say anything, pal’, there’d be question marks. It’s the same as a manager really.
“Advice? Check with your mates on how long they’ve betted you’ll go on; though that could be construed as insider trading. But just don’t go on too long and try not to offend anyone – that’s all you can do.”
And tucking a very apt warning – given the Sunday Game’s role in the disciplinary process these days – into my breast pocket, Silke sends me on my way to the chapel.
“I’d bear in mind that this will probably be taped so mind the language – and I’ve seen people think they’re funny and it’s gone down like a lead balloon. So err on the side of caution and remember that sincerity is very important.”
Now please Father, ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll raise your glasses to toast the bride and groom…
Adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
This column first appeared in this morning’s Irish Examiner newspaper
Also could’ve headlined with:
1. What are you gonna do today, Napoleon?
2. You wanna play me?
3. Hey, Napoleon. What did you do last summer again?
4. Heck yes I did!
Whipped from this week’s Guardian gallery. Take a bow, son.