GAA

Father, ladies and gentlemen…

Tomorrow afternoon in a beautifully-dressed and very full hotel function room, half choked by a stylish, grey cravat and shaking in freshly-polished shoes I’ll push back my chair at the top table. Then, at last, I’ll slowly step into the nightmare I’ve been playing out for months. The best man’s speech.

Mawwige: it's what has bwought us togeva today

Many of you will understand and appreciate the ordeal. More still will have gambled on how long someone else’s will drag on. But we’ve all sat through one – and this, my first, will not be easy.

While my good friend and his beautiful bride to be have undertaken the real and often unseen work of organising a modern Irish wedding-day – cars, hotels, music, flowers, whatever – I’ve been watching speeches on YouTube, made a list of his most embarrassing moments and talked to people, like a workaholic postman, about my delivery.

Those at sport’s top table, of course, are called upon often to grab the mic, pull a cue card from inside the blazer and offer speeches to teammates that are at times emotional, inspirational and even funny. Well then, who better to chat to this week than men who’ve spent several successful lifetimes swaddled in the dressing-room and hopped footballs or hurleys off table-tops in order to jab an emphatic full stop in a blood-bubbling piece of oratory.

Ray Silke is never short of a few words. In the wonderful documentary about Galway’s historic All-Ireland-winning year of 1998, A Year ‘Til Sunday’, it’s clear their captain is comfortable in taking the floor to offer a few words – be it on the training ground in midweek or as the studs are clip-clopping out the tunnel on match day. So, what’s the trick?

“The most important thing is conviction, you have to believe what you’re saying,” Silke said this week when I rang him, “I’m a big believer in if you have something to say, say it. It’s important but keep it short – there’s fellas in every dressing-room who go on a bit.

“But a good speech does make a difference. You’re trying to touch all the chords – there needs to be a bit of humour, a bit of love and maybe some advice – it’s the same in the dressing-room really, there has to be a mix.”

Tony Considine, the former Clare boss, has filed from buses to locker rooms with some of hurling’s most vivid characters – particularly those in the famous Clare team of the mid-90s.

“We didn’t really go in for the roaring and shouting in the dressing-room to be honest. I think a lot of the time that’s over-blown and not very productive.

“But we did have men in there who could talk well – Anthony Daly as the captain would say a word and then Ger [Loughnane] maybe have the last word. But the trick was always to put the arm around the guy who’s going a bit white and say ‘jaysus, get the bucket for this fella’ and maybe give another guy a stronger word in his ear.

“I’ve given best man speeches at weddings before, certainly. When you get up on Saturday morning, the most important thing is to not get it into your head that you’re going to make a balls of it. Like sport, just stay positive.

“When you look down at the crowd they’re all going to have the same two ears, eyes, the same nose as you. And then just focus on a point in the crowd and just clip away.

“You’ll find something funny on Saturday morning on the way to the wedding or on Friday night when ye’re having the few pints. So include that – the most important thing is to keep them laughing. That’s all anyone will remember at a wedding.”

Al Pacino: this is a war gentlemen

“My big thing was always to keep it tight and get your points across. Time is a big factor in a dressing room so you just want to speak clearly and succinctly,” says the St Finbarr’s man.

“Players expect a speech a lot of the time. It’s the same as a best man, if you got up tomorrow and said ‘I’m not going to say anything, pal’, there’d be question marks. It’s the same as a manager really.

“Advice? Check with your mates on how long they’ve betted you’ll go on; though that could be construed as insider trading. But just don’t go on too long and try not to offend anyone – that’s all you can do.”

And tucking a very apt warning – given the Sunday Game’s role in the disciplinary process these days – into my breast pocket, Silke sends me on my way to the chapel.

“I’d bear in mind that this will probably be taped so mind the language – and I’ve seen people think they’re funny and it’s gone down like a lead balloon. So err on the side of caution and remember that sincerity is very important.”

Now please Father, ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll raise your glasses to toast the bride and groom…

Adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This column first appeared in this morning’s Irish Examiner newspaper

As our little country feels the bony fingers of the IMF on our shoulder and the cold winds of financial oblivion against our grubby face, we are often lectured — throughout the media — by so-called ‘self-made men’.

These millionaire business people, known to us all, proclaim to have pulled themselves from nothing, leaning on no-one in the journey and boasting no early advantage. This, of course, is nonsense.

Every one of us has enjoyed a certain leg-up (education, interested parents, opportunity, privilege, whatever). None have arrived at this current destination in an empty carriage. Like a good, innocuous referee — sometimes we don’t notice the advantages.

Even if you don’t scan the star signs at the back of the daily paper, it is true that in sport, your birthday is one hidden factor in success — or indeed failure. Here’s a random passage from a match report this paper carried after the Ireland U19 team’s recent 1-0 defeat to their English counterparts. However, for our purposes, using a tactic the writer Malcolm Gladwell used once, I’ve substituted the players’ names for the months of their births.

“Ireland started the second half positively again looking to make their dominance count on the scoreboard. The Irish back four of March, July, March and January comfortably dealt with England’s attacking threat.

“January was again involved and he came agonisingly close in the 48th minute, when August played a quick corner to January but his first-time shot whizzed to the right of the post.”
Notice anything? Don’t worry if you didn’t, no-one did for a long time.

I met two UCC researchers this week over a cup of coffee in the college’s Student Centre who say that footballers born in the early part of the year are more likely to be selected to play at an elite level.

Robbie Butler of UCC’s Department of Economics and his younger brother, David, a final-year Commerce student in the college pushed pie charts and bar graphs which depict a dramatic bias towards those born earlier in the year, across the table.

“Where it originally came from is schooling,” Robbie, who plays with Waterford Crystal in his hometown, says, “Guys started to look at when kids went to school. Obviously school starts in September — so kids born in June are probably older than kids born in November that just turned four or five. So they found that kids that were older, just by a few months, were better at school.

“But the strange thing is that over time it lessens and levels off — and the reason they think that is because school is compulsory. And because you’re not allowed to leave what you see is a convergence — people actually start to catch up with each other.

“But the problem with sport is that it’s very, very easy to leave. Something that you find initially difficult because a guy on the opposing team is so much bigger, is easy to walk away from.”

So how does this affect the country’s kids on a Saturday morning?

Most athletes begin playing their sports when they are quite young. Naturally enough, since youth sports are organised by age, the leagues impose a cut-off date. The soccer leagues of here and across Europe use December 31 as the fateful day.

Now, imagine that you coach a team of kids and are assessing two players for the centre-forward position. One was born on January 1, the other on December 31. Both technically, the same age — let’s say nine — but actually one year apart. And at that age, an extra 12 months growth confers a huge advantage.

So though you’re seeing maturity rather than real ability, it doesn’t matter much if you’re aiming to win the district league or avoid relegation. It’s not in the club’s or coach’s interest to pick the skinny kid who might just be a star given some extra time and coaching.

Thus the cycle begins. The younger kids on the sideline in the rain drop out eventually and pick up a hurley or guitar, and the slightly older lads — or those naturally big anyway — keep on kicking and rushing.
The brothers presented their findings to interested members of the FAI last week.

“We spoke to High Performance Director Wim Koevermans and John Morley (U16 manger) and we admit no matter when the cut-off is you’re going to have bias towards another period in the year. But the trick is to try to reduce it,” explains David, who coaches underage teams himself.

“Now the biggest problem in soccer in this country,” adds Robbie “is that we expect kids to play on the same size pitch as the World Cup final this weekend. And it’s ludicrous.

“Therefore if you’re big and strong there’s a reward. You can kick the ball far and you’re facing a 4ft keeper in a goal that’s 8ft-high. And these big kids start to think — hey, I’m a good player; it’s called the Pygmalion effect. So we said you have to change the environment; make the pitches smaller and the goals smaller.

“If you do that — there’s still going to be a bias, it’s still better to be bigger, of course — but the advantage is considerably reduced.

“And the FAI are great at coaching camps and lovely little drills but then you get out onto a pitch and you might as well be playing golf — it’s a completely different sport. It’s a coordination problem — the coach wants to win — we all do. The U11 league decider against the old enemy, with parents on the line or whatever.
“But this needs to be about development.”

The pair are full of theories and ideas about this fascinating problem, which they have identified so expertly. But we break up the chat as I’m off to play a five-a-side game.

“What month were you born again?” jokes Robbie. December, I answer. “Well you have your excuse now.”

adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This collumn first appeared in the print version of the Irish Examiner newspaper

Perhaps the thing to know about Flan Marsh is this: he couldn’t be broken — just like his hurleys.

In another monochrome week where, it seemed, more than a volcanic ash cloud hung over the island, it’s not a bad way to spend a bright Wednesday afternoon; leaning on a fence outside a GAA clubhouse, talking to someone who’s going to hurl on, regardless of economic realities. And when he presses a hurley into your hands and insists his new design will work, you tend to believe him.

Game on, Ger.

A 36-year-old man from Broadford in Co Clare, Marsh learned his trade well, started a modest roofing venture, and constructed a business on his good name. Hey, for someone happy to work, there were plenty of new homes that needed roofs, right?

Eventually, the houses stopped sprouting like mushrooms, Marsh was compelled to leave his gang of lads go, and the work evaporated. It’s an old song at this stage.
Marsh, however, kept humming. Instead of backing out the van in the morning, he’d plod out to the shed with a mug of tea in his hand and work on his new project. His wife and three girls always knew where to find him.

“I was doing nothing so I said I’d turn my mind to making hurleys. And there was always a safety aspect that I thought I could get into the hurley. So I came up with the idea of making a shatter-safe hurley.

“A friend of mine got 27 stitches one time, with a flying hurley into the top of the head. And I’ve often seen parts of the hurley hitting them into the back and the head. And that was mostly it.”

Marsh leans on his hurley — a freshly-cut piece of ash that is only betrayed as different by a thin gray stripe that weaves through the trunk of the stick like the letters in a stick of rock. As he’s demonstrating its strength and relative lightness, the aforementioned friend — he who suffered the 27-stitch head wound — pulls into the clubhouse yard.

Danny Chaplin is manager of Broadford — who are currently enjoying an era of unprecedented success — and is this year also a selector in Ger ‘Sparrow’ Loughlin’s Clare backroom team. More importantly of course, he is the falling apple to Marsh’s Isaac Newton. He’s an inspiration.

“I thought he was off his head,” Chaplin deadpans, when asked to recall the day his club-mate emerged from his shed with an early prototype.
“Until recently I actually couldn’t see it. I didn’t even believe that it would prevent a bit of a hurley flying away.

“Until I actually saw fellas pulling there a few weeks ago, we used old hurleys and there was bits flying everywhere. But the new ones are amazing.”
With health and safety a blue-chip business these days, Chaplin realises there’s a gap in the market for the unbreakable hurley.

“Kids are taking a big enough risk maybe going out playing hurling. And I know that a lot of parents will be looking at anyway at all they can make it safer. Believe me when two guys clash, the hurleys don’t fly.”

Flan Marsh: roofer-turned-inventor of the noon-shatter hurley

“The thing with senior hurlers is that they like their hurleys made in such a place and in such a way. And once they get them then, they’re reluctant to do anything with them,” says Chaplin.

“But if they see the angle to it, as you see there’s no difference, they’ll get on board. It’s a great invention, for want of a better word.”

As anthropologists learn, watched animals eventually start to study their observers. As we talk of the whims and caprices which superstitious senior hurlers carry around in a lucky All Stars ‘98 bag, one joins us.

Meet Brendan Bugler – one of the Banner’s emerging crop of young talent. But today, he’s our crash test dummy. Curiosity pulls one of the builders who are working on constructing the club’s new gymnasium down the scaffold and we all head up to the pitch.

Bugler pulls on a helmet and our other volunteer, Conor Cooney, lunges at him with a traditionally-made hurley. Predictably, it’s axed in two, with one end spiralling into the air like an unleashed peg gun. The players look to us. Good job.

Then the Broadford man takes up Hurley2.0 and absolutely wears it off his inter-county friend. Somewhere in the county Sparrow Loughlin clangs his cutlery onto his lunch plate and senses something, somewhere, is wrong.

CRACK. The hurley snaps. (It reminds me of tent poles I’ve seen halved by falling fat guys, late at night, after the music has long ended at a festival). But the special spine holds it together safely. Good job.

Marsh is expecting the roofing business to stay quiet for anything up to a decade in this country. But he plans to go to Croke
Park chiefs with this clever, patent-pending innovation soon.
He might well see another boom then.

Contact adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

Enquiries to Flan Marsh at 0872783922 or grainne.marsh@gmail.com. The hurleys cost the same as a normal one.

THE neglected, rabbit-eared television set flickers high on the wall in the corner of the bar. Though ignored, Galway’s Joe Canning nervelessly taps over another free on a night in Semple Stadium that would ultimately see Cork slip quietly from the All-Ireland hurling championship.

It’s a typical Saturday evening in Dublin, as below the TV, revellers in a heaving Temple Bar hostelry swirl happily through the lounge and glassed smoking area. A trio of musicians feed the tourists a diet of Irish music to complement the half pints of cold Guinness, while colourful hen parties funnel through the swinging double doors.

At the bar, at the centre of what is an unusual cast of characters, uninterested in the televised action, is a Wexford senior GAA star (who has ‘hurled on Canning before’) – but is, at the moment, much more engaged in a very different sport.

Meet Stephen Nolan, a 23-year-old UCD graduate and Model County centre back (main pic, centre). The Faythe Harriers clubman is chief executive of Kama Lifestyles – a company with the stated aim of teaching Ireland’s men how to ‘attract and meet’ their opposite number – women.
Read the rest of this entry »