I personally spent more of December in a tin of Roses than my running shoes. I broke sweat once around the 27th when I fell asleep in front of the fire during Back to the Future II.

In the busy lead up to Christmas, the couple of games of six-a-side football in which I star fell by the wayside as a calendar full of office nights out and last-minute gift shopping got in the way of my weekly trot out (you should see the Opta Pro Zone stats: on average — three nutmegs conceded, two twisted ankles, one banished ball, lots of intemperate swearing).

Some may have slipped back into the spandex before this first full week back at work. I’m vaguely aware of people who swim outdoors on Christmas morning and others who fill the downtime before New Year’s with runs along the coastline or walks up hillsides.

Eoin Cadogan tweeted a picture on Christmas Day of himself and Cork teammates Sean Óg Ó hAilpín and Donal Óg Cusack at an unnamed hurling alley behind a veil of sweat and satisfied smiles. I threw a few more sausages under the grill and convinced myself it was a JBM photoshop job for Cody’s benefit.

But this week, the cobwebs were blown off throughout Ireland as those of us who pay to play under floodlights after work pulled up outside the cages once again. And as I pulled on damp, unwashed bibs that have sat in the back of a Volkswagen Golf for the break, I thought, it takes all types to make a team.

The Pointer 

Let me introduce this interesting chap. Though his AUL medals are perhaps now slightly tainted by the years, he’s still got it ‘upstairs’. Despite a certain thickening under the retro jersey, he can still strike a ball and head it even further.

His defining characteristic, apart from limited interest in a warm-up routine, however, is ‘the point’. A genius — he reckons — at positioning, he stands in the centre circle and indicates with a flourish of his index finger where exactly he wants the ball (to feet) and if he has the ball (at feet) he points to where he wants those around him to run. Every team needs one.

The Unknown Quantity, # 1 

On nights when both Sullivan twins have work, and the usual lads who can be relied upon to turn up when selected aren’t answering the phone, door or Facebook, you may be faced with an unfamiliar opponent across the halfway line before kick off.

He immediately picks up the ball from the tip-off, puts it through your planted feet and smashes the ball into the jumper in which you stashed your watch in the back of the net.

“Who brought your man?” you ask.

The Unknown Quantity, # 2 

It’s the Tuesday after a long weekend and bodies are thin on the ground. The twins are back on the night shift. We need a new lad. This time you’re joined in the bibs with someone who’s a friend of someone else. From the kick-off you pass to him, he takes a first touch that’s heavier than a black hole and then hops the ball off the bonnet of your car — via your face.

“Jesus, who brought your man?” you ask.

The Zoolander 

We’ve all seen Ben Stiller’s movie Zoolander, right? It’s the tale of a dim-witted but good natured male model. Incidentally, he can’t turn left. Like many of us on the five-a-side pitch.

The Self-Flagellating monk 

It may sound like an exotic cocktail in a men-only nightclub but it is in fact a well known archetype on all-weather pitches. This poor chap takes every sliced shot and mishit clearance like another terrible slip into mortal sin. He’ll shank the ball over the opponents’ defence, the surrounding high wall and into a nearby stream. Then, slapping his forehead and looking to the dark skies he’ll scream loud obscenities which shatter the relative calm in the area.

Flocks of birds clatter out of adjacent trees and bell towers. Sleeping children are later awoken from their sleep when he realises he left the lights on in the car the whole time.

The Skipper 

The man with the plan. He brings the bibs. Rings around every week making sure everyone’s still coming. When, invariably, everyone isn’t coming he chases up replacements. He knows the man who looks after the pitch by name and threatens to buy a respirator out of the kitty one day. Often he is the worst player on the pitch.

The Hacker 

He may not win the game… but you’re going home knowing you played on the same pitch as him tonight. Often wears a Féile 1992 T-shirt paired with O’Neill’s shorts and working shoes an old house-mate left behind when he emigrated to Western Australia.

The Fantasista 

One who can play a bit. And knows it. He calls every nutmeg. Celebrates every goal like he’s Marco Tardelli in the World Cup final. Wears snoods and tights. Claims to have had trials with Cork City but fell out with the manager because he wouldn’t pass to Kevin Doyle.

* adrianjrussell@gmail.com                                      Twitter: @adrianrussell

This column first appeared in the Irish Examiner newspaper

FOR me Frank O’Farrell was a sad, grey face sketched in 25-year-old newspaper print.

As a young lad brainwashed by an uncle with a season ticket for the Stretford End before Ryanair brought it closer to home, my brother and I were swaddled in United red – despite the unease of a Leeds United supporting father.

We pored over books and books on the Munich Air Disaster, Cup wins, and league titles won. Names and places like Best, Wembley ’68, McGrath, Whiteside and Robson became familiar.

Before the days when you could buy flash replica jerseys and official club merchandise in every sports shop on every high street in the land, I was given an Aberdeen jersey (they were good at the time) and told, in my innocence, it was a Manchester United shirt.

Neighbours still remind me of that one, quarter of a century on.

Once, home for a family funeral, my uncle ducked out of the pub in Blackpool on Cork city’s northside, to get us a parcel of match programmes from Old Trafford as well as a heap of dusty homemade scrap books from the ‘60s 1970s.

The chunky News of the World headlines told tales of names like McIlroy, McQueen, Strachan and Stapleton.  It was great.

At that funeral, we could have walked for three minutes up the road and hit upon the homeplace of one of those featured in those pages of course.

Frank O’Farrell was born and reared on Dublin Hill, on the other side of the railway bridge, many will know from journeys ending in Kent Station. He watched the carriages rattle by daily and dreamed of one day driving the engine.

Instead his talent as a footballer saw his life on a different track altogether. And one which I did not appreciate until RTÉ aired a wonderful, Christmas treat of a documentary about the man last week.

‘The Shadow of Busby’  framed a tall, soft-spoken man now well into his golden years.. who remains the only Irishman to manage the famous club, Manchester United.

It unwrapped a wonderful secret history of Old Trafford’s backrooms and dark corridors – but like the best history lessons, it was weighed down with contemporary relevance.

The short version is this: O’Farrell played with Cork United until 1947 before he was tempted across to the bright lights of East London to play for West Ham. Far from indulging in the city’s excesses, such as they were, the devout Catholic lad joined the Salvation Army and attended mass daily.

In a familiar twist, injury brought the curtain down on a good career. Someone comfortable as leader, he took the reigns as manager at Torquay and after tasting promotion, took a bigger job at Leicester.

He became the first Irishman to lead out a team in the FA Cup final when he took Leicester to within one stride of the 39 steps.  He was denied by Manchester City.

Twelve months previously on the same patch of grass, Matt Busby had realised his quest to win the European Cup as Best, Charlton, Law et al beat Benfica under the Twin Towers. That should have been the final bar of Busby’s song.

Instead he ‘moved upstairs’ –as was the euphemism – and Wilf Mcguinness was installed as the boss. In fact there was no moving anywhere – Busby remained behind his desk in his office. McGuinness was gone less than a year later.

That summer of ‘69, after a spell as caretaker, Busby sat at Farrell’s kitchen table offering him one of the biggest jobs in football.

Tellingly, he told O’Farrell that he would be on a yearly salary of £12,000 – an old man now, Farrell has no problem remembering the figure. This one sticks in the craw.

Later when the pair –as well as Louis Edwards were sealing the deal – the chairman let slip that the salary he sanctioned was in fact £15k. He should have slapped Busby’s hand away then rather shake it then.

Ultimately, O’Farrell was shafted – you know that. But this testimony put meat on the bones of what is a forgotten Old Trafford tale. For me, reading those books from England all those years ago, Farrell was a failure – a forgotten footnote in the club’s long history. It’s an unfair telling of his tale. And though quietly spoken, he could obviously look after himself on the pitch and off it – and this programme showed him pulling no punches. Even when tilting at United’s idols.

O’Farrell talked of trying to curb the drinking of George Best, he labelled, with some understatement, club legend and English football great Bobby Charlton ‘a bit of a moaner’, and settled scores, calmly and matter-of-factly, with Busby himself.

The Scot had the ear of senior players like Charlton and Law as they went on regular golf outings together. Busby still refused to vacate his manager’s chair and his shadow loomed large.

Now, the shadows are lengthening for the 84-year-old Farrell. He sits in his garden in Torquay, surrounded by family and happy to have been at the top – if not for such a fleeting time.

“I was manager of Manchester United,” he says in a familiar accent. “they can’t take that away from me.”

Alex Ferguson, whomever comes after him, and those ‘upstairs’ in the boardroom at the Theatre of Dreams would do well not to forget the their history.

First appeared in the Irish Examiner on December 23, 2011

ON Sunday morning, many of us will be woken by electronic bleeps and whirrs as new computer-powered gadgets and toys are plugged in, charged up and used for the first time.

But in a world unmarked by Xboxes, the analogue sounds of Christmases past, soundtracked December 25.

Think Meccano pieces clicking, bike wheels turning or – if you were lucky – plastic footballer figures clacking against a disproportionally large ball.

“So, you’re the man exploring the underbelly of Irish table football,” says national champion Mark Farrell as he picks up the phone in Dublin, having been warned I was to call.

I imagine he’s wearing a crown and sitting on a throne with a branded green felt pitch at his feet after his latest All-Ireland victory.

The 33-year-old is at the centre of a ‘resurgence’ in the game in recent years. He and like-minded individuals gather in parish halls, community centres, each others homes every week.

They roll out the pitch, set up the goals and flick-to-kick as the famous slogan went.

“The majority of the players these days would be guys who remember the game from their youth and they’ve probably grown up with the game. There’s a quantity of junior players still but the vast majority would be in their 20s and 30s.

“These fellas remember the game from their youth – these fellas with XBoxes and Playstations are growing up with those games. They don’t really have an affiliation with table football, you know, and its harder for them to get into it.

“I started playing about 20 years ago when I was about 12 or 13. And it was a big association then. The 90s would have been the heyday then around the game Europe. I played for about five or six years and then I stopped, went  off to college and everything else became more important.

“And then I came back to it when I turned about 30. Like a lot of guys.”

John Moore is one of the reasons the game is on the up again despite the fact that – to paraphrase the late Apple chief Steve Jobs – there’s probably an app for that.

“I started playing when I was about eight years of age, he says. “I encouraged all the friends to play as well, we would have leagues, cups, World Cups and play the old Division One in England with transfers, suspensions, sending offs, injuries.  It was the first version of [computer game] Championship Manager I suppose.

“I had received email a couple of years ago and decided to enter a team in the world cup in Birmingham.  That’s where it all started off again.  Since that tournament , Irish players have travelled to about 10 countries playing in about 40 competitions in the last eight years.”

You might remember punk band Half Man Half Biscuit and their hit song: All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit. It conveyed brilliantly the longing felt by Subbutteo enthusiasts for the extensive collection of paraphernalia that came hand-in-hand with enjoying the game.

“Ah yeah, that used to be a huge thing and that’s what got kids into it years ago,” says Farrell.
“You wanted to have the Liverpool or the Man U side but truthfully nowadays the supplier Waddingtons don’t make it anymore.

“The stuff isn’t available anymore in the high street – you used to be able to buy every little item – from replica World Cups trophies, the goals, advertising hoarding – every nook and cranny. But nowadays it’s mostly Ebay, there’s a lot of sellers out there and you buy teams and start from scratch and build up from there.”

Both table football exponents admit their hobby – (quick fact: Subbutteo comes from the Latin word for hobby) – leaves them open to a ‘slagging’.

“That’s the thing. At time you did get a bit of a slagging and they hear you’re playing table football and they’re like : ah sure that’s a kids’ game, what are you doing still playing that? But I think when people check out the website and they see what’s involved, their eyes are opened.

“When they see you’ve won a national title or whatever, they take you a little bit more seriously and realise there’s a bit of structure to it. We’re just not blokes in our 20s and 30s flicking a ball around a table.”

• Email irishtablefootball@hotmail.com for more details 

“Keep the finger on the trigger, it’s just the slightest movement, there’s no need to squeeze it. You’re jumping away, you’re doing this,” Baldwin, a Paralympian, jerks his index finger towards the palm of his hand.

“Barely move it when you’re ready. Stop moving your finger. Nice and easy.”  Whoosh – the air rifle arrows a bullet towards – I hope – a bulls-eye, which is worth 10.9 in competition.

“Okay…. 3.2,” says Baldwin.

Baldwin came to be standing here, via many bends in the road. An army man, he’s competed in two Military Games, three Military World Championships, three Military European Championships and an Orientation World Championships.

He has also lost a leg while in the uniform.

Now he shoots in both able-body and Paralympic shooting events and aims to be the country’s first-ever shooter at a Paralympic Games in London next year.  He doesn’t usually miss his targets.

“We were out in Liberia, I was deployed in November 2003,” he recalls before filing the bullets into his rifle. “And we were on patrol after being there for about a week and had a car accident. And the driver was killed.

“I broke every bone in my body. Crushed my skull, shoulders, ribs, broke my pelvis. Broke my legs – I didn’t actually lose it though.

“Unfortunately my injuries were so bad, they had to get me home within a certain period of time. And they said the only way to make me stable was to cut my leg off; that was below the knee.

“So, I lost my leg below the knee, was in a coma then after I got back and my body just collapsed really. My lungs stopped working and unfortunately I got that flesh eating disease and, so, they had cut above the knee then.

“It took about six week before I could come off the ventilator; my lungs wouldn’t work. But once I got them working I got to where I am now. Everything followed then.”

Whoosh! “4.1, you’re getting better.”

It’s my first time feeling the weight and weird power of a gun under my chin. And the sharpshooter to my left under a visor and beneath a special shooting uniform, once lifted one up for the first time too.

“Eight years ago i actually met a guy in the military who was trying to introduce this kind of shooting. He was just trying to get some guys interested in it I suppose.

“So I jumped up off the bleachers one day, had one shot and then I had to leave. But I met him six months later and I got into it.

“Not long after I qualified for European Championships. Then unfortunately then I had to go to Africa and I lost my leg.”

“Are they expensive? That’s about two thousand in your hands there. Hey, hey! 7.4… one more?”

Baldwin is at the top of his game. He has won several nationals, competes against all-comers international over four separate events. So what’s the key to reaching the top of this sport? Try, dealing with nerves.

“Butterflies? Without a doubt. Everyone gets them. It’s how you handle the butterflies.

“Everyone gets the nerves, the bit of shaking, the whole lot. It’s how you relax into it. And whoever relaxes the best is the guy who wins it. That’s just the way it is.

“In the air rifle prone there’s a young lady from Australia. She’s 58-years-of-age. On her 12th Olympics. She shot a world record in Spain and she still has another Olympics in her.

“The beauty about this sport is, you don’t have to be 20, it’s great though if you do start young, because you need about 10 years until you reach the top level.”

“You’re getting worse, zero. come on you can’t finish on that.”

Baldwin admits his new leg makes his passion that bit more difficult especially dragging the gear around on his own a lot of the time. But he was grateful to pull on the fatigues again and return to his day job.

“I’m back to work full time, no worries with the health” he says, “I work in logistics – I had to change tack a little – in the Training Centre in the Curragh.

“I don’t go overseas now, because of the conditions being so difficult in that part of Africa, the prosthetic leg I have wouldn’t work properly. The one I have is computerised and it just wouldnt work, y’know?” he shrugs.

“But now we’re back in the Leb, you never know. I’d go back in the morning for you. My last your in the Leb was ‘92. So it would be good to go back and see what’s changed.

“It’s all about balance not strength at all. you’re using your muscle, that’s the problem… Nice one, seven.”

adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

THEY say everyone has a book in them. Paddy Coyne dragged it out kicking and screaming.

Unemployment arrives at the door with plenty of baggage. Lots of us know it all too well these days. For the 35-year-old, Coyne, opportunity knocked too, however.

The north Tipperary man no longer filled his days on the floor at a factory. Instead he cracked open his laptop and wrote his first novel The Drinker with a Hurling Problem. When no-one would publish it, he did so himself.

The book, on the surface, is about someone who returns to the homeplace for one final lash at the junior title with the local club. It’s about a lot more besides, one suspects.

“I suppose I was trying to have a conversation with myself about why I played hurling and became so obsessive about it over the years,” Coyne — who played junior hurling, but ‘was never any good’ — tells me.

“It worked to an extent in that I got those feelings down on paper in a structured way. The story isn’t completely auto-biographical, but it certainly does reflect how I feel about hurling. An old axiom suggests that writers write about the one thing that bothers them so much they have no choice, but to write about it.

“One day I came across something that Maurice Mitchell had said in 1973 — ‘not enough young men and women arrived in university without ever having shipped a punch in the nose’. That really struck a chord with me and got me thinking about writing a book about the GAA. In Ireland now we have this excruciating problem whereby every man and his family seem to be run like a private company.

“Our sense of community is being diluted. And, I think the GAA matters more now because the old certainties of rural life no longer hold. That, I suppose, is the point I was trying to get across, that the GAA can still help a man to find a sense of himself.”

Having read the opening pages however this is no Fáilte Ireland, soft-focus clip through an idealised rural Ireland. Put it this way, if it’s ever adapted into a movie, Cillian Murphy rather than James Nesbitt will play the lead.

It’s a long way from the silver screen now admittedly. Coyne, the sound of slamming doors ringing still in his ears, took a punt and published it.

“I sent off a draft of the book to several mainstream publishers and was, as I expected to be honest, roundly rejected. I then turned my attention to self-publishing. I wrote the book for myself, as an exercise in self therapy if you like, so I was never banking on making a lot of money off it. But since I had written the damn thing I reckoned that I should try to make people aware of its existence.

“Self-publishing is easy enough and free which is always nice. With Amazon you can quite easily piece together a physical book and an eBook. It’s ridiculously easy to be honest. Once you have that accomplished the idea is to market it. I have not made much progress with that, but am hopeful that a couple of reviews, whether good or bad, might help it to get some traction in the market.”

And though the market may be crowded, Coyne — who devours sports book obsessively — isn’t impressed with those present. That perceived lack of quality in sports writing, on this side of the Atlantic particularly, prompted him to add another spine to a tower of books.

“I suppose I have been frustrated with the sports books I have read over the past few years. None have really come close to capturing what it is like for someone to play with a less than glamorous hurling team or with any hurling team for that matter. I don’t know if I have managed to capture it in the book, but at least I have given it a go. Some GAA books are fairly insulting efforts. A child could do a better job with a crayon.”

So now the cruel world can judge his effort too. Though he may not be in the parish if and when his tale of local rivalry and universal themes finds its audience.

“I’m not sure what I am going to do with myself now,” he answers when I enquire to his situation.

“Emigration is an obvious option. Personally, I don’t think I’m good enough a writer to make a living out of it, but I really enjoyed writing the book and might try something more mainstream next time round.”

* You can buy the eBook (€2.99) or a physical copy (€9.99). Both can be ordered off Amazon.com, search for ‘The Drinker with the Hurling Problem’.

* Email: adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This column first apepared in the Irish Examiner ion October 14.

Having shuffled in from under another cloud-scarred sky of an evening, I enjoy kicking closed the door, sending the kettle towards its whistle-stop and snapping open a book like an umbrella.

Bob Dylan explained once that A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall was written during the dark days of the Cuban Missile Crisis and enjoyed a unique journey into existence.

“Every line in it is the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one,” he shrugged many years after Kennedy and Kruschev steered us away from catastrophe.

I often think the same about all the books that are stacked high beside my bed in a mocking pile of uncreased spines; maybe I should read the first line of each… just in case.

One book, long since purchased on the recommendation of several colleagues on the Irish Examiner sports desk, has been keeping the cold from the threshold — or the storm raging at my door as Dylan would say. Let me pass on the recommendation; Kevin Mitchell’s Jacobs Beach.

Journalism is, we are told early and often, about the who, what, where, why and how.

Well this book is about the Mob, professional boxing, Madison Square Garden and money. But the ‘how’ unfolds happily over a couple of hundred pages in sweat, blood and whisky-stained detail.

Stop someone on the street this afternoon and ask them who the heavyweight champion of the world is today and most would rub their necks before shaking their heads in surrender.

But there was a time when names like Marciano and Clay were filed under household.

When today boxing fights are dressed in the garb of a pantomime, introduced and hyped in the language of the school yard and boasting all the intellectual heft of your average celebrity-filled gossip- magazine, there was actually a time when fights meant more.

The epic duology in the late 30s between the black American Joe Louis and the German Max Schmeling was widely regarded as a crude, intriguing metaphor for the looming struggle between democracy and fascism. Ali v Frazier echoed with racial connotations. There was more on the line than David Haye’s pride.

Dust off the romance of course and it’s clear that boxing’s heart did not beat true. In New York it was in the 50s that the mob really took over, easing out relatively respectable figures like the Irish-Jewish promoter Mike Jacobs, who had run the Garden venue for decades.

More sinister winds blew through the game with the mafia tightening a happy grip on the sports own mechanism, the International Boxing Club.

The sport’s honesty was on the canvas and it ‘haemorrhaged so much credibility’, writes Mitchell, ‘that it almost died of shame’.

Forgive the hyperbole, but you’d feel the same is happening now, watching Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather sometimes. I’ve personally long been a fan but Saturday night was embarrassing.

Mayweather Jr — one of the totems of the modern fight game — knocked out Victor Ortiz in boxing’s new garden, Las Vegas. He did so, you’ll probably know, with a highly controversial one-two that’s been tarred as the most inexpensive of cheap shots. I reckon it was Ortiz’s fault for not having his hands up — but the real showdown was after the bell anyway.

An 80-year-old boxing commentator Larry Merchant climbed through the ropes to ask Mayweather Jr about the fight’s inglorious denouement. With the questions feeling like jabs and the crowd’s boos growing louder, Mayweather lost it for the second time.

When he told the stunned HBO man that he knew ‘shit about boxing’, Merchant replied with a laugh: “I wish I was 50 years younger and I’d kick your ass.”

Mayweather and Ortiz are likely to meet in a re-match. One hopes that Merchant gets his too.

adrianjrussell@gmail.comTwitter: @adrianrussell
This column first appeared in the Examiner on Friday, Sept 23.

“LEGS, arms, eyebrows, chest hair, nipples, inner thigh, everything. And I mean everything. I raised €2,500 that night but they took every bit of hair off me with the waxing,” says Ross Long as he thinks back on that night in the Gaelic Bar.

The Carrigaline local organised a quiz night in the pub and a waxing charity drive so he could get himself on the place to the Special Olympics in Athens.  He also had the Kieran Kramer band entertain the locals, the Corner House in the city’s Coburg St opened their doors and Lifiemi Mafi donated a Munster jersey to raffle. Friends rallied, favours were called in and the €3,750 that every Special Olympics volunteer needs to table was boxed off.

Thousands of miles away, a 14-year-old Chinese athlete was making less painful preparations for his trip to the Greek capital. And Jun Sung, turned out to be quite happy that Long left the Gaelic Bar without a whisper of body hair – and his fund-raising problems sorted.

“I went out and was paired up with a Chinese golfer,” says Long 24 hours after touching down in Dublin with a campaign which say Team Ireland take 107 medals in total behind him.

“It was extremely frustrating at the beginning because of the language barrier.  He was a good golfer – I could see that – but he needed a lot of encouraging and his concentration wasn’t good.”

With the Chinese lad seemingly not too adept with Long’s lilting Leeside accent and the caddy knowing little Cantonese, he didn’t get much encouragement on their first day out together on the greens. He shot a very disappointing 71.

“He just needed someone to talk him through it,” continues Long.  “So we went back in and I was thinking ‘how am I going to help this fella now?’

“So I went up to his coach who spoke a bit of English and said ‘I need Jun Sung – his name was Jun Sung – to be able to understand me’.

“I have one of these phones with a voice recorder in it and I got the coach to say about 10 phrases into the machine.”

There, off the course, the three stood as they muddled through a series of phrases that Long thought would be helpful.

“Please concentrate Jun Sung.”

“The lie of the putt is left.”

“The lie of the putt is right.”

“Your choice of club is wrong.”

“You need extra power because of the sand.”

The pair headed out the next day with a small hole punched through the language barrier.

“He shot 59 and picked up 11 shots,” says the Corkman, “then the third day he hit 51 and the last was 60.”“What can I say, I came up with an ingenious plan and helped him out,” the caddy deadpans.

“We definitely bonded. We were high-fiving all the way around the course; that was my way of telling him that he had hit a good shot. So if he made a mistake or whatever and I held back the high five, the head would drop.

“Then on the next hole if he did better he’d give me a thumbs up and we’d have a high-five. He was only 14 and he only had two words in English: ‘water’ and ‘okay’.

“[But] I went out there and was paired with a Chinese golfer who I never met and by the end there was of course an emotional attachment.  On the last day I gave him a Team Ireland T-shirt with Athens 2011 on it and our logo and he gave me a little Chinese doll that someone must have given to him to give to me.  I don’t where he got it from.

The performance earned the youngster a bronze medal.  The Chinese coaches were jumping around behind the rope as they tried to explain to the athlete what he’d achieved, despite a terrible start.

“There was definitely a few hugs at the end,” he adds.

So Leeside can take some credit for a Chinese medal. Did Long go to see its presentation?

“We all went to the awards ceremony to support the Irish athletes but obviously when athletes from other countries got their medals we’d cheer and clap them too. But when Sung got his medal he got an extra cheer from the Irish,” he recalls.

The luggage is unpacked again and the trip for this volunteer is a tan, some wonderful memories and a little Chinese doll. Was the waxing worth it to get there?

“When you wake up the next morning with no hair but you’re fundraising is done it’s worth it. Fellas were coming up saying ‘I’ll give you fifty for half an eye-brow’.

“And I was like: give me it. I’m delighted I got there.”

You get the feeling, he’s not the only one.Adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

William O’Doherty pulled on his apron as normal one morning in Cork city and walked to work behind the bar of the well-known Woodford Bourne public house on St Patrick’s Street. The year was 1912.

He was in his early 20s and, it seems, liked a game of cards after his shift pouring pints. One night he and a colleague were dealt a fateful hand. The pot? A ticket each for the Titanic’s maiden voyage.

You can, I’m sure, guess the rest; both young men were lost in the cold water on that night to remember, April 15.

It sounds like a Hollywood yarn – and indeed it is, thanks to James Cameron – but O’Doherty was my grandfather’s uncle. And, sadly we thought, he earned even less than those Irish who were resigned to the footnotes in that chapter of history. O’Doherty and his workmate were forgotten completely – the names of the two lads who actually lost the game of cards, and earlier booked the tickets, are instead on records, plaques and in books.

They may well have cursed their luck at the full table in that dark corner of the bar (which is still open), then risen and walked out into rich, full and long lives. Their descendents may be reading this now. But their names are inked in history’s ledger as the two young men who frozen in the Atlantic.

So, prompted by an uncle who compiled our family tree through hours of research and conversation, I stayed back late one night after work in the Irish Examiner offices and sneezed my way through the dusty archives. A colleague in the library allowed me to literally reel in the years on the impressive microfilm print machine. I poured a coffee and slotted the spool marked ‘Cork Examiner, 1912’ into the mechanism.

Eventually I found the front page for which I was looking. Peering back at me through layers of time and several generations was the stoic image of a posing William ‘Achilles’ O’Doherty. With a middle name like that, he was always doomed, it seemed to me.

The journalist Senan Maloney dedicated a section of his book ‘The Irish Aboard the Titanic’, to the pair’s story having one day rapped on my grandmother’s front door, I believe.

Armed with these pieces of evidence, we next contacted the heritage centre in Cobh, to politely pull at their sleeve and explain that their list of lost souls on the wall was missing a couple of chancers. They promised a year ago to commemorate him by producing a piece of the wall of his own.

Tomorrow, meanwhile, the Tour de France gets underway and its stages will, I hope, be once again bookended by the voice of Eurosport’s Gary Imlach. The wry, intelligent presenter has been doing the presenting job for years, prodding studio guests like Stephen Roche for nuggets of information that those of us outside the peloton never learned.

He wintered this year under the lights of Channel 4’s graveyard NFL coverage in which his understated demeanour seemed at odds with the chuckling persona of his America in-studio pundit.

But far from saddles and shoulder pads, it’s from another sporting tradition that Imlach’s family is rooted. When his father died in 2001, the Englishman realised he knew relatively little about him. He wrote a wonderful book – My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes – as a sort of testimonial.

Stewart Imlach – Gary’s father – was a left winger from Lossiemouth in Scotland. A nippy winger, he weaved his way through 14 seasons of professional football, over 400 games, including playing in the 1959 FA Cup Final for Nottingham Forest against Luton Town and the 1958 Scottish World Cup.

He rarely spoke of his past and Gary didn’t delve into his father’s career until he was forced to rely on secondary sources – like newspaper microfilm – for sources.

“The list of his clubs had always had a natural rise and fall to it,” he wrote, “Bury, Derby, Nottingham Forest – pause for a beat – Luton, Coventry, Crystal Palace. Nine syllables up, nine down.”

And the sad end to a proud career becomes more personal as he learns more. “I knew the sequence of steps to and from the high-altitude plateau in the middle of his career, but I didn’t know the tempo. Discovering the abruptness of his decline was like coming across an old spool of cine film in the attic that showed him falling silently and inexplicably downstairs.”
Finding a match programme for the ’58 Wembley showpiece, Imlach reads with a little sadness: “Bob McKinlay, centre-half: training to be a motor mechanic … Stewart Imlach, outside-left: a return to the joinery business.” His father did quickly fade into the shadows again and folded away his medals and caps. But his son’s memorial is a wonderful piece of writing and a better testimonial to his dad.

On Sunday, rather than sit in and watch the second stage of Le Tour with Imlach, after an email from Cobh this week, we hope to travel to the town for the day to view William O’Doherty’s new testimonial for the first time.

Adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

When you get a phone call from Flan Marsh in Clare, you realise it actually is. And you’re usually left smiling by the time you hang up.

The Broadford man has featured in these pages before. He lost his once-successful and honest roofing business when the Tiger stopped roaring and new houses no longer needed protecting.

Instead of kicking his heels around the house he set up a hurley-making workshop in his back yard and eventually developed a new technology that stops the ash splitting and spinning dangerously off in all directions, often prompting trips to A and E departments adjacent to hurling strongholds. His shatter-safe hurley was born and it’s kept him out of trouble since, providing as he does now equipment for the Banner senior hurlers and half the county besides.

Major League Baseball – who bleed money every time a spectator is cut by a broken bat – called him up in east Clare and he dispatched a parcel of sticks to New York where they put them under their microscopes; CSI Semple Stadium.

He pushed one into the hand of GAA president Christy Cooney who visited a local pitch. In short, he’s open for business.

But, despite his busy year, Marsh is not now leaning on his hurley like a lazy corner back.

He rings me this week from outside a sign-makers while, inside, they work on his new van. Or as he calls it ‘the world’s first mobile hurley making unit’. The plan is to pull up at pitches throughout the country and make hurleys for players, young and old, while they train.

He’ll ake the measurements, specification details, preferences from the players as well as a template of the old hurley, and by the time the few laps are run and the drills are drilled, there’s a new hurley waiting in the car park.

Where did you go this one from, I ask into the hands-free?

“I’m an entrepreneur – these things come naturally to me.” [Loud laughter from east Clare]

“I got a van off my bother Thomas,” he says, “We put two sanders in it, an extractor fan for the dust, a blower for the dust and I can plug the whole thing into any power point. And if there’s none I have my own generator.

“It’s the right job altogether. I needed to think of something to be honest with you. What’s the point of me sitting in my workshop waiting for people to come to me with work? I’m bringing the mountain to Mohammad rather than waiting for Mohammad to come to the mountain.

“I can make a house call now to a gang of lads sharing a house, or go to a pitch or go to a kids’ party and they can watch me making the hurleys, cos they’re mystified by the whole process. They’re looking at me going ‘Jayze, what’s your man doing now’.”

I know what they mean. Marsh insists the service will be invaluable.

“I wanted to give something back to the GAA. It saves the mothers and fathers having to drive to hurley-makers around the place and dragging rakes of kids around the place to get a hurley.

“You’re paying €28 for a hurley plus the cost of diesel to go out to a workshop whereas you give me €25 and it’s into your hand, made while you wait.”

What if Ireland trades its way back to the good days and more houses sprout up throughout Clare and beyond? Will Marsh rip the sanders out of the back, strap a ladder to the roof-rack and back it into a building site again as a roofer?

“I’ll keep my head down and my heart up now. This is the way forward now I reckon,” he says, looking instead, like his county’s hurlers, no further than Sunday’s match. He’ll park the newly-pimped-out van outside the stadium before the Tipperary game.

And what did he tell the sign-maker to paint on his gifted van? “Marsh Shatter Safe Hurleys, my goal is to see you score your goal.” He pauses and continues: “Get your ash… in a flash”. And there’s laughter and a smile again.

Visit Shattersafehurleys for more details.

MJ Tierney has a media degree and though he didn’t see his one-word tweet emblazoned across the famous broad sheets of the ‘Gray Old Lady’ on Monday morning, he will certainly have learned a few more lessons about how this industry works in the past seven days.

The talented Laois senior footballer was dropped from the county’s starting XV as the side prepared to face Dublin in Croke Park on Sunday afternoon.

The summer was hard underfoot, the Hill was blue and the television on-air studio light was red. This is the reason why a talented young lad like Tierney went to bed early, ate what he was told, lifted what was put at his feet in the gym throughout the fog of winter training. When he was dropped – late in the day it seems – he had every right to feel disillusioned.

When he sent a tweet and updated his Facebook page with that very word however, he broke new ground.

The bullet that killed Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 was the shot that launched the world into World War I and ultimately modernity.   Will this seemingly innocuous tweet, fired out absent-mindedly by an upset footballer, do the same for the GAA? As Pat Shortt once said, “One bullet; Bang, bang.”

The Association is, if not rocked, at least a little rattled by the imposition of this technology it seems.  Column inches were devoted to the issue, the Sunday Game discussed it after Des Cahill read out the succinct message and Tierney was compelled to defend himself off-line.

Tony Davis and Kevin McStay ran the usual route of a lot of those in the media – in Ireland and beyond – of playing the I-don’t-get-it card. They’d want to start trying to and not revel in any perceived Old School superiority. Maybe things were better back in the day, in many respects, but those times are not coming back.  I have a hunch: this internet thing isn’t going away.

“There are ways of taking bad news or tough medicine on the chin,” said the former Mayo star McStay on the Montrose couch.

“I would suggest that tweeting to the GAA public is not one of them. It doesn’t show a lot in the sense of teamwork or what you’re about,” he added.

John Fogarty of this parish reported that Tierney was unhappy with the spotlight afforded by RTE’s flagship GAA programme: “Why bother bringing it up?” Tierney argued, “They were making something out of nothing. It says more about the quality of The Sunday Game that they have to talk about a tweet by me. That’s the stupidest part of it. Obviously, they haven’t much to be talking about and that’s the truth of it.”

Like cash-strapped fans picking their battles this year though – Tierney should’ve realised he was fighting a losing one there. He wrote something publicly – you can’t complain when people comment on it.

GAA chiefs met to discuss Twitter this week we’re told – though theyve already furnished players with guidelines. On Wednesday night, Tierney, admirably fought his corner against similar opposition on RTE’s Committee Room (which is really good by the way). He sounded pretty sensible to me.

Marty Morrissey and Vincent Hogan however made reference to a more sinister thread of online discourse: anonymous chat rooms. Earlier in the day, Down’s John Clarke threw his hat at his intercounty career, citing pressure and criticism. Let there be no mistake that those in the shadows who belch anonymous vitriol onto the internet every Monday morning and beyond add considerably to that which is upon an intercounty player.

For all the light that modern communications bring to our lives – think Google Earth, texting a loved one, a picture message when you meet a hero – there’s darkness too. The internet seems to add a layer of distance to conversation, seemingly giving licence for bad manners or worse.

It often reminds me of those shouting obscenities through a windscreen at fellow drivers in traffic. Put those commuters on a crowded footpath and they  don’t as easily swear abuse however.

Honestly, at this stage of my life if someone offered me a magical capsule which would transform me into an intercounty player instantly, I think I’d refuse. Why would I want to sacrifice freedom, privacy, time and energy for what the modern player expects in return?

The prospect of a hip replacement, a strained personal life and servers full of online abuse.

Tierney, tellingly, alluded casually to the amateur status that is the foundation of the association. Or as he put it when asked if he hadn’t learned the lessons of English soccer stars like Giggs and Rooney: “They get paid for it, that’s the difference”.

It certainly is. Though as Daily Mirror reporter Oli Holt learned when he opened his twitter account this week, Rio Ferdinand – a man who is paid handsomely – should also realise what you write online, will end up in the public domain.

“You fat prick. U got something to say about me missing a drugs test say it when u see me,” the Manchester United man  had written to Holt in a private Twitter message.  The Mirror put it on their front page.

Adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell