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Post by glengael on May 21, 2014 11:17:07 GMT
The Middle Third is back for the summer.
The more I hear people complain about the state of things at the start of this summer’s championship, the more I miss being a player getting ready for it. I hear all this talk of how unstoppable the Dubs are and all I can think of is how much I’d love to have a cut off them. Trying to work out Cluxton’s kick-outs, trying to find a way of stopping Michael Darragh Macauley. What more would you want out of life? Or better again, people giving out about them playing all their games in Croke Park. Give it a rest. The bit of Kerry arrogance would never let you make a song and dance about the like of that. Sure Kerry built the place! We were filling it to the rafters long before they decided to get in on the act. Bring it on, is the only attitude to have there. Bring. It. On. Being a player now is different in one big way, though. The level of attention now is completely different to when I finished in 2009, never mind when I started in 1993. The media side of it is a big enough distraction in itself but the social media element is potentially even bigger. I’d say you can be fairly sure that if I was playing now, I probably wouldn’t be a whole lot more accommodating to the press than I was back then. The phone would be going to voicemail a fair bit in the run up to a game. You can be guaranteed I wouldn’t be on Twitter or Facebook. The Instagram profile would be fairly blank.
Social media
The game has changed though. I look at young lads now and they live their whole lives through their social media. You’d be on a bus going to a game and there’d be total silence with nobody talking to each other – they’re a few seats away from each other and all going back and forth on Twitter. It’s a different world. Everything is so open now. Everything is out in the world without you even trying. When I started playing for Kerry, there were nearly more local papers down here than national papers in the whole country. And even with that, you were still totally removed from the spotlight. Holed up away in west Kerry, if one of the big Dublin papers had a notion about doing something on you, they really had to want it. This was pre-mobile phone, pre-internet. There were no forums in those days for a player to read through late at night and be annoying himself. The forum was a few lads down in the pub giving out about you and if you happened to walk in the door, they went quiet and stared into their pints. People would be mortified if they thought you heard them give out about you. That’s not something people worry about now. When they have a go at some young fella online, they know well that it’s possible – or likely even – that the player will come to hear about it or read it eventually. Part of them will even think that’s a good thing, that at least somebody’s got the guts to call it. One last hero.
Bad comment
In fairness, players mostly stay well away from that stuff now. or if they see it, they wave it off. When so much of your life is online anyway, it can be water off a duck’s back really. They live such open lives that they get used to the odd bad comment. But the other side of that openness is that everything is so transparent. It’s impossible to keep a secret at intercounty level now. Totally impossible. When I heard the story a few years ago of Jim McGuinness making all the players put their phones into a bag at the top of the room before going through game tactics, I thought it was a bit much. Maybe even an invasion of privacy. Now? I’d make it compulsory! If I was an intercounty manager, it’d be privacy bedamned. Boys will be boys. Always. The reality of it is that some lads just can’t hold their water. Lay something new out at training and it’ll often be home before you. Young guys now have more education than we had but less wit. They’re more disciplined in certain areas and less so in others. You rarely have to chase them to do their fitness work but they’re far more questioning about it. When we were that age, if we were told to do 15 or 20 laps, that was what we did. We did it with a heavy heart and we cut the odd corner when nobody was looking but we did it. These young lads are spending their day going through YouTube for fitness tips. They can find Munster’s training plan at the click of a mouse, they can flick through their phone to see what the San Francisco 49ers or the Miami Heat do. You tell them to go out and do 15 laps and you lose them, just like that.
Different breed
They’re a different breed now. There’s just not as many of them who will go through a wall for you. They will push themselves in the gym, absolutely. But they’ll do it to keep their numbers up in the app they have to fill in at the end of every session. They’ll do it to improve themselves and make themselves better. Stand in a dressing room holding up a jersey and banging your chest just won’t get through to players anymore. They won’t go for all that pride in the home place thing. They’re far more likely to get motivated when its explained to them what success can do for them. Build them up. Appeal to their competitive instincts. Social media gives young players a profile. It makes them well known. Maybe just in one small circle of people but it’s still something they aspire to. They don’t find it odd that they’re sharing bits and pieces of their lives with everyone on the back of it. It’s the complete opposite actually. It’s amazing how different the generations are. I was talking to Brendan Lynch, the former Kerry player, there a while back and he couldn’t fathom the whole thing. He saw a tweet from a player one night that said something like, “Laying up for the night drinking tea and icing my hamstring.” Brendan was scathing. “A nation holds its breath,” he said. But that’s just how players are now. And the upshot of it is that nothing an intercounty player or manager or team does these days ever happens in private. Because everybody is so keen to share every little bit of their lives, every little thing gets out to the wider public. That row with Mayo and the supporters club in New York is a perfect example. There was a mix-up somewhere along the way and people thought the team was turning up somewhere it wasn’t. It doesn’t really matter what the ins and outs of it were, what’s interesting is how it came to be such a big deal.
The carpet
Even just five years ago, that would have been swept under the carpet. There would have been no outrage on Twitter, the worst of it might have been a few lines on a forum and maybe a piece in one of the Mayo papers. You can be damn sure it wouldn’t have ended up with James Horan having to sit down with the county board to explain it all away. Everything is a big scandal now. Everybody has a cameraphone and a Twitter account so everybody is a potential reporter. I remember coming out of a game against Cork in Killarney one year, walking down to the team meal in the hotel. A couple of young lads from Cork started giving us abuse and even though we should have let it go, they wouldn’t shut up. So my man went over and got into a square-up with them.
Now, there was nothing in it and it was over in a couple of seconds. But can you imagine if that was today? Somebody would have had their phone out in a flash and the video would have been on Twitter before we’d sat down to our starter. The papers would have picked it up and it would have made the front pages on the Monday morning. Then the next day, the two young lads would have had their say and the whole thing would have dragged on for a week. That’s why players have to be so careful now. They have to watch what they say and who they say it to. But because they share everything online, a lot of them just don’t have that instinct. They’re not naturally careful. If anything, they’re naturally the opposite. It’s going to be interesting to see what living in a Sky Sports world is like. When all the roaring and shouting was going on about whether the Sky deal was good or bad for the GAA, I thought it was interesting that nobody pointed out the effect it will have on players. I can promise you the one group of people delighted to hear Sky were coming on board was intercounty players. These are young men, the natural audience for Sky. Even in my last few years playing with Kerry, we used kill time at training sessions having a go at the Crossbar Challenge. Being part of that world, however small, brings a bit of excitement to players. A bit more profile, maybe a few hundred more Twitter followers. All of this is good in a way because it means managers have to be more on their toes. It separates the wheat from the chaff a bit more. The top guys are able to think on their feet, to adapt, to see things coming and work around them. That’s essential when there’s a wild card around like Twitter.
Terrible slagging
I know I sound like an old geriatric here but I’m serious. Twitter has the potential to affect your team’s season. We give Bomber Liston terrible slagging any time we see him, ever since his Kieran Donaghy tweet before the Munster final last year. He didn’t mean to cause any hassle at all but there was blue murder around the county for two days after it. Any time I run into Bomber now I ask him if there’s any news on Twitter. This is the age we live in now. In one way, I’d love to be playing. If I had a Twitter account, I wouldn’t have my name on it. The less any opponent knows about me, the more I have in my pocket over them. But I’d be on it alright, following all the lads I might be coming up against. Working out what makes them tick, looking for weakness. How does he think? What does he think is fair? Who does he admire as a coach? What sort of football does he like? Does he shrink from a bit of rough stuff or does it gee him up and make him play better? There might be nothing at all in it but one way or another I would form my opinion of this guy and then work out how I’m going to play him. I’d have more to go on than if he kept himself to himself. But there’s no going back. This is where we are and players just see it as a part of their lives, as normal as brushing their teeth. Better them than me.
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inchperfect
Senior Member
No longer active member.
Posts: 272
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Post by inchperfect on Jun 9, 2014 12:15:19 GMT
Has Darragh posted in the last 2 weeks?
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Post by Annascaultilidie on Jun 9, 2014 12:44:38 GMT
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Post by glengael on Jun 13, 2014 11:35:22 GMT
I was watching the Mayo players on Sunday with full sympathy for the situation they found themselves in. When your year is all about winning the All-Ireland, there’s nothing worse than a game in June against a crowd whose year is all about beating you. I don’t care how well you’re tuned in or how much you’ve been guarding against complacency, there’s a part of every player in that team who’s thinking, “Christ, do we have to go through all this? Can we not just turn up in August?”
You could see it in the Dubs as well in that first half against Laois. They ended up with a big score but for a good half an hour of that game you could tell that some of the Dublin players weren’t exactly breaking the speed limit on the way to the ball. It can happen. You wouldn’t be human if it didn’t. At least the Dubs have an All-Ireland under their belt and a lot of them have two. Mayo have none. They’ve gone to September two years in a row and have nothing to show for it. They know they have it in them to make it there again but walking out into Hyde Park on Sunday, it would have seemed very far away. The grass was long. The weather was pure west of Ireland – hailstones one minute, sunshine the next. The opposition were the near neighbours, a team on the rise with a league title behind them and their eye solely fixed on catching them on the hop. And to make it all the more unattractive, Roscommon set up with an army of men behind the ball and basically told Mayo that they were getting nothing handy here today. Aiming towards You’d want to be some sort of machine to come out and blow that away. All you want is to press fast-forward and arrive at the August Bank Holiday. That’s what your year is aiming towards. You know it, everyone knows it. The opposition surely know it. They suspect it at least. And if they didn’t know it for sure, little bits and pieces would filter out and they’d use it to convince themselves. Neighbouring counties leak like a sieve. Always have. What sort of training is the other crowd doing? How much of it are they doing? Suddenly word gets around that they’re horsing through 200m sprints every night at training. In May! Did ye hear that, lads? These animals are training for August. They don’t think they’re in any danger against us. Well, they’ll soon find out different. Won’t they, lads? This is what Mayo and Dublin had to face last weekend and it’s what Cork and Kerry will come up against in the next few weeks. It’s a bridge that has to be crossed and it’s a challenge for the managers to get the players focused on it. But ultimately, I always saw these games as being something the players had to work out amongst themselves. Managers will spend plenty of time in the build-up to them telling you not to be complacent but this is one of those situations where the players can be thinking one thing but doing another. Subconsciously, they have the game won before they go out and it’s only when the prospect of losing it comes along that enough of them shake off that subconscious thinking and go about smartening up and winning the game. There’s very little a manager can do about that. Their sights Going into that game, Mayo knew what Roscommon had to offer. James Horan knew that they had a good side made up of a few different generations of under-21 teams and above all, he knew that they had Mayo in their sights. The players knew that too – it wasn’t like they were surprised by anything that came their way in Hyde Park.
But when you’ve been around the block a few times, you know too that this is not the day you’re going to be judged on. It’s not that you take the opposition lightly, it’s more that your attention for the year is on the bigger picture. These Mayo lads are bright boys, they’re experienced players. They know well that you can’t just assume you’re going to walk through Connacht again. But the reality is that a good number of them have never lost a game in the province. And those who have need to go back four years to remember the last time. They’re going back to the well for an All-Ireland, not for another Connacht medal. And so a smart, ambitious team like Roscommon comes looking for a scalp. They reckon you might not just be on your game from the word go and they set about making it difficult for you. They’ve played a game already so they know the system they want to play and now they try to squeeze the life out of you. Football is fun when it’s loose and when you’re able to kick scores and get good passing movements going. Roscommon set out to make it as little fun as possible for Mayo, which was the best way to test to see if they were up for it. And look, it’s no crime not to be. As I said, players are only human. I played in those games plenty of times. You’re looking around the pitch to see who’s going to take this thing on. You see a couple of debutants and you think, “Well, we can’t expect them to have to be the ones to pull it out of the fire”. You see a few fellas coming back after injury and trying to get game time and you go, “Nope, not them either”. It’s not too long before you start running out of bodies and realising you have to get after it yourself. It’s like that poker movie Rounders – if you can’t spot the sucker after half an hour at the table, then the sucker is you.
Do too much You see a few lads try to force it then and try to do too much. It was so easy to spot the rot setting in for Mayo last Sunday. Lee Keegan came forward a couple of times and drove the ball wide from distance. Lads start cranking at each other then. The older fellas start going, “Look, calm it, we’ll get there. Don’t be pot-shotting”. The problem is, you’ve given the other crowd a bit of belief now. Mayo kicked 10 wides in that first half and it kept Roscommon in the game. Kick four or five of those points and you suck the life out of a young team. Roscommon came there hoping rather than expecting and Mayo’s first job was to kill off the hope altogether. Make them decide, “Ah, sure we’re not just at the level yet”. Instead, Mayo would have been in their dressing room trying to convince themselves into a performance. Maybe a bit of hollow shouting, maybe a bit of table banging. But talk is cheap at that stage. I always found that the fellas banging the table are some of the same lads grabbing the jersey after a score. Go out and do it. That’s what you’re there for. Mayo had to find a way to do it and they were in trouble until Andy Moran and Alan Dillon came on and found it for them. It was one of those days where nothing would go right. One of the really enjoyable features of the game for me was the amount of high fielding in it but I couldn’t help laughing when at one point Seamie O’Shea rose for a ball and just mishandled it – there were four Mayo bodies underneath him but but somehow it fell to the one Roscommon man. That’s the way of it sometimes. You try everything and nothing comes off. You get into the referee’s ear to try and get him to throw a few decisions your way, although it doesn’t always work. I remember playing a club game one time and we were struggling badly even though we’d have been expected to win it handy enough. I started getting onto the ref, a fella who was a big Kerry supporter who you’d see at all the games. “You’d want to mind yourself now,” I was going. “Some of these calls could cost us the game. On your head be it now, that’s all I’m saying.” My man turned around to me and said, “Darragh, now I know what they meant about never meeting your heroes in case you’re disappointed.”
Rest of game Well, that shut me up! Fair play to him – I went away chuckling and I didn’t open my mouth for the rest of the game. I remembered him on Sunday when Eddie Kinsella was refereeing the game at Hyde Park. He took no lip from anybody and moved the ball up for mouthing a few times. Mayo got a few handy frees from him, Roscommon got a few too. But overall, you could see he wasn’t for moving anytime the players got in his ear. In the end, Mayo came through it. They fairly celebrated at the final whistle but that won’t have lasted overly long either. What a game like that does is it gives everyone carte blanche to have a go afterwards. We played Waterford in Killarney in 2006 and made desperate heavy weather of it. In the dressing room afterwards, there was skin and hair flying. Everybody blamed everybody else. Jack O’Connor was the manager at the time and he went around a few players and asked what the problem was. “We were flat,” said the players. And sure that just started off a chain reaction. The finger got pointed at the trainer for not having us right. The trainer stood up and said he hadn’t been able to do enough work with us because of the county board. And by God, the county chairman wasn’t going to stand for that so he took desperate umbrage altogether. If anyone saw us! We were like a family at Christmas tearing strips off one another. The blame game flew round and round the dressing room. Everyone short of the bus driver got a kicking. The thing was, we went on to win the All-Ireland in the end that year. You come away from a game like that with doubts and it might take the rest of the summer to overcome them. Mayo will realise in time that this wasn’t the worst performance in the world at all. That’s a very promising team they beat and you’d hope that by the end of the summer Roscommon will show that there was no shame in having to dig deep to get past them. The big job for Roscommon now is to show that there’s more to them than just trying to bring the neighbours down at the knees. As for Mayo, they need to put this behind them. It was a tough day but they came through it. It won’t be good enough to win an All-Ireland but the point is it didn’t have to be. All it had to be was good enough to get out of Hyde Park. Job done. Move on.
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Post by MrRasherstoyou on Jun 13, 2014 14:22:18 GMT
Spot-on piece by Darragh that, thanks Glen. Mayo's only goal right now is to get through the games, win them any which way, keep the heads down, do some cathartic home-truth-telling and get it all out of the system. They might have to go through the qualifiers and that would really push their mental belief to the limit.
But only through finding their way to Croker in August, probably wiht some very dodgy-looking struggles aloong the way are they going to learn some things to clear their heads and find the right space to have another go at the serious business end.
But unlike last year, if they make it to August they will arrive with a much lower profile and expectations. That hasn't really helped before but it's useful to them. They also still have fresh the knowledge that if they suddenly pull out one huge performance and knock out the champions or one of the other favourites it doesn't really mean anything in terms of their chances of winning Sam.
Ideally for them they reach August, get a handy enough quarter final, then come through a really dour struggle in the semi. If they were to get back to the final like that I'd fancy them to finish it.
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Post by Mickmack on Jun 13, 2014 17:02:18 GMT
Why does Darragh have to keep making the same point over and over. The first half of his article is making the same point over and over. Does he think we are slow learners!
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peanuts
Fanatical Member
Posts: 1,857
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Post by peanuts on Jun 13, 2014 17:13:15 GMT
Why does Darragh have to keep making the same point over and over. The first half of his article is making the same point over and over. Does he think we are slow learners! To be sure to be sure Mickmack
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Post by glengael on Jun 13, 2014 19:57:23 GMT
Why does Darragh have to keep making the same point over and over. The first half of his article is making the same point over and over. Does he think we are slow learners! You have to remember Mickmack its not just us razor sharp, quick witted, seasoned super football analysts on this here forum who read those articles.
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Post by glengael on Jun 19, 2014 10:04:59 GMT
Getting the Tyrone monkey off their back a massive achievement for Monaghan The hoodoo factor is real – Kerry had it over Dublin, Tyrone had it over Kerry
They do it differently at the World Cup. No doubt about it. I couldn’t help laughing last Thursday night as the Croatian and Brazilian players went around hugging each other in the tunnel before kick-off. Everybody seemed to have somebody to love in the other team – you could nearly see fellas looking around going, ‘Christ, I better find someone to hug here or I’ll look bad in front of the cameras’. I know these lads are all professionals and that they have clubmates on other teams and all that. But I was looking at it all wondering where the intensity was going to come from. You’re walking out into one of the biggest games of your life, you’re in front of a huge TV audience worldwide and yet it’s all nicey-nicey and lovey-dovey. How are you going to brain a fella after giving him a big hug in the tunnel? It must take some level of ruthlessness to be able to switch into the intensity you need just like that. They must be some cold-blooded pros to get into that mindset with the click of their fingers. Mind you, David Luiz was one of the boys who had a hug for everybody and yet the first thing he did was nearly land one of the Croatian lads into the first row of the stand. As I say, they do it differently over there. Intensity builds There wouldn’t have been many hugs and kisses going around in the tunnel in Clones on Sunday, we can be sure of that. A few of the Monaghan and Tyrone players would have played together on colleges teams or for Ulster but the GAA isn’t the World Cup and intensity can’t just be switched on and off like that. Intensity builds over days and weeks and months and years. For a team like Monaghan, who’ve been waiting all their life to beat Tyrone in the championship, you come into Clones on a day like that promising that, whatever happens, the intensity will be huge. You wouldn’t dare look sideways at the Tyrone players in case they picked up some bit of advantage off you. That’s what it’s like when you’re trying like hell to beat a team that always beats you. We had it with Tyrone ourselves. They were new to us in 2003 but by 2005 we felt we had to beat them. Along with having lost to Armagh in 2002, we were going in with the mindset that this northern thing had to be nipped in the bud fast. And when we didn’t get it done then, it hung over us. Going into the 2008 final, I was full sure we were going to beat them. At no stage in the build-up did I think we were going to lose. I thought we had the team to do it and we had the game to do it and that surely to God they weren’t going to have it over us forever. But that little voice that says you haven’t beaten this crowd before can always worm its way into somebody’s head. And if it gets into one head, it can get into a few. Fellas can get distracted by small things. Their focus can waver. Looking back, we were thrown a bit in the lead up to that final by Mickey Harte bringing Stephen O’Neill back into the squad. It came out of left-field. Suddenly we had to give it some attention. We had to plan for what we were going to do if he started or if he came on. A hangover It was a brilliant move by Mickey Harte because, as it transpired, O’Neill wasn’t in the same form as he had been before yet we paid him the same amount of notice. Plain and simple, that was a hangover from having been beaten by Tyrone twice already. The flipside is that Tyrone’s players were well fit to say, ‘Sure look, we’ve beaten Kerry before, we’ll beat them again.’ They knew that on some level Kerry players and Kerry supporters had doubts in their head and straight away that gave them an angle to work on. It’s amazing what you can do when you’re convinced you have the other team’s number. It’s only a psychological advantage but it matters. Most of all, it make it easier for every player in the panel to tune into what you need in a game. There’s a comfort there for everyone – they know that if they do things the right way and stick to what they know works, they should come through it. It’s as if everybody decides, ‘Right. No messing here. Let’s do what we do and get it done’. Crossfield pass Go back to the 2007 All-Ireland final against Cork, when Kieran Donaghy scored two goals and we were well in the clear. Seán O’Sullivan came off the bench in the second half and one of the first things he did was try to float a crossfield pass with the outside of his left boot, the kind of thing you do when your team is walking away with a game. It sticks in my mind because straight away after the pass was cut out by Cork, three different Kerry players absolutely read Seán the riot act. Savaged him. Told him that this wasn’t that kind of game and that’s not the kind of thing we were doing. The fact that three different lads had the same thought at the same time stayed with me afterwards. Men on the same wavelength. We were able to think that way because we always felt that we had Cork where we wanted them if we met them in Croke Park. We could lose to them in Munster but our mentality was that there was no way we were going to be the first Kerry team to lose to them in Croke Park. Good place Belief matters. When you’re in the dressing room before a game, you go through your mental checklist. Have I done the work? Am I fit enough? Have we covered the things they’re good at? Do we match up well against them? Do we usually do well against them?
If you can tick the majority of those boxes, your level of belief is in a good place. That’s how you have to approach it when you’re the team that has the hoodoo over another. We used to have it with the Dubs, funny enough. It never mattered that they had good players or that they were after torching every team in Leinster. We always went into Dublin games thinking, ‘Well, we’ve beaten them before, we’ll beat them again’. That goes in cycles, obviously. Dublin have it over most teams now, Kerry included. Losing the All-Ireland final to them in 2011 still haunts Kerry people. Not alone did we lose an All-Ireland, we lost it to Dublin. Most people in Kerry were more annoyed about that than they were about the five-in-a-row. You need to choke the life out of the Dubs when you can, don’t give them a chance to rise up. Close finish Dublin hadn’t beaten Kerry in 34 years. They didn’t know what it felt like. They didn’t have any experience of it to go back and call upon. But that all changed when Stephen Cluxton kicked the winner. Maybe they would have won last year’s All-Ireland semi-final without the 2011 win and maybe they wouldn’t. I think it’s fair to say they wouldn’t have turned a close finish into a seven-point win if they still had the monkey on their back. Monaghan got the Tyrone monkey off their back last Sunday. When it changes, it changes. They probably won’t have to wait 26 years for the next time.
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Post by glengael on Jun 27, 2014 9:59:48 GMT
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Post by givehimaball on Jul 9, 2014 19:38:21 GMT
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Post by duchalla on Jul 10, 2014 8:52:14 GMT
Sorry for being pedantic, but I thonk it was Johnny Buckley who Declan played that short free to in the 2nd half and not Donnacha.
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Post by glengael on Jul 30, 2014 20:33:36 GMT
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Post by glengael on Aug 6, 2014 12:34:01 GMT
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Post by Mickmack on Aug 6, 2014 21:58:18 GMT
Darragh uses a phrase that Paidi used "We threw the hammer after the hatchet". Paidi used that phrase in his interview after the 2000 semi final replay v Armagh..... I watched the game recently.
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Post by glengael on Aug 7, 2014 11:13:28 GMT
Darragh uses a phrase that Paidi used "We threw the hammer after the hatchet". Paidi used that phrase in his interview after the 2000 semi final replay v Armagh..... I watched the game recently. Jack uses that phrase in The Book as well. I have that match on DVD somewhere. It makes great viewing even if I am still nervous about getting the right result.
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Post by glengael on Aug 27, 2014 19:22:37 GMT
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fitz
Fanatical Member
Red sky at night get off my land
Posts: 1,719
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Post by fitz on Aug 27, 2014 21:46:10 GMT
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Post by kerrygold on Aug 27, 2014 22:13:25 GMT
Poor call by Darragh to say the game is only about the players. The game is for the people, all the people, something county players in their bubble don't always see.
What Darragh meant to say is that Croker showed scant regard towards the players who have burst a gut all year to perform on the highest stage at peak form. A six day turn around at this stage of the season, for a game of this magnitude, over an overly long and protracted season, is very poor form from the Croker suits.
Saying the venue had to be kept clear for the Dubs in the event of a draw only rubs salt in the wound.
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fitz
Fanatical Member
Red sky at night get off my land
Posts: 1,719
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Post by fitz on Aug 27, 2014 22:35:38 GMT
Some good some poor points. I admire his cut at the GAA, think he's spot on.
Whatever about "T T T T Tom Carr" Liam Hayes was on Today FM on Monday evening pontificating that the players just need to get on with going to Limerickand what about it if some people can't see the game. He's a monumental fcukrag.
Anyway, back to point on Darragh's column, there is a little bit of badge of honour though regarding Kerry coming to the capital to where they belong etc...found it a bit cringe worthy. I must say between Tomas, Darragh, the Bomber, they never call against Kerry and focus more on the Kerry side of the upcoming match being reviewed. Shouldn't a bit more neutrality be attempted, despite their lineage and allegiance?. Those comments might be naïve and is not just down to Kerry columnists, but if we come through on Saturday, the real test of that assertion would be the matchup with the Dubs assuming they don't topple by 'freak' on Sunday
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Post by glengael on Aug 28, 2014 11:24:56 GMT
Darragh can't win lads can he? If he speaks as a supporter, ye'll say why does he not focus on the player's perspective - given that he has played the modern game at the very highest level unlike other commentators?
If he speaks as a player or from their perspective, then he's forgetting the supporters and all the grassroots and the Club players etc etc. If he says Kerry will win, he's just talking them up and being blindly loyal to his old comrades and his brother(s) and refusing to see the flaws in the team. If he calls against Kerry because the opposition are better, he is being disloyal to his county, his former team-mates and colleagues or he is being mischievious and trying to work the Yerra reverse psychology a la Micko and Paidi. If he is neutral and doesn't call it, he's bottled it. I don't always agree with him myself but whats a man whose family having given only 40 years service to the Kerry senior football team to do to keep everyone of ye happy? PS. thanks for the missing link Fitzwop.
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Post by glengael on Sept 3, 2014 15:53:05 GMT
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Post by kerry4life on Sept 8, 2014 15:15:48 GMT
Im laughing at the Dub that was giving out about them not being tested after 20 minutes. Ha he wont complain if they are in the predicament next year
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Post by buck02 on Sept 10, 2014 12:20:17 GMT
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Post by ciarraioch2014 on Sept 10, 2014 21:26:54 GMT
Im laughing at the Dub that was giving out about them not being tested after 20 minutes. Ha he wont complain if they are in the predicament next year I'm laughing at EV McFinnity in the comments section. The same guy who has been banned from here a few times since 2010! The name is an alias though!
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Post by glengael on Sept 17, 2014 17:00:09 GMT
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Post by glengael on May 20, 2015 10:17:38 GMT
I thought he might be sidelined by their shiny new Tuesday signing. Clearly not. Darragh Ó Sé: Sledging isn’t great but I wouldn’t be getting too annoyed I always thought that guys who were mouthing at me were wasting their energy In Ventry last weekend, they had a big crowd down to unveil a statue of P Ó Sé himself. A rake of his old teammates were there, plenty of locals, plenty of rogues. There was a monsignor and two priests down to bless it. That’ll tell you how holy Páidí was – they needed three clergymen to balance the scales for the blessing. It was one of those occasions where even though you thought you knew every story about the man already, there was still one or two more that sounded new to you. We heard one about a change of county secretaries in the 1970s – Andy Molyneaux had been the man for a long-time but Tony O’Keeffe was coming in to replace him. Páidí saw what you might call a political vacuum and decided to see if he could take advantage of it. He had already sent his expenses in to be settled by the previous secretary but just in case, he said he’d send them to O’Keeffe as well. No harm in finding out did these fellas have their ducks in a row at all. As it turned out, they did. O’Keeffe told him where to go with his second claim. “Oh, no problem at all boy,” says Páidí, half making out that the confusion was on the county board end of things. He didn’t get paid twice but you couldn’t hate him for trying. All the talk about sledging from the weekend reminded me of a challenge match from Páidí’s time as Kerry manager. We were playing Armagh in Askeaton and for whatever reason, they landed down without a full team. Or maybe they only barely had a team. Whatever it was, my abiding memory is that Kieran McGeeney went into the game cranky. And he was giving Maurice Fitzgerald plenty of it. Back of the head Now, the thing people might not appreciate about Maurice is he was one of the most physical players in the country when he wanted to be. He had these big long heavy hands and he’d no problem using them. You’d be playing a county championship game and jumping for a ball when all of a sudden you’d feel a shot down the back of the head. You wouldn’t know where it was after coming from because when you’d look around, Maurice would be sloping away in the languid way he moved and you’d be going, “Well, whoever it was, it couldn’t have been him.” You’d be looking around for some kind of hobo but it would be Fitzy all along. Anyway against Armagh this time, him and McGeeney were hopping off each other from early on. Maurice hit him a puck at one stage and McGeeney being McGeeney wasn’t going to back down. He was full of chat for him. “Come on,” he says. “Come on, I can take it, I can take it.” I only know this now because McGeeney said it to me later on. He’d have had plenty of running battles with fellas down the years but Maurice’s reply was unique. “I know you can,” he says. “But I need it more. Hit me back but make sure Páidí sees you do it. Come on we’ll go over here beside him here – he thinks I’m soft.” It threw McGeeney off his game altogether. He was laughing with me after. “How do you answer that?” he said. “I thought we were in the middle of a row!” The moral of the story is, if you’re going to be going mouthing, you’d want to know your audience. No avoiding it There’s no point in us all tearing our hair out about sledging. It’s part of the game now and there’s no avoiding it. You don’t like seeing it but I wouldn’t be getting my knickers in a twist about it either. My view on it was always that it seemed to be a lot of wasted energy for not very much gain. The last thing I ever wanted to give an opponent was an insight into how I was thinking. I felt that there was way more advantage to being an unknown quality. If a guy is talking to you and yapping at you and you’re not responding, then he has to be wondering what the point of it is. I didn’t get it that often but when I did, I just shut my mouth and carried on playing. The longer it kept going, the easier it was for me to play on and not respond. After a while it would stop – I always assumed out of embarrassment as much as anything. If you keep jabbering away at somebody and you get nothing back, surely you start to feel a bit stupid after a while. Sledgers aren’t bad people. They’re just guys who’ve got themselves into a certain mindset for a certain game or opponent. They’ve convinced themselves that this will have an effect somehow or other. Ryan McMenamin was one of the worst for it – a monstrous little weasel when he was playing. But I’ve rarely met a footballer whose company I’ve enjoyed more off the pitch. That just tells you it’s all a put-on. Which, to me, proves that there’s no point doing it. Sledging means nothing. It achieves nothing. I’d far rather a fella yapped in my ear all day and spent his energy on that rather than on making run after run for me to chase after. Sledging never scored a point or set up an attack. All it ever did as far as I was concerned was show a chink in the armour. There’s no doubt it’s a huge part of football in Ulster now. Obviously you see it outside of Ulster but not to anywhere near the same extent. Funny, in all the talk that there’s been since Sunday, nobody has really mentioned the driving force behind it – the sheer level of familiarity between the teams up there. It’s a massive factor. We played Limerick back to back in league and championship for a few years. It felt like they came out of the hat every time we turned around. And they pushed us to the wire a few times, which only made it worse. Suddenly, they were a team that we knew we had to keep down. We knew we couldn’t let them start getting it into their heads that they were allowed to win against us. You couldn’t let that idea take root. So those games got spiky and they needed you to be mentally tuned in. You’d be going in knowing you weren’t going to get any breaks from the referee because any bit of a dig out he was going to give would fall the way of the underdog. The other thing in your mind would be that you have Cork in a couple of weeks – don’t be getting a man sent off, whatever happens. What that meant was resigning yourself that you’re going to be a punchbag, you’re going to be a target and your job was going to be simple – suck it up and take it. Don’t go looking for trouble. Stand your ground but don’t give the referee an option to make a name for himself. Just get through it. That’s what a lot of these Ulster games must be like. Players know they have to get through it. They steel themselves for war every time they go out. Think about it. Ulster is the only province where most of the teams think they can beat each other on a regular basis. No county is afraid of any other county and the majority of them aren’t beaten before the ball is thrown in, as is the case in the three other provinces. On top of that, they meet each other often three or four times a year. Check the reports of the McKenna Cup games in January – the Ulster counties have far more of their best players out in those games than is the case down the country. Go back to the opening game this year, Tyrone v Armagh. It had nearly 9,000 people at it and it ended with four men sent off. Serious players too, Colm Cavanagh and Ciarán McKeever among them. No way do you see that sort of madness so early in the year down south. Weak points Throw in the fact that these guys come up against each other in colleges games and in league games and you arrive at the summer with them just having seen far too much of each other. They know each other’s weak points. They know how to get at one another. Seán Cavanagh and Eamonn McGee were playing against each other in the championship back in 2004. How many times have they played against each other since? What is there left to say? I enjoyed the Donegal-Tyrone game on Sunday. The pace of it was savage at times and the ability of these players to take hits and bounce up was totally admirable. Fellas were throwing themselves on the line for the cause, which is what you want to see in championship football. And the quality was high enough that there was no margin for error – those Tyrone wides in the first half cost them dearly in the end. The difference between what was going on in Ballybofey and in the other games was massive. If you took a player out of one of the Leinster games at half-time and dropped him into the second half of Donegal-Tyrone, he’d have had a heart attack. Ballybofey was pure championship, the rest of it was Mickey Mouse stuff. People can give out about the Ulster Championship all they like. But let’s be honest here – it’s the only thing worth watching this side of July. Intense, dogged, cynical, physical, no margin for error and always, always competitive. A bit of sledging won’t stop people tuning in for that.
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Premier
Fanatical Member
Posts: 1,176
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Post by Premier on May 20, 2015 11:39:56 GMT
I thought he might be sidelined by their shiny new Tuesday signing. Clearly not. Darragh Ó Sé: Sledging isn’t great but I wouldn’t be getting too annoyed I always thought that guys who were mouthing at me were wasting their energy In Ventry last weekend, they had a big crowd down to unveil a statue of P Ó Sé himself. A rake of his old teammates were there, plenty of locals, plenty of rogues. There was a monsignor and two priests down to bless it. That’ll tell you how holy Páidí was – they needed three clergymen to balance the scales for the blessing. It was one of those occasions where even though you thought you knew every story about the man already, there was still one or two more that sounded new to you. We heard one about a change of county secretaries in the 1970s – Andy Molyneaux had been the man for a long-time but Tony O’Keeffe was coming in to replace him. Páidí saw what you might call a political vacuum and decided to see if he could take advantage of it. He had already sent his expenses in to be settled by the previous secretary but just in case, he said he’d send them to O’Keeffe as well. No harm in finding out did these fellas have their ducks in a row at all. As it turned out, they did. O’Keeffe told him where to go with his second claim. “Oh, no problem at all boy,” says Páidí, half making out that the confusion was on the county board end of things. He didn’t get paid twice but you couldn’t hate him for trying. All the talk about sledging from the weekend reminded me of a challenge match from Páidí’s time as Kerry manager. We were playing Armagh in Askeaton and for whatever reason, they landed down without a full team. Or maybe they only barely had a team. Whatever it was, my abiding memory is that Kieran McGeeney went into the game cranky. And he was giving Maurice Fitzgerald plenty of it. Back of the head Now, the thing people might not appreciate about Maurice is he was one of the most physical players in the country when he wanted to be. He had these big long heavy hands and he’d no problem using them. You’d be playing a county championship game and jumping for a ball when all of a sudden you’d feel a shot down the back of the head. You wouldn’t know where it was after coming from because when you’d look around, Maurice would be sloping away in the languid way he moved and you’d be going, “Well, whoever it was, it couldn’t have been him.” You’d be looking around for some kind of hobo but it would be Fitzy all along. Anyway against Armagh this time, him and McGeeney were hopping off each other from early on. Maurice hit him a puck at one stage and McGeeney being McGeeney wasn’t going to back down. He was full of chat for him. “Come on,” he says. “Come on, I can take it, I can take it.” I only know this now because McGeeney said it to me later on. He’d have had plenty of running battles with fellas down the years but Maurice’s reply was unique. “I know you can,” he says. “But I need it more. Hit me back but make sure Páidí sees you do it. Come on we’ll go over here beside him here – he thinks I’m soft.” It threw McGeeney off his game altogether. He was laughing with me after. “How do you answer that?” he said. “I thought we were in the middle of a row!” The moral of the story is, if you’re going to be going mouthing, you’d want to know your audience. No avoiding it There’s no point in us all tearing our hair out about sledging. It’s part of the game now and there’s no avoiding it. You don’t like seeing it but I wouldn’t be getting my knickers in a twist about it either. My view on it was always that it seemed to be a lot of wasted energy for not very much gain. The last thing I ever wanted to give an opponent was an insight into how I was thinking. I felt that there was way more advantage to being an unknown quality. If a guy is talking to you and yapping at you and you’re not responding, then he has to be wondering what the point of it is. I didn’t get it that often but when I did, I just shut my mouth and carried on playing. The longer it kept going, the easier it was for me to play on and not respond. After a while it would stop – I always assumed out of embarrassment as much as anything. If you keep jabbering away at somebody and you get nothing back, surely you start to feel a bit stupid after a while. Sledgers aren’t bad people. They’re just guys who’ve got themselves into a certain mindset for a certain game or opponent. They’ve convinced themselves that this will have an effect somehow or other. Ryan McMenamin was one of the worst for it – a monstrous little weasel when he was playing. But I’ve rarely met a footballer whose company I’ve enjoyed more off the pitch. That just tells you it’s all a put-on. Which, to me, proves that there’s no point doing it. Sledging means nothing. It achieves nothing. I’d far rather a fella yapped in my ear all day and spent his energy on that rather than on making run after run for me to chase after. Sledging never scored a point or set up an attack. All it ever did as far as I was concerned was show a chink in the armour. There’s no doubt it’s a huge part of football in Ulster now. Obviously you see it outside of Ulster but not to anywhere near the same extent. Funny, in all the talk that there’s been since Sunday, nobody has really mentioned the driving force behind it – the sheer level of familiarity between the teams up there. It’s a massive factor. We played Limerick back to back in league and championship for a few years. It felt like they came out of the hat every time we turned around. And they pushed us to the wire a few times, which only made it worse. Suddenly, they were a team that we knew we had to keep down. We knew we couldn’t let them start getting it into their heads that they were allowed to win against us. You couldn’t let that idea take root. So those games got spiky and they needed you to be mentally tuned in. You’d be going in knowing you weren’t going to get any breaks from the referee because any bit of a dig out he was going to give would fall the way of the underdog. The other thing in your mind would be that you have Cork in a couple of weeks – don’t be getting a man sent off, whatever happens. What that meant was resigning yourself that you’re going to be a punchbag, you’re going to be a target and your job was going to be simple – suck it up and take it. Don’t go looking for trouble. Stand your ground but don’t give the referee an option to make a name for himself. Just get through it. That’s what a lot of these Ulster games must be like. Players know they have to get through it. They steel themselves for war every time they go out. Think about it. Ulster is the only province where most of the teams think they can beat each other on a regular basis. No county is afraid of any other county and the majority of them aren’t beaten before the ball is thrown in, as is the case in the three other provinces. On top of that, they meet each other often three or four times a year. Check the reports of the McKenna Cup games in January – the Ulster counties have far more of their best players out in those games than is the case down the country. Go back to the opening game this year, Tyrone v Armagh. It had nearly 9,000 people at it and it ended with four men sent off. Serious players too, Colm Cavanagh and Ciarán McKeever among them. No way do you see that sort of madness so early in the year down south. Weak points Throw in the fact that these guys come up against each other in colleges games and in league games and you arrive at the summer with them just having seen far too much of each other. They know each other’s weak points. They know how to get at one another. Seán Cavanagh and Eamonn McGee were playing against each other in the championship back in 2004. How many times have they played against each other since? What is there left to say? I enjoyed the Donegal-Tyrone game on Sunday. The pace of it was savage at times and the ability of these players to take hits and bounce up was totally admirable. Fellas were throwing themselves on the line for the cause, which is what you want to see in championship football. And the quality was high enough that there was no margin for error – those Tyrone wides in the first half cost them dearly in the end. The difference between what was going on in Ballybofey and in the other games was massive. If you took a player out of one of the Leinster games at half-time and dropped him into the second half of Donegal-Tyrone, he’d have had a heart attack. Ballybofey was pure championship, the rest of it was Mickey Mouse stuff. People can give out about the Ulster Championship all they like. But let’s be honest here – it’s the only thing worth watching this side of July. Intense, dogged, cynical, physical, no margin for error and always, always competitive. A bit of sledging won’t stop people tuning in for that. I believe this media focus on sledging will result in it being used by club players against Inter-county players in order to get a reaction out of them (red/yellow card)
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Post by donegalman on May 20, 2015 12:17:57 GMT
A brilliant article. He doesnt justify sledging, but he certainly puts it into context.
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Post by Dermot on May 20, 2015 13:28:34 GMT
Yep, he just about nails it on the head .. Its a pity there werent more sensible people like him around !!
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