Heineken İtaly Activation from Kreatif360 on Vimeo.
I don’t usually post advertising, but this is an unbelievable effort from Heineken in Italy.
(Thanks to Stephen O’Leary of O’Leary Analytics)
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The Sports Illustrated writer Joe Posnanski recently recounted a favourite quote he prodded like loose change from an interview subject.
Louis ‘Red’ Klotz, has the most unenviable jobs in sport; coaching the team that faces the famous Harlem Globetrotters every week.
The Washington Generals (also often known as the New York Nationals) are the journeymen stooges who, game after game, season after season, decade after decade are duped by the same flashy crossover and follow the ball-on-the-string trick like a loyal but obtuse dog teased with a biscuit treat.
In the 58 years since he’s taken charge, Klotz’s teams have beaten the Globetrotters just twice. Amazingly, they’ve lost — wait for it — over 13,000 times.
But Red yet still shelters an un-dimming flicker of hope. This past winter the Globetrotters, a well-oiled organisation more adept at slick marketing and cheap publicity stunts than the ad men of Madison Avenue, announced they’d face the Generals again. But this time on ice.
If Klotz was perplexed at this curious arrangement or fearful for the safety of his boys, he didn’t let on. In fact, he made a foolhardy statement that encapsulates his entire outlook: “We excel on ice”.
Yes, that’s right. After decades playing the pantomime villains and losing every game bar a couple, he thinks ice (ice!) will suit the Generals’ playing style.
With unflinching optimism like that, he must support Sligo Rovers. Or Shels. Or be a season ticket holder at Dalyer. Or any League of Ireland club.
Tonight the Airtricity League kicks off after a 12-round close-season that left even Roddy ‘Queensbury Rules’ Collins punch-drunk. While its players went, scandalously, unpaid, Cork City endured a court-room drama so protracted and convoluted I thought I’d put the Boston Legal DVD back in the Lost box-set. The once great Derry City also dropped a division in a winter of discontent.
But tonight, after all the off-field attrition — though the battle scars are admittedly yet to heal — a football match will break out. And then another. And a few more. It’s perhaps an apposite time to reaffirm some of the many reasons why we love domestic football.
1. The quaint stadia, like the Carlisle Grounds. Bray Wanderers’ home is the only stadium that needed a Hollywood budget to bring it up to 1920s standards with Neil Jordan casting the charming, seaside ground as Croke Park in Michael Collins. The Dart spin is nicer than a Tube journey too.
2. We’re on the way, meet you in… Kennedy’s of Drumcondra; The Black Lion, Inchicore; The Horseshoe on the corner flag in Turner’s Cross Tavern; the Yellow House in Waterford. Wherever.
3. The Aviva Stadium. It looks like Optimus Prime’s foot spa but it’s ours now too. The Palindrome will likely host Bohs and Rovers’ Dublin derby in August. The RDS and elsewhere was grand in the interim but it’ll be good to be knocking about Lansdowne Road again for the big days.
4. Ryanair. You don’t have to pay Michael O’Leary to use the toilet on the way to Flancare Park. Though Longford is like a foreign country sometimes.
5. Jonny Logan. The Eurovision titan’s Hold Me Now was appropriated by Bohs fans after a particularly successful sing-song in a
Stockholm bar. You don’t hear that on English terraces.
6. Terraces! What am I saying? There aren’t any terraces in the EPL. If I wanted to sit in a comfortable seat with affluent middle aged men for an hour and a half I’d queue for a prostate exam in the GP’s waiting room.
7. Gary Lineker’s MOTD puns have ruined more of my Saturday nights than nightclub doormen.
8. Ball was there ref, the ball was there!
9. Neale Fenn’s first touch.
10. Walk away, player!
11. Gary Twigg. The Scottish striker has a haircut that’s heard around the world, but he’s the most natural scorer this side of Ashley Cole.
12. Ashley Cole
13. Friday night football. A pay-slip, a hair-cut and a pint before kick-off is, scientifically, the best start to any weekend, right?
14. Fans’ jokes when UCD visit: ‘Come on lads, these have bleedin’ school in the morning!’
15. Watching a midfielder steaming into a tackle before emerging from puddles of blood and gnawed bone with the ball, then turning to your pal and saying: “I used to have him in my pocket at U15s, ‘member?”
16. Mick Wallace’s Italian renaissance in Wexford. And his Youths side wear pink. Forza.
17. The asterisk; we usually boast more than any other league in the world.
18. Summer football — the sun shines but we excel on ice too.
Contact: adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
This was the view from my hotel room in Ballsbridge last weekend (after the Examiner v Indo game).
The new Aviva – or The Palindome as we’re calling it around here – looks like it’s gonna be an amazing new home for Irish football and rugby. And Michael Buble.
Damien Duff will this morning unpack a suitcase in his London pad after leaving the Ireland camp, on the back of a 10-day stint away from home, to rejoin his new team-mates at Fulham.
If a week is a long time in football, as the truism rings, then a week-and-a-half on the road for an international double-header must feel like an eternity. I attempted to find out just what the Ballyboden native and his Irish roomies do for entertainment on trips stamped in green. And I decided to have this chat over a game of Tomy Super Cup Football.
For those wretches unfamiliar with the joy that is Tomy Soccer, as we knew it, I must explain that it was the pinnacle of sporting gaming in the 1980s. Produced by the Japanese toy giants (the now-faded box features a picture of Graeme Sharp in his Eveton blue jossling with Manchester United’s be-mulleted Arthur Albiston) it features two teams of tiny (and fragile) players who are moved up and down using levers, striking the ball with a flat paddle attached to their base.
If American presidents and supreme court judges face the crude litmnus test of the abortion debate, we children of the 80s divided all men into two groups; Tomy Soccer and Subbuteo.
Duff’s languid style and magician’s trunk of tricks betrays a flick-to-kick merchant, and he eyes suspiciously the battered cardboard box. I try to sound confident in challenging a talented, millonaire football star to a showdown, in an empty room, on a tiny, mechanised pitch. “Go on then,” he says, “Let’s have a game.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Irish Examiner and The Sunday Business Post newsrooms will at last unite for a game versus Independent Media this Saturday for the victims of Haiti’s recent earthquake.
It’s 2pm kick-off at the famous Tolka Park (after Bohs boss Pat Fenlon scuppered our plans for the more famous Dalymount Park earlier this week).
All welcome, details here.
UPDATE: Hold the back page: the game ended 2-2, with well over €4000 raised for Haven’s efforts in Haiti. The Examiner lot one the dance off however.
Old soldiers often visit now-green fields which long ago heard their last gunshot in order to retrace hard-made steps and remember battles fought.
If any gnarled and scarred Irish veterans of the memorable USA ‘94 campaign ever make the pilgrimage stateside, the site of their most famous victory will be utterly unrecognisable.
Earlier today, the demolition of Giants Stadium got started when a massive metal claw bit chunks from the cement helix. Dust clouds poured into the Meadowlands air as concrete and metal spokes poked through the shredded facade.
The stadium is merely 34-years-old and was, apparently, perfectly fit for purpose. But in that most American way, it was decided to topple it and start again. Renewal.
Just like the renowned and beautiful Yankee Stadium which went the same way recently and the Mets’ Shea Stadium, Giants Stadium was discarded like an old fashioned overcoat, before a new ‘facility’ is built right across the street.
There are, I think, few pleasures in life more exciting than a great sports ground in the pregnant hour or two before a much-anticipated event. Like that Heineken Cup TV advert which depicts a grizzled old groundsman recounting sepia-tinted days in the stadium while memories of solid tackles and spectacular tries visibly haunt the turf, sitting in a stadium and imagining the history that was played out in the little bit of real estate is a wonderful little experience.
Anyone whoever played the backroom in Cork’s Sir Henry’s could claim a shared performance heritage with Nirvana and Sonic Youth (and they did) and so too anyone who sat in a stadium seat that was witness to sporting soap opera, plugged into its rich history.
I wasn’t at the game in 1994 on that searingly hot June Saturday. And now, alas, I won’t be able to sit high in the bleachers in New Jersey and replay in my mind’s eye what I witnessed on the televison on the green canvas in front of me.
Due to the mutli-chrome spectrum of sports that was hosted in Meadowlands, I could have made my X on any blade of grass and hit upon a splinter of history.
As well as field goals kicked, Springsteen anthems bellowed and goals scored, labour leader Jimmy Hoffa was said to be buried in the foundations at one end zone (the Hoffa Zone, predictably).
This has since been disproved but it’s a good story, and it’s a great place to be dumped – if you were, in fact, killed by mobsters.
Here in Ireland? We’ll always remember Giants Stadium for Ray Houghton’s looping goal over a stranded Pagliuca that sent the country into absolute raptures. Paul McGrath once recounted a time when Villa played Inter in the UEFA Cup I think and the Italian goalkeeper grabbed him by the arm in the tunnel and sang, unblinkingly, ‘Oooh Aaah Paul McGrath’ at a bemused Black Pearl of Inchicore; a ditty learned that day in New Jersey.
If the demolition machinery creaked to a halt now, you might just hear 50,000 red-neck Irish people oohing and aaahing still.
Cross posted to the Irish Examiner sportsblog.
From the front page of today’s Irish Examiner: Bertie Ahern watches the Arsenal-Man U game in 3D in Fagan’s. Insert your own joke.
Emmet Ryan of Action81 was there for us – you can check out his report there, including the former Toiseach’s opinion.
FIFA decided earlier not to punish Thierry Henry for his cheating in Paris in November.
Fortunately, as I sunk into a deeper spiral of frustation and self-pity, America’s greatest living writer Cormac McCarthy texted on a few bits and pieces, in an effort to make sense of this dystopian, achromatic football world.
Nice one, Cormac! LOLZ xxxx
“People were always getting ready for tomorrow.
I didnt believe in that.
Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them.
It didnt even know they were there.”
— The Road
Essentially, what the Pulitzer Prize winner is saying here was actually best paraphrased by one Roy M Keane: Fail to prepare; prepare to fail.
“Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.”
— The Crossing
This one is clear: we need goal-line technology and/or a video referee.
“Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you’re happy again, then you’ll have given up. Do you understand? And you can’t give up, I won’t let you.”
— The Road
A note of optimism. Trap has a good squad with some lovely young players coming through – James McCArthy, Seamus Coleman et al. The skies grow greyer by the day. But come July, some sunshine may crease the sky again and Euro 2012 will tilt into the horizon.
“If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”
— The Road
Translation: why didn’t the Duffer just stick that one-on-one with Lloris? Henry could’ve thrown the ball into the net afterwards and we wouldn’t have cared.
“The rain falls upon the just
And also on the unjust fellas
But mostly it falls upon the just
Cause the unjust have the just’s umbrellas”
— The Stonemason
Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini protect the bigger nations, according to McCarthy (no relation to Mick, incidentally). The seeding system is endemic of a flawed process. We have no umbrella and John Delaney, we now know, needs an umbrella.
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
— No Country for Old Men
This book was written during the Staunton era and so the sentiment is understandable: we could’ve been mullered in South Africa.
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 »
Irish Football
“I remember hearing about Brian Clough trying to get Archie Gemmill to sign, he slept on his sofa. That’s what I’d do with Stephen (Ireland) … well, I wouldn’t sleep on his sofa, I would sleep outside his house to try and get him back.” — Roy Keane — who we’ll be hearing of a lot of here — advising Giovanni Trapattoni to invest in a sleeping bag.
“We are arguing about Henry when we should be erecting a statue to him … when I think that certain politicians want to replay the match… they don’t even know if the ball is round or oval and they would be the first to come and drink champagne in South Africa. The replay? I’ll do it when you want on a PlayStation.” — A remorseful Patrice Evra after Ireland’s World Cup exit to France.
“In the case of Thierry Henry’s handling of the ball … an entire nation has taken on the role of unjustly oppressed victim — something the Irish do well, having had several centuries of practice.” — Dominic Lawson writing in the Sunday Times. How can you justly oppress a victim, by the way?
“I want to pay tribute to the Irish team and their fans, what they did over two matches — they gave us a lot of problems and I want to congratulate them. I’m disappointed for them and their public. But bravo to them.” —– A puke-inducing Raymond Domenech.
“France were there for the taking and Ireland never grabbed it. The usual stuff. Afraid of that next step. Mentally not strong enough. They can complain all they want, it’s not going to change – France are going to the World Cup, get over it. We don’t want sympathy… it’s the usual carry-on, boring. Bore you to death, they would. Boring.” — Roy Keane offers us a shoulder to cry on.
One Liveline caller to Joe: “I’m fuming over that Roy Keane fella, Joe. The cheek of him. The men of 1916 would be spinning in their graves.”
Joe Duffy: “Listen to him again Anto (the tape of Keane’s press conference), you can interrupt him if you want.”
Anto: “Interrupt him? I’d knock him out if I got my hands on him. The cheek of him. He was a great player but I tell ya Joe, as a manager he’s s**t. Even his Cork people — and I’ve never heard them do it before — even they’re calling him a langer. And that’s what he is: a langer.”
Joe: “Thanks Anto.”
Anto: “Good luck.” Read the rest of this entry »
Harrington makes Major breakthrough
Anywhere else, Pádraig Harrington might have walked off the 18th green knowing his two shots that found the bottom of Barry Burn for double bogey had cost him the British Open.
The label of choker would rattle louder and he would not go on to win the USPGA and the Open again in the space of 13 months.
He wouldn’t be the Harrington we know today.
But at Carnoustie, calamity can — and probably will — strike at any time, and did, during the 2007 final round.
In a nail-bitting Sunday evening finish, Harrington delivered the fitting climax to a day that kept everyone guessing.
He took a two-shot lead to the final hole of a play-off, and still had to sweat out a three-foot bogey putt to beat Sergio Garcia.
He became the first Irishman in 60 years with his name on the famous claret jug and elevated himself to the elite status.
We don’t like cricket, we love it
Sometimes the sporting scriptwriters phone it in. Take a rag-tag bunch of amateur Irish cricket players, cast as the underdogs against the game’s elite at the World Cup in Jamaica.
It’s not Cool Runnings in whites, but Ireland’s breakthough performance in the game.
And in a delicious twist, the Blarney Army enjoyed their most famous win on St Patrick’s Day as the talismanic Trent Johnston hit to clinch victory over Pakistan.
Amazingly, the Irish went on to reach the Super Eights, and the sport in this country has taken long strides since.
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 »
Dr. Emmett Brown: If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour… you’re gonna see some serious shit.
After his winning goal at Anfield on Sunday, Arshavin goes back to the future to dump on Liverpool again.
The Irish Examiner sportsdesk chose their favourite books of the year for a piece in last Saturday’s newpaper.
Here’s my two picks:
Boys Will Be Boys: The Bad Boys Won: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboy Dynasty
Jeff Pearlman
Harper Collins
When the Dallas Cowboys opened up the sparkling, box-fresh Texas Stadium with a defeat of the New York Giants in September, it was the denouement to the Jerry Jones story. Boys will be Boys explains how it began.
Jones, an oil magnate (predictably) from the Lone Star State purchased America’s Team in the early 90s – a franchise who at that point seemed to have gone to the well once too often. Rising from the smouldering ashes of a car crash 1989 season they went on to win their first Superbowl in four years and produce a swashbuckling, confident dynasty that defined the NFL in the 90s.
But for a team who took care of business on Sundays, they played hard every other day too.
The tale opens with future hall of famer Michael Irvin stabbing a teammate in the neck with a barber’s scissors, and from there spirals out of control.
Massive investment from Jones – along with the expertise of coach Jimmy Johnson – brought unprecedented victories on the pitch. But four Superbowls success in the 90s was paralleled by off-field excess. Drugs, orgies, fights, marital infidelities, and, finally, that stabbing which punctured, at last, the years of wild living in the infamous ‘White House’ – a neighbourhood home the squad rented collectively to facilitate their partying.
Though the tale is punctuated by trips to strip clubs and cocaine arrests, the Shakespearean power struggle at the heart of the Cowboys story is as fascinating. While their team crumbled, owner Jones and manager Jimmy Johnson’s relationship descends into mis-trust, turf-battles and paranoia.
Written by Sports Illustrated writer Jason Pearlman – who previously depicted the beer-soaked tales of the womanising, vandalising ’86 New York Mets who claimed an unlikely World Series win in The Bad Guys Won, he has stuck to a winning formula. With a rainbow of colourful characters, this book is as hard-hitting – and fun- as the team it depicts so well.
The Beckham Experiment
Grant Wahl
Crown Books
A typical football book – particularly one of the game’s superstars – might be cracked open by a reader with some reservations about its journalistic merit. Not this one.
When David Beckham’s LA Galaxy lost the MLS Cup final on penalties to Real Salt Lake City last week a gaggle of reporters hopped open the locker-room door, strode in and asked a half-dressed Beckham for his reaction. This is American sports media.
If Beckham is now used to the underpants-revealing admittance the newspaper men receive in the States, he wasn’t when his LA Story began.
Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl slipped behind the velvet rope to earn unprecedented access to Goldenball’s life and the weird marriage of Hollywood and sport that this deal was.
Beckham’s foray into the United States was engineered by entertainment conglomerate AEG, which owns the Galaxy, and the former English captain’s first season in the US was scarred by disappointment, manipulation and disaster – on the field at least.
Wahl sketches a dressing room full of European journeymen, Californian surf dudes on 25k a year and America’s favourite son Landon Donovan all under the eccentric management of hirsute red-head and US legend Alexi Lalas.
Donovans’s unwavering criticism in this book of the new signing – that Beckham took the skipper’s armband, wouldn’t pick up tabs in restaurants and wasn’t committed to the Galaxy – are said to have produced a new resolve at the Home Depot Arena and sparked this season’s charge for the playoffs.
Though now part of the story, The Beckham Experiment offers the fullest picture yet of the growth of US soccer, the business of sport and Beckham’s role as a Hollywood leading man.
Anyone have their own recommendations?
Inspired by his forthright thoughts on Ireland’s defeat to France in the World Cup play-offs (including extra bonus journalist ringtone RAGE), former Ireland and Manchester United captain Roy Keane takes time out from his busy work day at Portman Road to discuss the topics of the day, in a feature new to The Deadline.
Today, Keane – who once sang Positively Fourth Street in Lillies Bordello’s VIP Lounge after beating Holland, of course – offers his perspective on Jedward’s exit from X-Factor last night.
[Keane sips a herbal tea from a chipped 'Who's The Boss' mug, one veteran journalist's mobile phone is smashed into the lino when the reminder alarm for his heart pills sounds. Then, he quickly gets into his stride on the singing twins]
“Jedward had chances at boot camp and on Saturday but didn’t take them,” he said. “Lloyd was there for the taking but Jedward never grabbed it – as usual.
“They were afraid of that next step and were mentally not strong enough. They can complain all they want. That is not going to change anything. Olly is going to the final – get over it! They want sympathy as usual. It is the usual carry on and it’s boring.”
“It is the usual Louis Walsh reaction – ‘we’ve been robbed’, ‘the honesty of the game’ but there was one of the earlier rounds (movies week) when John and Edward got through and no one had appealed for it.
“It was one of the worst decisions I have ever seen. But I don’t remember Louis saying ‘You know what? The public made a howler, let’s give them a replay.’ It is the same principle.
“It [Joe singing an Elton John song on George Michael night] was instinct for Cheryl. Would I call her a cheat? No I wouldn’t think so. Did she bend the rule a little? Maybe. You see cheating going on all the time. Nobody wants a cheat. I wouldn’t agree that Cheryl is a cheat. She is a top, top player who took advantage of the situation.
[Ten minutes later... After discovering Roy is uninterested in seeing the fake CArlsberg pint application on my iPhone...]
“I don’t feel the game has been damaged one bit. Jedward had the chances. They never took the chance in the first game [Saturday]. They never performed.
“Louis talks about the honesty and integrity of the game but I would not take any notice of that man. People forget what went on in Popstars in 2002 [Nadine Coyle, now of Girls Aloud, was kicked off the show for lying about her age] and that man talks about honesty. I have been involved with Boyzone since I was 15 years but he didn’t have the decency to even make a phone call – and he goes on about the honesty of the game.”
[Keane suddenly storms off through a closing canteen door when Colin Healy is spotted wearing his studs indoors. We eventually leave, when the Corkman fails to return after two hours. The Watercooler: a sideways look at what's in the news with Roy Keane returns for a special budget edition soon!]
update: The Gift Grub guys had the same idea it seems, listening to this morning’s broadcast.