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unlucky

The news broadcasts are creaking under the weight of cliches like ‘blankets of snow’, ‘big freezes’ while footpaths are engaging in treachery.

As the country has slowed ground to a halt, the sporting world has been the same.

Meanwhile, in today’s Irish Examiner, despite the present icy inertia, about two dozen of our staff writers and columnists have looked ahead to the events that will define the Irish sporting year. I can’t link to the website as it’s a graphic but check it out in the hard copy if you’re in Ireland. There’s some surprising calls.

In the meantime, here’s my effort: Read the rest of this entry »

IrelandGrandSlam2009PA

“Horan… Wallace… Ireland in position … this must be it… this MUST be it for Ronan O’Gara… drop… at… goal… Grand Slam . . . at . . . stake… HE’S GOOOOOOT IIIIIT!!!!!!!! YES!,” Ryle Nugent. Love him or loath him; he cares more than when he was doing League of Ireland football coverage.

“Woohoooooo!” — Nugent’s colour man Tony Ward offers his analysis.

“No penalties,” pleads a shaky-sounding Ward, presumably looking skyward in supplication.

Half a second later: “Penalty to Wales” — Nugent, from under the desk.

“Sixty-one years awaiting, how sweet this moment is,” Ryle gushes after the nation realises Stephen Jones’ kick has dropped short. Great stuff.

“I thought I was going to have another Seamus Darby moment, deprived right at the death.” — Conor O’Shea, the Kerryman on the RTÉ panel, back in the studio. Darby would’ve made that kick.

“After the first two lineouts, I realised Gert must have taught the Irish guys some Afrikaans. They were counting with us before the ball was thrown in.” Springbok Victor Matfield reveals that Donncha O’Callaghan picked up more than Paul O’Connell during the lineout in South Africa. Read the rest of this entry »

Zidane loses his head
This was like a pitch for an old Clint Eastwood movie: a maverick cop is about to retire after a working life married to the badge. Here’s the rub: his last day at the office isn’t going to be uneventful.

Zidane — the brightest talent of his generation — already had a World Cup medal on the sideboard, a European Championship win, European Cups, Ballon d’Oors — enough baubles to decorate your Christmas tree essentially. But Zizou will forever now be remembered for his rash reaction to a Marco Matterazzi jibe as the world watched on in shock.

By scoring a seventh-minute penalty he had become only the fourth player in World Cup history to score in two different finals. However, in extra time in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium he headbutted the Italian defender in the chest. The flash of the referee’s red card sent the curtain falling on a glitterring career.

Italy, of course went on to win the penalty shoot-out 5–3. Aptly, he kept the Golden Ball award for best player at the tournament.

War of Attrition strikes gold at Cheltenham
Michael O’Leary heralds his airline’s obsession with arriving on time. His horse War Of Attrition clocked in early after little turbulence — stopping the stopwatch at 6min 31.7sec.

In the past 50 years only two Gold Cup winners have gone faster, Looks Like Trouble (6:30.3) six years previously and Norton’s Coin (6:30.9) in 1990.

In 2004 War Of Attrition left Cheltenham as a courageous loser, beaten a neck by Brave Inca in the Supreme Novice Hurdle. In 2006 however, he went one better than his old rival with victory in the Gold Cup, as Ireland’s dominance at the Cheltenham Festival reached unprecedented heights.

This success was the ninth at the meeting for an Irish-trained horse, and the 10th, Whyso Mayo, came in the next race, setting a new record. It was all very easy for jockey Conor O’Dwyer who settled his horse behind the early pace and moved towards the front of the race with about a mile left to run. The Celtic Tiger purred and Cheltenham’s Irish partied on.
Read the rest of this entry »

donal5

“You say to me that there is more to life than hurling. Well if you want to carry on like a fella who is not an inter-county hurler well then there will be more to life than hurling. Lots more. But there won’t be hurling. That’s the reality of it.” — Manager Brian Cody on the monk-like existence Kilkenny hurlers endure for their All-Irelands.

“Cop that. It’s different this time, boys.” — Kerry footballer Tadhg Kennelly, in his book ghost-written by an Australian journalist, on the high challenge on Cork’s Nicholas Murphy in the first moments of this year’s All-Ireland SFC final in Croke Park.

“On my solemn word, I did not and would never intentionally go out to hurt another footballer.” — Kennelly backtracks after a storm of public disapproval swirled around him after the book’s publication. Read the rest of this entry »

ron1

“I am deeply aware of the disappointment and hurt that my infidelity has caused to so many people, most of all my wife and children.” Tiger Woods after engaging with a fire hydrant, a tree and half of the world’s female bar staff.

“After much soul searching, I have decided to take an indefinite break from professional golf.” I’ve paid for a few expensive rounds in my time, but Woods rues one of the most expensive cocktails of all time.

“I have not been true to my values and the behaviour my family deserves. I am not without faults and I am far short of perfect. I am dealing with my behaviour and personal failings behind closed doors with my family.” Woods — again — faces up to the reality of getting caught with his pants down.

“I would probably need to apologise to her and hope she uses a driver next time instead of a three iron.” Jesper Parnevik, who introduced Woods to his wife, offers some professional advice to his former au pair.

“If I could, I would take this f****** ball and shove it down your f****** throat.” Do you kiss your dad with that mouth Serena? One of the Williams sisters rants at a US Open line judge

“Slim dumps a small pile of powder on the coffee table. He cuts it, snorts it. He cuts it again. I snort some. I sit back on the couch and consider the Rubicon I’ve crossed.” Andre Agassi on fine-tuning his pre-match warm-up — taking crystal meth in the 90s. Didn’t we all?

“There was a typo in the book. I did math, not meth.” Agassi, joking about the sensation caused by his drug admission. It would have been more surprising to discover he was doing lines of algebra, to be honest. Read the rest of this entry »

sallyf

1 The Paul McGrath Award for best disappearing act: Kenny Egan
More used to jumping rope, Egan skipped off to New York at the end of February. The Olympic silver medal wining boxer caused quite a stir as Twitter lost one of it’s biggest proponents and the social diarists were missing a once-reliable cast member. The Dubliner eventually returned after missing an Irish team tournament with the USA, apologised and has since kept the head down.

2 The Waldorf and Stadler Award for bickering media pundits: Pat Spillane and Joe Brolly
We may have to give RTE’s GAA analysts an award each to avoid an argument. It was a summer of late tackles and dirty hits on the sofa as co-panellist Colm O’Rourke and his Meath team of the late 80s would have applauded. Like two old fellas on high stools, the debate was fairly incoherent and trivial: who is the team of the decade, Tyrone or Kerry? It started early in the season and was concluded, with Spillane grinning, when the Kingdom regained the upper hand in September.

3 The Podge and Rodge Prize in Recognition of Tact: Clare Balding
I’m not going to stick the boot in here. But… the words ’stones’ and ‘greenhouses’ sprang to mind after the Grand National when the BBC’s racing presenter poked fun at winning jockey Liam Treadwell appearance. Sticking a mic in the poor guy’s face (at precisely the highest moment in his professional life) she demanded: “Give us a big grin to the camera. No, let’s see your teeth! He hasn’t got the best teeth in the world, but you can afford to go and get them done now if you like.” Stay classy, middle England.

4 Most Innocuous Question of the Year: Marty Morrissey

The beloved Banner broadcaster was left mopping the spittle from his impressive pate when he casually queried Brian Cody (after the Kilkenny manager saw his side seal a four-in-a-row, let’s remember) about that final-defining penalty call.
“I have no idea Marty. Did you check all the other frees to see if they were dodgy also?” Cody spat before continuing in that poisoned vein.
“Well Marty wont be buying the book after that,” Lyster chuckled afterwards from the comfort of behind the studio sofa.

5 Least Innocuous Question: Paul Kimmage
The contrarian journalist anmd former pro rider Paul Kimmage, who already has plenty of history with Lance Armstrong (“He is the cancer”) when he asked him a question about his disgraced former colleagues. “What is it about these dopers that you seem to admire so much?” said Kimmage. Armstrong responded at length and with chilling calmness.

6 Contingency Plan of the Year: Plan B
The national emergency plan saw half the country suffer for a fortnight under floods, sticking Leon Best up front for quarter of an hour didn’t reap rewards for Ireland against France in Dublin and going back into the jungle didn’t get Jordan back on track.
However, as Croker chiefs pressed the panic button and flashed a ‘GO TO PLAN B’ message which flashed across the big screen at HQ, the phrase entered our sporting lexicon.

7 The Bill Murray Award for Losing It In Translation: Tadhg Kennelly
To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, Ireland and Australia are two countries divided by a common language. When Kennelly shoulder Cork’s Nicholas Murphy into the face in the All-Ireland Final in September he recounted the incident in his rushed-to-shops book.
“Cop that, it’s different this time boys”. It did not go down well.

8 The Frontline Heckler Award for Late Late Show performance: Donal Óg Cusack
The Cork hurling star got stuck in on his Late Late Show appearance to promote his ‘controversial’ new book. Ryan Tubridy, who looks like he’d blow away if he stood outside the dressing-room door as a Junior B team ran out, tried his luck at talking about hurling. Cusack thought him to stick to the lounge music and book clubs.

9 Oliver Reed for Drunken TV Appearance: Brendan Fevola

Readers here, and pub workers in Galway especially, may remember Brendan Fevola as the Aussie Rules player who was sent home from the 2006 International Rules Series after brawling with a barman.
This year Fevola made a holy show of himself at the Brownlow Medal ceremony — stumbling from guest to guest with a microphone and all-too-willing cameraman as he quizzed the game’s great and good.
The Carlton player has been fined $10,000 and told to “wake up to himself”. ‘Fev’ admitted he had no recollection of the events which also led him to being axed from the Footy Show on Channel Nine

10 The Boy George Question Award: Caster Semenya

In August Semenya won gold in the 800 meters at the world championships in Berlin. Immediately afterwards questions were raised about the South African’s gender. The row rumbles on; Semenya will be allowed to keep her medal and prize money no matter what. if not her privacy.

11 The Golden License Fee Award : RTÉ

The national broadcaster managed to miss one of the nation’s greatest sporting achievements this year. Olive Loughnane romped home, as they say, to take a silver medal in Berlin but we had to watch Brendan Foster interview the Galway girl for us as RTÉ didn’t have the rights to the world championships

12 The Stephen Ireland Award for Silly Vehicle Choice: Cliff Lee
Phillies pitcher Cliff Lee almost missed the first game of the World Series against the Yankees when he decided to take a cab uptown to the Bronx. Lee was stuck in a taxi at 5:45pm en route from his team’s Manhattan when the driver told him they were hopelessly stuck in traffic and it might take two more hours to get to the ballpark. Lee instructed the driver to find the nearest subway stop and negotiated two trains to make it to the mound on time.

13 The Milli Vanilli Special Mention (in recognition of claiming other’s work as your own): Noel Hunt
The Reading striker sparked a mini-controversy when he insisted he and not captain Robbie Keane — scored the equaliser for Ireland against Italy in Bari in April.

14 Best Outfit: Serena Williams
The younger Williams sister shook the cosy world of lawn tennis with a tight-fitting and cheeky “Are you looking at my titles?” t-shirt at a Wimbledon press-conference. New balls please.

15 Jedward Award for Attempted Singing: Tommy Bowe
The Ospreys man was hung out to dry by his Ireland teammates on Dame Street at their Grand Slam homecoming. Thinking he’d enjoy a chorus lines of championship-winning colleagues, instead they stood back and left him suffer through an in front of 17,000 fans on Dame Street.

This article first appeared in the Irish Examiner sports review supplement.

jonz

When Michael Jonzon, above, closed out the Castello Masters in Spain last month with an 18-foot birdie, the title secured his European Tour card. But he also won a more tangible trophy. The pictures in the newspapers on Monday morning showed the Swede kissing an oak-coloured sculpture of a man with a ball on his head and smile on his face. And this, these days, is not the weirdest prize in sports today.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ghostwriters: like teenagers stealing drink from unsuspecting couples.

Ghostwriters: like teenagers stealing drink from unsuspecting couples.

The always-readable Pitch Invasion takes a fairly extensive look at footballers’ autobiographies.

I talked to some of the men who pen them, ghostwriters, for the Irish Examiner.

“I went to the World Cup, I was shite, here’s my book” was how Joey Barton succinctly and accurately summed up the raft of autobiographies spawned by England’s 2006 tournament failure.

But for every tome revealing whether Wayne Rooney likes to ring for a pizza before or after he watches Countdown, there’s a Liam Dunne, Dessie Farrell or Tony Cascarino laying bare his soul for all to peruse. Read the rest of this entry »

I took part in a seminar for coaches in UCD last week, offered by the renowned Ajax of Amsterdam. Yesh.

The intellectualisation of soccer has, they say, always foundered on a one simple problem — football players. Unless, of course, you’re Dutch.

The propagators of Total Football in the 1970s elevated an industrial sport from the spit and sawdust shop floor to an erudite, urbane beautiful game and enlightenment dawned over Europe.
Ajax Amsterdam is, of course, a catchword for home-grown productivity, expert training and, above all, success. In a country that gave the world Van Gogh and Rembrandt its greatest club has delivered innumerable soccer-playing artists in Cruyff, Van Basten and Bergkamp. Read the rest of this entry »

The GAA summer was still-born last weekend but this Sunday, as Cork meet Tipp in Thurles in the Munster senior hurling championship, the season will be very much alive and kicking.

Last summer as part of the Irish Examiner’s monday championship supplement, as the recesson began to bite I tried to guage how cheap one could get to Croke Park for a big game.

I planned to hitch from Kerry to the capital. Wearing a Cork jersey.

Ask a New York cabbie, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” and they’ll invariably tell you “practice, practice, practice”. With my collar pulled above the nape of my neck to shield myself from a sheet of the wettest Kerry rain, as I shuffled along the road between Killarney and Tralee before 8am on Saturday morning, I realised getting to Croke Park was a journey not dissimilar. But it’s more a case of thumb, thumb, thumb.
Read the rest of this entry »

sk1

I’ll be riding shotgun in the Sean Kelly/An Post team car today on Stage 3 of the FBD Insurance Rás from Cobh to Cahirciveen. Follow the progress on twitter @adrianrussell.

Ah, I’ve been expecting you, reader! As part of the Irish Examiner’s GAA championship supplement available in all good newsagent’s today, I attempted to predict what will happen this summer using a few different methods.

Tonight in pubs and homes around the country, slugs of pints or milky tae will be punctuated with wild opinion and heated discussion about the season ahead.

Who will come out on top in September? Who will be player of the year? Will we get a ticket off the club if we get there? In an attempt to answer these evergreen questions this straw poll, forged in laboratory conditions, attempts to go back to the future.

We’ve read the omens, asked an expert bookmaker, quizzed a fortune teller (she knew we were calling) and, acting as a control in the experiment, interrogated a recently-castrated, bemused Yorkshire Terrier called Jasper under a hot lamp deep in the bowels of the Irish Examiner building.

1. Forget the small talk, who’s gonna won the hurling this year?
The omens say – That’s easy; back the Deise this year – again. The last time Ireland won a Grand Slam in 1948, Waterford won Liam.
Michelle the fortune teller, Temple Bar – Kilkenny seems to be coming on my tarot cards with a new player who is fashionable and will be loved by many. And Henry Shefflin will look weak for a while but will do the job.
The bookie, Paddy Power: Kilkenny should be made play left handed at this stage. Galway will add a new dimension to Leinster of course and it’ll suit them to have more games but Kilkenny might have another gear to go up and if they do – everyone else look out.
Jasper the Dog: Given a choice of two tennis balls representing Kilkenny and Galway respectively, a sliothar which is Cork and a soft toy which we’ll call Tipp for no reason, Jasper – with all the contemplation of TV pundit – went for Galway. Eventually. Read the rest of this entry »

Micheal Phelps’s three-month suspension, which was doled out by USA Swimming after a picture surfaced in a British red-top newspaper showing him inhaling from a marijuana pipe, ended today.

And the freak is back in the circus.

He admits however that he drew up and pros and cons list for both swimming and quitting.

Here he is racing CNN news hound Anderson Cooper not long after the Olympics…

Imagine how fast he’ll go now he’s not sponsored by Cheech and Chong. I wrote about one of the American’s races in Beijing as part of a ’sporting highlights’ series at the turn of the year.

BEFORE the bells toll on 2008 next week, an extra second will be added to the last minute of the year. Our warming and expanding planet is an unreliable timekeeper and the subsequent discrepancy with our atomic clock causes a world of practical difficulties — like large financial transactions, reliant on precise Wall Street time stamps vanishing.

And for every millisecond the atomic clock is out, global positioning systems are approximately 1,000m inaccurate; that’s a fairly important one thousandth of a second if you’re recuperating in an Iraqi hospital, one kilometre up the road from a US army missile target.

So on December 31, the Director of Time (yes he exists), — a man who measures delicate factors like the wind on mountains slowing the rotation of the Earth — will add that extra second to our year. Only one other man operated in such minute fractions of time this year — and he didn’t need a Sat-Nav to find his way into the history books. Read the rest of this entry »

The confirmations keep coming for the Irsh open in Baltray this month. I packed a flask of milky tea and hit Adare Manor for last year’s competition.

WITH an impressive tented village at the heart of the picture-postcard Adare Manor hawking expensive jewellery, Audis and gourmet sandwiches, it seemed the Irish Open was like the Electric Picnic for the middle aged.

And walking the rope with about 20 or so other die-hards to follow the early action between our own Peter Lawrie and Australian Scott Strange, one had the quiet satisfaction similar to enjoying a favourite cult band that no one else is interested in.

The Castelknock man bantered sporadically with the faithful few who shunned the brighter lights of the Harrington roadshow, or even the draw of Clarke, McGinley and McIlroy for this off Broadway production as he and his playing partner battled well on a pleasant Saturday morning.

On a day that grew warmer, it occurred to me what a nice way this must be to make a good living. In the same way Mary McAleese must think Ireland smells of drying paint and fresh flowers because of the effort Muinter na hEireann put in before her visits; so too, this golfing elite must think the world, or perhaps this country at least, is a picturesque, affluent resort with bottles of chilled Ballygowan water every 700 yards or so. Read the rest of this entry »

sk1

I went to a secret location somewhere outside Brussels to visit the Sean Kelly Cycling Academy some time ago to see how the Irish pro riders train and live. The team look to be in good form at the moment ahead of a busy summer. The piece is below.

WHEN the peleton converges on the start line in Grand Canal Square in Dublin for the first stage of the Tour of Ireland tomorrow morning, 16 teams from 11 different countries will be represented. But through the patchwork of colourful jerseys, will run a thread of green – Sean Kelly’s An Post team.

Founded by the Carrick-on-Suir cycling legend four years ago in an attempt to offer a platform for promising, young Irish amateurs, this season has seen the team come of age with three race victories so far. Kelly, a man born on the nape of two counties, and after a lifetime in the saddle on foreign roads, has attempted to blend ‘overseas riders’ with the best from this country at his high-performance academy in Belgium – a policy that is starting to pay off. Read the rest of this entry »

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