This piece of indigenous hip-hop is more intercounty than Intergalactic.

And as fan-produced All-Ireland final songs go recently… it’s pretty good. But I’m biased.

Somewhere south of the Mason-Dixie, however, Caleb Followill is spinning in his skinny jeans.

Ok, last week you might have seen Sky Sports’ Jessica Kastrop getting pinged in the back of the head while reporting with Scholl at a Bundesliga game.

This week during Germany’s Euro 2012 qualifier it became apparent that Scholl has developed some post traumatic stress issues as he sees footballs whizzing towards him as soon as the cameras go live.

Incidentally, last night I read Malcolm Gladwell’s piece The Art of Failure in The Only Game in Town: sportswriting from the New Yorker – which I really recommend sportswriting nerds – in which he explains the nuanced difference between ‘choking’ and ‘panicking’.

It’s safe to say, Scholl is panicking.

HT Hot Clicks

Picture credit: Killian Kelly

Remember the bit in the old baseball movie ‘The Natural’ when the eponymous Robert Redford is lamenting his sorry past (he was shot by Barbara Hershey), beating himself up to Glenn Close?

Redford: “But I didn’t see it coming.”
Close: “How could you know she’d hurt you? How could anyone?”
Redford: “I didn’t see it coming.”Close: “You should have?”
Redford: “Yes. But I didn’t. Why didn’t I?”

I’d like to see the Sundance Kid hurtling precariously through – as I did on Wednesday – the beautiful Ballyhoura Forest which hugs the border between north Cork and south county Limerick, on a sophisticated mountain bike.

I pulled on the gloves they gave me inside out, bunny hopped around the car park thanks to the teenager-sensitive front brakes and was told, with a smile, to fasten my ‘brain bucket’ helmet. Perhaps I should’ve seen it coming.

In total, Ballyhoura offers more than 90km of biking trails along this single track, as well as on forest road climbs, which marks it apart as one of Europe’s top mountain-biking destinations. These loops range from the relatively easy six kilometres of Greenwood Loop, which would take a slow-ish biker (hi there!) about an hour to complete, to the leave-it-to-the-experts 51km Loop.

This, the ‘brown path’, is for the absolute headers. It could take a biker up to five hours to finish, including as it does l’Alpe D’Huez-like climbs and tough-to-negotiate features in a slaloming, long descent.

Local company Trailriders rent out the bikes to those who visit the recently-developed facility (€25 for a nice bike couple of hours, for example). Jonathon Mansell has just completed his Leaving Certificate and is about to start an exciting outdoor pursuits course in Kinsale, Co Cork.

For now, he works full-time for Trailriders and is known around here as one of the most proficient mountain bikers to yet turn the pedals up the hill. At the moment however he’s staying out of the saddle due to a hip injury. Another clue.

“We’re pretty busy at the moment – we had about 47 bikes out on the mountain on Saturday – and guys just keep coming back.

“It’s not for everyone – some don’t know what to expect to be honest – but we had three lads earlier flew around in a couple of hours and then went for a trip around the green course. And that was their first time. So they’ll be back.”

Mansell wheels out one of their newer bikes and sits me up on it.

“The brakes are very sensitive, so just feather them like this,” he says, spreading three fingers across each lever and touching them softly. “You’ll be grand.”

Diarmiud O’Leary is a retired secondary school teacher from the local town of Kilfinnan. He’s kindly volunteered to spend his morning guiding me up – and then down – the mountain side.

A highly interesting man with a love of the locality having been involved in the development of the Ballyhoura Way, he peppers generous encouragement (“you’re more confident now, you have the fitness anyway etc”) with some saddle-soiling scare stories (see that rock there, the greatest advertisement for a helmet…)

I follow him tentatively as we wend up the incline in a narrow pathway which is hemmed with large rocks and carpeted in moss, earth, whatever. He explains later that one group walked their bikes around the trail having expected the route to be tarmaced. “I don’t know why they wanted mountain bikes, really,” he shrugs.

I soon grow a bit more at ease and happily tail Diarmuid’s wheel as he offers, like an F1 technician, insigts into little corners that cause trouble while he’s not afraid to stop and admire the impressive 180degree vista that swallows the Golden Vale to the Galtees.

After a lung-busting crawl to the top of our route, we begin to peel back down. O’Leary is fearless as he skids across long and winding 2-ft-wide timber bridges that stretch across yawning drops.

Surveying the footprints and wheel tracks in the soft mud below – evidence of past falls by better riders than me – I choose to dent my pride rather than backside and wheel the bike across the bridge like a small child crossing the road to school. I’m not ashamed to tell you this.

The US air force have an expression for the period of time immediately after a young pilot fully qualifies and arrogantly thinks they can do it all: the death zone.

As we reach the end of the trip and I’m comfortable enough to stand cautiously on the pedals as Diarmuid encourages me, so to better manoeuvre the bike beneath I realise that I am in fact a natural. If I come up a few times a month, perhaps London 2012 might yet be a possibility.

Then comes that rock. An innocuous nick of the pedal. A skid. A screech. And you’re picking yourself out of a rabbit hole.

“The most important thing is to get back on straight away,” said Diarmuid. “It’s like they say with horses isn’t it? You must always get back on.”

After a giddily enjoyable few hours in Ballyhoura, I’ll be getting on again soon I’m sure.

Ballyhoura Forest hosts one leg of the 2010 An Post cycle series on Sunday, September 12. The Rebel Rush presents cyclists and mountain bikers with a choice of three trails between 6k and 35km. Visit www.corkrebeltour.ie. Registration closes this Wednesday.

Adrian.russell@examiner.ie                                                                                              Twitter: @adrianrussell

New video for Cee Lo’s latest tune. Dunno how they’re gonna make it look like ‘Forget You’ for TV, which is the plan apparently.

Dude looks like he could play for Baltimore Ravens.

H/T John Riordan

Waiting for flight home, but saw this cool infographic at the Hoop Doctors.

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

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.