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There's an awful lot of arselicking of the British monarchy from free staters, disturbing so it is

All international celebs get fawned over - Hollywood actors, music stars, world leaders, often to an embarrassing level. 
Charles, Camilla, William, Kate Middleton, Meghan, et al. are seen as Hello magazine A-listers and not the puppet masters and string pullers of an occupation.

Nobody in Offaly expected the Harte appointment.
How it washes with Declan Kelly is a big question mark. He has a reputation for being somewhat dogmatic and inflexible. This led to some disgruntlement this year in the camp and may explain why some players downed tools in the Tailteann.

Which is why I'd be surprised if both Declan Kelly and Mickey are still joint managers in a year's time.
It is a punt in that regard. A lot can go wrong, mainly around personalities and allocation of duties.
In the heat of a match and Mickey thinks a player should be subbed off and Declan Kelly wants him left on...

Michael Duignan, who has appointed Harte, wrote about the time he came in to work alongside Mike McNamara in 2004. In the Leinster final that year, they were arguing over their headsets about a switch and Mike Mc turned his off, so the change never happened.

In the broader scheme, Offaly currently look like a permanent Division 3 team with no obvious prospect of shooting up.
There is a sprinkling of talent there, including some of the 2021 U20 All-Ireland winners. However something needs to happen to elevate the county up a notch.

Will the Mickey factor give Offaly the short term boost to get out of Division 3? It could do, yes.

Pat Hickey getting arrested bollock naked in 2016 must have been a turning point for Ireland in the Olympics.

Preserving perks like premium tickets, staying in 5-star hotels, isolating potential challengers, and bullying the sporting bodies were more important than success.
He was cut from the same cloth as John Delaney. The sport suffered while he milked it.

Brilliantly done by McClenaghan. It must be some pressure.
He has spent 3 years practicing a routine that lasts a few seconds. He could do it perfectly hundreds of times in training, but in the pressure of the Olympics cauldron, there is no margin for error.

[Review: The Clash of the Ash]

Review: The Clash of the Ash
31 January 1982

The Clash of the Ash, by Raymond Smith. Aherlow Publishers. A Popular History of the National Game 1884-1981.
Do we have consumer protection legislation in this State? If not, why not? If we do, how did The Clash of the Ash get into the bookshops?

About ten months ago Smith lost his title of Worst Journalist in the World. He must have set himself an uncommonly steely regime to win it back for since then he has ruthlessly shed his little stocks of cogency, syntax accuracy, grey matter and plain cop on. He has clawed his way back to the bottom.

For £4.90 Smith provides 223 pages of "text", that is to say, a skein of unremitting hackery, sodden with suppurating bilge, and noisome with the smugness of an utter ass convinced of immunity from exposure.

The outer garment - coffin, if you will - of the thing is a 'new section' on Offaly's and Galway's triumphs. The thing has abundant nadirs of taste, style and fatuity to choose from, but the grudging treatment of Offaly's victory epitomises author and opus so well that it should be allowed to sink as their monument. The cadaver died of a surfeit served from Smith's previous "full-length histories of hurling", each of which was an ill-conceived rehash of a rehashed predecessor, having as much historicity as a cigarette ad. It is a confection of snivelling excuses for Tipperary's failures.

For the rest, there are nearly 200 photographs - 95 per cent of them familiar to the point of contemptibility .
Skimming through for the first time, this reviewer found inane blunders and clumsy fabrications leaping in such gay profusion from the pages of this work of "History" that he went back and made a list. (Given hereafter). Take this example. On page 123 Smith tells us that "Galway had their first - and so far lone – All Ireland in in 1923." Now, on September 7th, 1980, Galway shed a deal of sweat over a second All-Ireland victory, the principal significance of which to judge from this "history" - was to provide a pretext for twenty-odd pages of Smith's simpering and preening himself, and gibbering about art, culture and heritage. To read this chapter is akin to experiencing an attempt at strangulation by a more than usually repulsive and fouling yeti. To read it more than once would be to indulge in anew, esoteric, and unquestionably shameful perversion.

On pages 65/66 we find a team of Portuguese villagers setting out from their homes to bring back the All-Ireland hurling crown, only to be "decimated by emigration" along the way. All very tragic, no doubt, but they'll have to learn to get to the pitch if they're ever to win anything.

On page 129 and again on page 151 Smith says that Tommy Doyle kept Christy Ring scoreless for 150 minutes. In 1955 Smith ghosted a book which hinged upon this canard. For twenty-six years he repeated it - and coined. In May '81, while treating of an acolyte of Smith, one Dorgan, Magill nailed the lie. But Smith and Dorgan refuse to withdraw their discredited vapourings, and the long-suffering public still awaits its money back. The flower of all evil bestrews a potent curse.

On page 91 Smith recalls seeing "the versatile Jimmy Carroll in outstanding form" for Limerick against Tipperary at Limerick on June 21st '81. Jimmy Carroll was suffering from a serious shoulder injury at the time and took no part whatever in that game.

There are two Chapters 8. There is a list of seven errata, three of which have no relevance to the passages they purport to amend. On page 62 Smith goes on about the "essential essence" of something or other. On page 97 he tells us that he's got mercury in his veins. It is that sort of book.

Few adult hurling followers will have been taken in. But those whose interest awakened over the past three vintage years, and the children, will not, perhaps, have been so lucky. These and the game itself deserve better publishers and sponsors.

Tom Brown, Brendan 0 hEithir and Micheal 0 Muircheartaigh are superb commentators, each having a passion and flair for hurling and language. If sponsors are serious about promoting hurling they will commission work from these people, thereby: providing to the follower something which he/she will read and preserve, and may give to non followers or foreigners without a cold shiver; and - not unimportantly - upstaging Smith, who threatens to strike again in '84. 0 Lord! Deliver us!

The following fabrications and blunders, together with those outlined above, comprise the list garnered from two quick readings. There are, undoubtedly; many other instances of slovenliness and vapidity.

1. p36. Discussing Jim Power and the '77 Munster Final, Smith says, "The offence of 'striking' was committed", etc., etc. It was not. The offence of butting was committed, and the rules deliberately distinguish between the two.

2. p39. Jimmy Barry-Murphy is credited with scoring three points in the '76 All-Ireland Final. IBM got four points that day.

3. p40. Cork's great half-back is called Dermot McCurtain. Not "Denis".

4. p40. Discussing Cork '76-'78 Smith says "Gerald McCarthy was equally good at wing back etc." McCarthy never played at wing back in '76-'78. His last championship game in the position was in September '69.

5. p49. Smith says Waterford "crushed Tipperary to a nine goals defeat in 1959". Waterford beat Tipp by five goals and two points in '59.

6. p67-p71. On p67 Johnny Flaherty is 35 years old. By p71 he is 33. Read on, Johnny!

7. p86. "This Limerick side of '81 gave a pride to the Green and Gold jersey". Sure somebody had to help poor Kerry!

8. p89. "Limerick failed to capitalise on penalty situations ... and we saw Leonard Enright coming down to take over from Eamonn Cregan". Limerick were given only one 'penalty situation',
and consequently, the striker, Leonard Enright, did not 'take over' from anybody, on the day.

9. p92/93. Smith can now exclusively reveal that only thirteen days (4417) separated the first and third Sundays of May 1980.

10. p93. Smith says that four of the Limerick '73 team were still playing in '81, Eamonn Cregan, Liam O'Donoghue, Sean Foley and Frankie Nolan. Joe McKenna played a bit for Limerick in '81 - and Smith lists his contribution to the '73 Final on p98.

11. p.93. Nobody called "Richie Dennis" ever played for Limerick. Bennis, perhaps.

12. p 107/9. Smith has Cork and Tipperary playing and replaying the Munster Final of 1972. Cork and Clare contested the '72 Munster Final.

13. p113. Smith saw Eddie O'Brien playing right half-back for Cork in the '72 All-Ireland Final and thought he should have been moved to attack. Eddie O'Brien's last big game was the All-Ireland Final of 1970. The man who played in '72 was Ted "Starry" O'Brien, a natural defender, and about as different from Eddie O'Brien in looks, approach and style (including having the opposite grip) as it is possible for two hurlers to be. Yet, the "afficionado" thought these two were the same person.

14. p 120. Smith says "Tony Reddan's brilliance prevented John O'Grady getting a chance on the Tipperary team until 1958". John O'Grady was not Reddan's understudy - Blackie Keane was, and he (Keane) kept goal for Tipp from after the '56 League Final until half time of the '57 Munster semi-final, when he was replaced by Moloughney.

15. p122. Smith says "Christy Ring played his first senior game for Cork in a League tie against Kilkenny on October 22, 1939, in Cork." Christy Ring made his senior debut for Cork in a League game against Waterford at Cork on March 5th 1939.
16. p150. Smith has Christy Ring saving a 21-yard free in the second half of the 1953 Munster Final. It happened in the first half.
17. p 152. Smith says Mick Seymour got Tipp's goal in the 1954 Munster Final. Billy Quinn got it.

18. p180. Smith says of Clare's late equaliser in their 1955 first round match against Cork "Jimmy Smith let fly first time and the ball skied 'off his stick over the bar". J. Greene got the score.

19. Same page, same game - Clare's winner. Smith gives us "Jimmy Smith, now playing like a man inspired, got the ball again from the puck-out and brushing aside the despairing tackles of the Cork defenders swept in to shoot the winning point". Jimmy Smith got the winning point from a fairly easy free.

20. p218. Smith tells of "hard-hitting duels in the sun" during the Munster Final of 1966. It rained throughout the game.

21. On page 62 Smith states as a fact that M. Keating and D. Nealon of Tipperary switched sliotars during the Munster Final of 1971, thereby hoodwinking referee Frank Murphy. On page 103 Smith implies that he believes Frank Murphy's assertion that they did no such thing. He should make his mind up, but, not, please, write about it.

* Pat Fitzelle played a sterling second half for Tipperary that day, at right half-back, directly-in front of the Press seats. Fitzelle is, and looks, the most distinguished of Tipperary's current team. Sean Kilfeather of The Irish Times reported that Fitzelle had been taken off at half time.

In the same report, Kilfeather announced that the distance from Limerick city centre to the Gaelic Grounds is five miles. It is 1 1/4 miles. He would appear to be as knowledgeable about walking as he is about hurling. He probably sits beside Smith.

[BRIAN LOHAN of Clare is a great full back. In the Sunday Tribune of a week ago, he proved himself a shrewd evaluator of individual and tactical play. And those amongst us who thought — or forced ourselves to believe — that Galway had left their worst old ways behind proved ourselves gawdawful gulpins.]

August 14th 1994


"WELL, at least the rain held off," quoth one mild and unresentful and stoical citizen, in the deflated aftermath. Well, yes; but it never ever rains in the home or the hostelry; so, think Of all the trouble of travel, travail of tickets, and throes of tedium which 46,000 gullible gudgeons would have been spared if only Antrim and Galway had been considerate and candid enough to tell the nation that the form of their League disasters was the only form they had in them.

Nor are we hacks guiltless: the news that Antrim had appointed a "sports: psychologist" was a warning knell. Those amongst us, including the present-writer, who perceived the thing to be a surrender to desperation or gimmickry, observed — mistakenly — the charity of silence. The unfolding of events suggested that that psychologist could do with some sessions with his; psychiatrist. Seriously though, the news should have been treated with the hilarity it warranted: as a head-banging departure,from the'truths that-hurling matches are won by hurling skill, and hurling motivation can only be supplied by persons whose souls are informed by the essence, ethos, and experience of the game.

Anyway. Whether the cause was motorway congestion or psychological confusion, only three Antrim players were really and truly present in Croke Park, last Sunday: ancient reliables, Woody McKinley and Sambo McNaughton, and that grand goalkeeping discovery, Brendan Prenter.

As the likelihood of Limerick's victory progressed into inevitability, their players were subjected to many mean and sneaky wallops of hurleys. The Antrim players "responsible" the culprits — who were, in fact,  in the truest hurling sense, non-combatants to a non-man, on the day — betrayed not only Jim Nelson, who upholds the finest values, but also betrayed the staunch and vibrant communities of West Belfast and The Glens which sustain hurling in the county, and also betrayed that nation-wide commonality of goodwill towards Antrim, and towards every other staunch hurling community striving for success or mere survival.

APROPOS of which, a confession. In the middle of the week before the match, a very, prominent North Antrim hurling man told- the present writer that Nelson & Co were contemplating that merry-go-round of switches, planning to negate Mike Galligan, which, in fact, took  place before the throw-in. Your corr argued that the thing was misconceived, and that Nelson & Co should be taught some reality. To wit: Frank Carroll was, is, and will be an altogether more dangerous forward than Galligan; and, if special provisions should be made at all when facing Limerick, they should be made for Carroll. Those observations — if they ever reached Antrim's preceptors—were ignored. You all know what happened next.

Why confess? Because one is often accused of favouring Antrim. Because of all the bombast about bias and/or objectivity, and objectivity as/or opposed to bias, which you've endured if you've ever been daft enough to take newspapers — especially Indo and Turbine editors and editorials — at their pompous, pontifical word.

Newspapers, like copulation, should be taken copiously, not seriously. Newspapers, like stockbroking companies or political parties, exist to serve the interests of these or those proprietors or advertisers or speculators. Only when they purport and proclaim Olympian propriety and impartiality do newspapers become ridiculous.

So, when accused of partiality towards the hurling communities of Antrim and Derry and.their heritage and outlook and objectives, this correspondent pleads proudly and incorruptibly guilty. That is to say that, insofar as prideful self-expression in the native pastime of those communities constitutes an assertion and vindication of the right of those communities to resist and be rid of apartheid and subjugation, active . support of their efforts positively becomes a duty.

In the coming years, Antrim's priorities must be: unfailing attention, at every level within the county, to every facet of the game's multiplicity of skills, and their execution at maximum speed; to properly planned training schedules; and, above all, to avoiding the kind of uniquely Antrim squabbling which makes its way into the headlines in the Falklands, but which, if it happened in Cork hurling or Kerry g.f. wouldn't get outside the practice ground.

Of Limerick — the road to September 4 is paved with happenstance — we'll have time to treat in the coming weeks.

BRIAN LOHAN of Clare is a great full back. In the Sunday Tribune of a week ago, he proved himself a shrewd evaluator of individual and tactical play. And those amongst us who thought — or forced ourselves to believe — that Galway had left their worst old ways behind proved ourselves gawdawful gulpins.

Every appalling aspect of the most distressing demonstrations of the Jennet Express years was reverted to in spades to the power of n. The familiar, fabular shitehawks soloing up their own fundaments. The gormless, bleary, fatalistic handpasses to the nearest opponent. Etc, etc, ad nauseam et infinitum.

On top of all that, ye gods! came the bunching. That's where Brian Lohan comes in. He pointed to the crowding in upon Joe Rabbitte by Galway forwards which had stymied the big fellow in their two previous games. He recognised, at least by implication, that Joe's greatest asset to his side is in powering past one opponent in space and, thereby, turning all or most of a defence.

But what happened? Well, in fact, a vortex of whirling flailing sticks and bodies submerged Joe every time he glaumed the sliotar — and most of those sticks and bodies were maroon. Your hour has not, yet come, Brian Lohan. Joe Cooney's legs are indeed not all they were of yore. But Joe was noble and gracious and defiant and gallant. And, even if we never see: him on centre stage again, last Sunday will be as fine a redolence of him as any of those days on which he owned the match. -

A few other Galway players were living proof of the iniquity of the provincial system and the burden it places on Galway selectors. Those selectors will find excuses, for their decisions— or lack of decisiveness — in the unfolding of events, harder to come by.

[In defence of the commonwealth]

In defence of the commonwealth


THE conflict over the Gaelic Players' Association and its deal is nearly a fortnight old, yet from neither side have we heard a word that amounts to more than further ``fumbling in the greasy till'' as Mr Yeats so neatly put it.

Would that a Croke or a Cusack were living at this hour! To state and stand for the cause of truth and honour and genuine sporting values.

The GAA was founded to be, and remains, a benevolent society in the truest sense of that term: it exists to promote communal well-being. The GAA is as surely and demonstrably a benevolent society as, say, the Simon Community: idealism and the concept of service voluntary service are equally intrinsic to each body. And not a syllable of the foregoing is changed by the fact that for many, or most, the GAA is also a highly enjoyable hobby.

From that it follows, as night follows day, that the totality of the resources of the GAA must constitute a commonwealth. This was so self-evident to the founders, and other visionaries, of the association that it probably was not asserted strongly or frequently enough down the years. We do not use the word ``commonwealth'' in the way in which it was abused by the rump of the Empire upon which the sun has long since set but upon which the blood has yet to dry. By that egalitarian word ``commonwealth'' we mean the entire stock of resources, material and mental, of the GAA, to be applied for the common weal, i.e. the maintenance and advancement of the GAA and its aims and ideals, thereby serving the good of the whole community.

All of that is too easily and too often forgotten.

``Never believe the rumour until you hear the official denial'' was a reliable and valuable axiom of old. We've heard more than enough assertions that the GPA is not interested in pay for play; logically sequential questions arise but, of course, have not been asked. 1 Does this mean that if pay for play became available you would turn it down? 2 When the matter of pay for play arises in your conventicles or in casual conversation do you cogently and consistently oppose it?

And another. If it can be proven that the GAA has money to spare and splash and nobody has come remotely near to so proving should not the very first priority be the reduction or abolition of admission charges for families and for the poor and disadvantaged?

Thus we arrive at the immediate cause of the current conflict: money becoming available from outside the association. (The GAA's getting enmeshed with these priests of profit, advertisers and marketeers and sponsors and all the rest, who wish only to exploit and manipulate the GAA for their own gain, was questionable when it began and is more so and blatantly so now. But that is a separate argument.) A quotation from Brian Corcoran is relevant here: ``The GAA aren't sharing their revenue with us; why should we have to share ours with them?''

The GAA provides its members with free hurleys, free coaching, free pitches to play on, free matches to play in, and free referees to run them. All of those boons and benefits these people enjoyed, and enjoy, came out of the GAA's resources, or ``revenue'' as Corcoran would have it; all out of the COMMONWEALTH of voluntary cooperation and contribution which is the GAA.

Grasp that and you grasp that such incidentals and windfalls as may happen along from whatever source belong to the commonwealth. No individual has a right to that which belongs truly to the commonwealth, to all.

Nearly fifty years since, Christy Ring was offered unimaginable riches just to allow his name to be put over the door of a pub in New York. The tangler trying his arm was given a choice between disappearing in twenty seconds or taking a ducking in the Berwick Fountain.

The economic arguments for preserving the GAA from the myrmidons of Mammon are irrefutable. But they are the least of the arguments. We need the GAA as an expression of all that transcends mere commerce: idealism, service, joy, plain goodness.

Corporate Park might never have been built if Liam Mulvihill and the other main movers had adverted even a little to the history and the literature of their country. The Proclamation enjoined them to ``cherish all of the children of the nation equally.''

Prophetic Seán O'Casey explained to them that their pals, the banks who occupy their sybaritic boxes, were no more than ``respectable thieves.'' Oliver Gogarty opined that the cure might lie in ``turning the banks into brothels and the brothels into banks''; but then bethought him that, when the bank manager sought to effect the exchange, Fresh Nellie might ``Tell him none of us would be seen dead in his kip.''

Perhaps the first great mistake was made even further back: the appointment of the GAA's first full-time professional administrator. The most urgent thing to be done now is to restore egalitarianism in the GAA. As a first step Corporate Park must be sold on to Ahern and his sidekicks. And the GAA must relocate to Thurles and there build a ticketless stadium of the people not the powerful.

When first made, many moons since, that suggestion was just the radical vision of this one writer. Now it is an imperative towards drawing the fangs of the GPA, and restoring decency and democracy.

[Tipp's will to ascend peaks must be in some doubt.]

Tipp's will to ascend peaks must be in some doubt.
By Kevin Cashman.
April 25th 1993.

One faced into the 11 am hair of the dog session of the Cork panel, on Monday September 7, 1992, laden with trepid forebodement that one was, at last, about to experience the full impact of The Dance of Death. It wasn't that macabre; in fact, it c wasn't even sombre.
Which may be some sort of proof of that old saw about the tribe of hurlers being a resilient lot. Or, perhaps, those players who said that the starkness of contrast between what happened and what was supposed to happen would not hit home for days maybe weeks or months had the rights of it. But, the greatest likelihood is that the right lay with those who asserted that, out in the future, when all were retired and some forgotten, 1992 would be remembered amongst themselves as the year of Cork's self vindication and sweet -revenge upon Tipperary, and what happened against Kilkenny could never cancel that.

A sensible, not to mention cheerful, point of view. Were all the frabjous hours Tipp luxuriated in, that Summer of '87, expunged at the moment of defeat by Galway? Of all the Wexford folk, who threatened suicide or, at the very least, serious mutilation of self or selector after defeat by Offaly in the '84 Leinster final, do lie not 99% now reminisce about that as the ill year of Doran's resistless late fetch and be fulminating shot and goal and all his other gaisci that brought low the double double Cats?

Nostalgia and aging memory have their faults; their grandest benison is their capacity for excavating happiness and excluding its opposite from the seemingly inexhaustibly bounteous seams of happiness that lie in battles long ago.

So what about Tipp? A year since, on the eve of their league semi-final against Galway, Michael Keating was asserting that neither he nor his men would be inconsolable if they didn't win the league and, anyway, he couldn't see that either Cork or Tipp had much to gain from a pre-championship clash. All that has changed now, for the duty of self-vindication and sweet revenge has passed to Tipp. And, equally importantly, they need to determine, once for all, whether four or five - and maybe more - players of late '80s vintage are good for1993.

Forty years since almost to the day, the good people of Tipperary travelled to Croke Park for the league final against Cork (contrary to everything you think or I have been taught, bad fixture making didn't start in the lifetime of you youngsters) utterly convinced that the result of the '52 Munster final had been a fluke and that the world would now be set to rights. Instead, Cork won fairly handily - Paddy Kenny's
late goals made it respectable, 2-10 to 2-7, and went on to hold the whip hand for five years.

THAT something similar may happen today is quite conceivable.

Last June 7, at The Alamo, seven, maybe more, Tipp players would not cross the line that Travers drew in the sand. The signs had been there in the '92 league final against Limerick, but everyone, including the present writer and yourself, gentle reader, failed - or refused -to acknowledge them.

It comes to this: DeclanRyan was, in 1989, potentially the successor of Jackie Power or John Quirke, as the most versatile and invincible player in the game; Nicholas
English was a remorseless scoring machine up to some time in 1991, John Leahy was an omnipresence, a Bryan Robson of hurling, for a few seasons; Declan Carr, at his peak in 1989, a redolence of what Justin McCarthy taught the game and all who follow and love it: style, even when executed in slow motion, can prevail; and Cormac Bonnar was an exemplar of the an antithesis: style is not necessary to prevail.

As of this date, late April 1993, the ability and/or the will or those players to ascend again to the peaks they once knew remains questionable. As is the will of Tipp's Wise Men to drop those greats if, or when, they perceive that the spark of yore is quenched.

Of course, Cork's case is not that much different. There you see again a sort of desperate reliance on yesterday's men, men whose zest for combat - combat at its legitimate limits as practised by Kilkenny, and Wexford, too, if they ever again get out, of Leinster - is no longer as unquestionable as once it was. Albeit, a distinction important to be made is that, over these early years of the '90s, the county championship of Tipp has thrown up many more inter-county prospects than has that of Cork. The next season or two will tell how many of those were genuine if they're ever given their chances.

Conor Stakelum was not born to be a midfie1der. That, taken with those questions about Carr's form which refuse to go away, presages a prosperous day out for Cathal
Casey, who, consequent upon the tribulations of Peter Finnerty, now vies with Ciaran Carey and Liam Dunne and Eddie O'Connor for the honour of being the best hurler in the land.

You have to wonder whether Michael O'Meara will be Tipp's as first choice centre half for the championship: he has never been totally impressive in his previous inter county outings; and he has too often evinced a proclivity to er, ah, impetuosity. To balance that you have to wonder whether Cork's half back line is precisely what their fondest dreams dictate, either. That immaculate control and equally immaculate ambidexterity of Denis Walsh will never cease to thrill; the question is whether he, has the pace to survive 70 of the hottest I minutes at No 7 - 60 minutes against; Michael Cleary should not prove: insurmountable for Walsh, given the moral advantage he garnered for himself, last June.

At the time of writing, Friday noon, the weather forecast is, at best, possibility of a clearance from wet and windy at about the 3.30 throw-in, which, the showing of, recent years, would favour Tipp. However all that may turn out, Tipp's full back line has to be fancied to get a tighter grip than Cork's, and so that result of 40 years gone by should be reversed.

You'll find Peter Finnerty's estimation of the relative merits of Limerick and Wexford elsewhere on this page. I bet Peter goes for Limerick - and I bet he's wrong.

[Getting it right on the day.]

Getting it right on the day.
By Kevin Cashman.
June 7th 1992.

FIRST you notice the serenity: that calm awareness and conviction that today, is, perhaps, a sort of life and death; but Cork and Tipp and the game stretch beyond today into eternal import on the doings and destiny of us all.
What the coach says, what the paper says, what sour or triumphant participants or spectators may yet say, all fade into shadowy relevance in contemplation of the great continuum: the game is the thing.

Thirteen years ago, Gerald McCarthy retired after St Finbarr's defeat by Blackrock in his eighth Cork county final; he'd won four. Since then he's been coaching club or county with just a couple of sabbatical years in the late eighties.

So, after the ecstasy of 1990, was he helpless as it all came apart in '9l? Did he let fly any few good hefty fuchsias as his five selectors sat seemingly petrified by indecision while some things went blatantly wrong on the pitch? And then the invasions started.

In the long weeks afterwards, did resignation beckon?

"I let fly more than a few, I can tell you. The invasions were a dreadful I thing to happen and a bad reflection on the occasion; but they did not cause the result. Although I did tell the referee that we might I have to take the team off the field for its own safety if order was not restored.

"I would not see having a different point of view from somebody as a reason for resigning. You argue your point and if you're successful, well and good. The selectors give me a panel of players to work with and to train and that's it. But I'm sure everybody has learned from last year and anyway it would be a mistake to dwell too much on it; this is a new match, a different challenge."

And are you and your men as right for it as you were in '90, when you remarked that you had never seen their touch so sure as in the last session before the match?

"We are happy that we saw things coming right in recent days and weeks. It's part of the programme really; you have a game in mind that you have to be at your peak for. If we win we'll have to worry about getting it right for subsequent matches; but we never had any choice but to put everything into being at our absolute best for this game. Of course, Tipperary are in exactly the same boat."

1992 will soon be over - for multitudes of Cork and Tipp folk it will be over at half five on Sunday, whoever wins. Do you ever try to envisage what your life may be like without Cork and the Barrs?

"Every coach, no matter who he is, has only so much to offer. At the end of three or four years he usually has given it. When the players start telling you what you're going to tell them, you know the bell is tolling".

So, would you go on and help Meath or Donegal or Derry? Say, if a well constructed scheme were put in place whereby yourself or whoever would spend two years maybe living in a weaker county and not be out of pocket?

"I never thought of going to any other county. But the concept is a good one, I think it's obvious that the knowledge and experience that Johnny Clifford took to Westmeath, or Justin to Clare in his time, were of immense benefit'.

But what is it that sets the strong and the weak apart?

"I remember chatting with a few of the lads before the Kerry game. We agreed that Kerry have the same numbers and much the same sort of limbs and organs as we have. And, as we all know, they have a lot more brains. And they don't lack strength or courage. I think that the principal difference is that they don't perform the skills at the maximum pace. It's not constantly drilled into them to do that; that speed of the eye and hand are as important as ability to run. So they tend to try to slow it down, to do things at the pace they're used to, and that's fatal, of course.

"It's fashionable and easy to make little of tradition. Tradition is no more than winning regularly. And that, by ensuring that you're nearly always playing with the best of your own and against the best of the rest, is how standards have been maintained in the strongholds.

"One thing I find hard to understand is why mid-fielders and half-backs, and often wing-forwards too, don't use the lift and strike more. I mean, a fellow controls the ball, then he handles it, now he has to throw it up again. He's given the opponent a better chance to get to him and spoil him. And the fellows up front are getting the ball that fraction later."

Of course, you're profoundly influenced by the fact that you grew up in an era when the city teams, more especially the Barrs, were renowned for lift and strike.

"I did. But it makes good sense and better hurling in any era".

Anything else you'd change, rules or whatever?

"I'd get rid of the most infuriating rule in the book, the Square Rule. That a forward has to stand there and refrain from playing the ball dropping in, while the 'keeper swans around like Rudolf Nureyev, is a mockery of the game".

Do you worry that, when you and I are gone, and maybe before, the game will be taken over by entourages of therapists, psychologists, astrologers and every other sort of mountebank as appears to have happened in, say, tennis?

"The best psychology is common sense. If we can come up with enough of that and apply it, we'll all be happy boys on Sunday evening".


We Corkies have always been accounted a fairly volatile species. The past month provided an extreme manifestation, as the prevailing mood swung from the unheralded to the sublime: from deepest despondency to steely, taciturn confidence.

Rumours of rifts, and the fact of a straight talking panel meeting - the type of things that troubled Tipp folk before the '91 Championship - set expectations, or fears, at just about that nadir they reached in those doom-laden years, '65 and '88.

Then, as May sped by and Nature did her bit by laying on some true hurling weather, one could see and hear and feel things coming together: hurling getting sharper and a reawakening of the intense bonding, the loyalty, ardour and zealotry of 1990.

Little cameos often tell truer tales than towering tomes: in 40 minutes of yarning to and fro, I couldn't - not with prompts, probes, nor yet snakey leading questions - get Gerald McCarthy to concede a single weakness in any Cork player!

To have, at last, a game to study without provisos and caveats about injuries is a benison to be profoundly grateful for - and that's the only easy bit about this one.

After several thunderstorms and other varieties of deluge, the pitch, which was squelchy before all those, will hardly conduce to fast and true first time play. Whose advantage? Probably Tipp's: more settled in their method of play; whereas Cork would probably have looked forward to an opening 20 minutes of fiery, flying first time hurling - the more, and more unpredictable, changes of direction the better - to throw Tipp off their structured game.

And again, wouldn't it be the crack if, after eight months of fretful anticipation, the whole issue were to be decided by wisdom, or want of it, in choice of studs. For want
of a nail.

On Friday afternoon, the Met Office thought that Sunday might bring some breeze from the west and that rain or showers just might hold off until the game is over. That wee breeze is amongst the most intriguing aspects - and has been in Cork/Tipp confrontations for generations.

Given choice, Cork have played against the wind in the first half every time for more than 40 years. And their policy has been hugely successful: choice of ends has never been a actor in a Cork defeat in those decades.

Tipp, on the other hand, tend to discuss and dither, and usually (come down on the side of playing with the breeze if the toss is won. And many a Tipp man will tell you of many an occasion for bemoaning that choice - the League final of one month ago not least amongst them.

That day, Aidan Ryan shipped a couple of hefty, entirely accidental, wallops. The present writer has for years been of the opinion that his propensity to run into punishment was deeper at the root of that thrilling player's comparative decline than all the divers reasons that were speculated about. If he attains his pinnacles of '91, he will be hugely influential, for neither Cork mid fielder has mobility has mobility to match Ryan's forays forward to plunder points.

Of course in that matter, Seánie McCarthy doesn't have to get forward: he can soar one over the bar from ninety yards. And Ted McCarthy looks ever more like a man whose about to reproduce his 70 minutes of admirable diligence of July '91.

Declan Carr's fine solid second half of the League final has been overshadowed by the fact that Tipp were well beaten in the area, simply because Ryan was unable to help and the Wise Men unable to perceive the fact. It comes to this: if all four players are at their very best, a slight advantage may go Tipp's way.

Cork newcomer, Tim Kelleher, has always looked more of a midfielder or wing-back than a wing-forward; perhaps we'll see an early switch with one or other McCarthy.

But, where the forwards are concerned, Cork's primary concern must surely be to avoid repetition of the ghastly, barren bunching that disfigured the last 20 minutes of their performance in Thurles '91.

The goals will hardly come as thick and fast again: Tipp's full-back line is more cohesive now; for all that he lacks Michael Ryan's physique and spectacular clearance George Frend is probably a neater and tighter defender. Tomás Mulcahy v Colm Bonnar promises to be a mighty set-to. The wonted flurry of points from Tony O'Sullivan is indispensable to Cork's hopes.

It is almost forgotten now, that Catha Casey had the better of exchanges with John Leahy last year, until the Tipp man took to touring. Denis Walsh, when placed in his favourite left-half-back position, has nearly always displayed calm, 'thou shalt not pass' assurance and lovely clearances - and, somehow, never raises as many fears about lack of pace as he does nearer goal. Michael Cleary comes challenging with more pure hurling ability than Walsh has ever faced at left-half - but that observation may cut both ways.

Absolutely fundamental for Cork is that the half-backs remember not to be drawn up to - and beyond the half-way line, if and when John Leahy - and/or possibly Cleary -set off a-roaming. No amount of marking, no matter how tight or intelligent, will suppress the Tipp full-forward line if they are again presented prairies of space in front of them.

Brian Corcoran's vast experience and honours in under age hurling will be of some benefit as he faces up to Nicholas English; whether the youngster has the footwork and steadiness to cope after that only this day can tell. As only the day can tell which county was wiser in setting up the rematch of Denis Mulcahy and Cormac Bonnar. If adjacent colleagues are proving up to their tasks, Sean O'Gorman will do an acceptable job of work on Pat Fox.

How tempting it is to tip the draw! 20 minutes into the first half of last year's replay, Tipp were level after simply owning the game - the whole Cork forward line had had four pucks of the ball between them in that time. But every other period of Tipp dominance, throughout those 140 minutes of swaying fortunes, was more productive than Cork's. Now, Tipp have fewer uncertainties. Those factors may just about see them through. The replay?

[And so it came to pass.]

And so it came to pass.
By Kevin Cashman.
August 15th 1993


And so it came to pass. The last droplets of united greatness of Michael Keating's team were indeed proven to have drained into the wolds of Semple Stadium and Páirc Ui Chaoimh.
Much individual excellence remained and remains. But the team, as a team, spent its soul in that timeless July of 1991. The portents – not to say proofs – of that were palpable since half time of the '92 league final; nothing more needs to be said about the matter now.

So, can Galway build, again, on a very famous victory over Tipp? Perhaps Galway can: first they need to learn to stop frightening the gizzards out of those amongst us who invested faith and farthings in them.

The wides, and the balls tapped gently to Ken Hogan, were bad enough. What was utterly inexcusable was the obsession with trying to score goals off chances of points that would have put the game over the horizon out of Tipp's sight. The primary culprit, two minutes before half time, was, of all players, Joe Cooney. Then Liam Burke made his apostatic contribution. Near the end, it was Liam Fahy. Then Burke again: except that, from 20 yards, he did go for the point – but it was on his left side, and the sliotar hardly reached the square. You could not but envision The Cats smirking smugly "All of these crowds have learnt nothing."

Of course, Galway didn't start it. Earlier in that first half, spurning points from 50 yards or so, Colm Bonnar and Aidan Ryan, in blatant ignoration or unawareness of The Territorial Imperative, soloed intrusively into Seán Treacy's patch – and as Daveah used to say, "soon found out who made the world."

At this point of human and hurling evolution, Seán Treacy claims a place on the tree beside Denis Riordan, and Michael Maher and Link Walsh: basic consciousness that, if you can let them know who's boss in this wee acre, they'll probably stop chancing it here and everywhere else.

Anyway, Tipp have aeons for reflection; Galway have just three weeks. Fahy is hardly good enough, and little can be done about that. But the county of Galway has more than a sufficiency of high class handball alleys, into any one of which Burke could be conscribed for the next nineteen days, in the custody of, say, Noel Lane or Steve McMahon, until Burke would emerge, on the Final before the final, never knowing his right hand from his left, his hat from . . .

The point is that ambidexterity is a state of mind. But it is an acquired state of mind. At the peak of their powers, Keating and Cregan and O'Leary and McFetridge seemed – in point of fact, actually were – quite oblivious of which side they had the ball on. But they were not born with that bension; they learnt it; or had it taught them – by kindness or kicks.

The present writer recalls a young fellow, Kevin Dorgan – now, thanks to the basics of the Malleyite economy being so indisputably right, in San Francisco along with everybody else – being quite incapable of even beginning to swing a hurley on his left side at the age of 14. The lad was so irreversibly insane about the game that, with the correct mix of encouragement and abuse, he was, inside six months, as ambidextrous as any of your Cregans or Mahons – and, by all accounts, remains so in whichever club he adorns in The Land Of The Fee And The Home Of The Bride. So, achievement of ambidexterity should not be regarded as a destiny unattainable by Liam Burke, whatever his date of birth.

This could, all too easily, turn into a preview of the All-Ireland final. In fact, we merely reflecting on a day of seriously seminal semi-finals, the impact and relevance of which have been distorted or denigrated by sciolists.

How many times did you read, or hear over the airwaves, that Galway had 'a new team?' In fact, Galway had just three new players; and of those only Murt Killilea could be accounted 'new' in the real sense of the word: Padraic Kelly and Joe McGrath were, or should have been, at the head of every notebook that ever got anywhere near a Sarsfields match – and they're the All-Ireland club champions.

In the weeks leading up to the game, you didn't need an Einstein to cop that Jarlath Cloonan and Peter Finnerty were laying it on a bit thick. No single medium, nor the media in general, can complain about that: we've spent lifetimes ho-ho-hoing about Paddy Grace's spoofing i.e. disinformation.

What matters here is that media managers – in this medium as in all others – fail to confront the essential incompatibility of the elements that comprise the GAA. The GAA claims to be about reviving hurling; then browbeats its brightest and best hurlers into participation in Gaelic football, an activity designed specifically for persons who've failed to watch The Eton Wall Game. Media managements, all over this island, reflect, and are complicit in, this sham – the pretence that a burlesque of sport is sport. And has to be given the same prominence and coverage as sport.

Thus journos – who might, just might, with time and encouragement and coddling, discover whether a sliotar is stuffed or pumped, or a hurley cast, cut or cobbled – spend their time in places like Clones (I'm told it does exist) and Castleblayney (I'm told it doesn't) and Tralee (nobody is sure, but the consensus is that Gaybore made it up). And you, serene and patient and mansuete reader get stuffed full of pablum about Galway having a 'new team.'

Many thought that the worst thing about Antrim's exit was that we may never see Cloot again in Croke Park. That, if it happens, is sad for the rest of us. But nobody should worry about The Happy Hurler himself. You may rest assured that he'll become the champion at darts or croquet or skinydipping or something, while you and I are still trying to master the elements of beggar-my-neighbour.

[Mixing up the figures at Corporate Park]

Mixing up the figures at Corporate Park


A CHARA,

By now just about everybody has had a fine, self-satisfying, oul' bluster about the state of Corporate Park's wee playing paddyfield. So it is high time to season or spoil the bluster with facts and figures.

The rules of hurling used to decree the permissible length of a hurling field to be 140 yards minimum to 160 maximum, and the width to be 84 yards minimum to 96 maximum. Then, in the chariot tracks of Charlemagne, Lynch the Invincible drove the frontier of our Empire to the Elbe, and it became expedient to metricate our dimensions. Thus, today we have length 130 metres to 145 metres, and width 80 metres to 90 metres. (See Official Guide, Part 2, (Playing Rules) Croke Park, 1995. They've never gone and changed things, by Order of Quango, since then? Have they?)

It is worth noting that, in this metric conversion, the maximum permissible length lost some 1.7 yards, while the maximum width gained some 2.4 yards. ``Sloppy'' I hear you say yet a mere mote by comparison with the bungling at Corporate Park, at the dawn of the spang new millennium.

The accompanying, and highlighting, chorus of twaddle and piffle from sciolists and official spokesmen (those species being, in the main, indistinguishable or interchangeable throughout) was, of course, most fitting and delightful and predictable.

Around the time when the first moves in the handover of the GAA to the Tribunal class were being made, a promise a sop was extended to the lower orders, supporters and players and suchlike: the playing area of Corporate Park would be increased to the maximum when the handover was consummated. In recent days, Danny Lynch, the perennial Boy on the Burning Deck, announced that the width (currently 82 metres) will be 84 metres when building is completed. That is six metres narrow of the maximum and of the promise.

DANNY LYNCH also announced that the current length is 138.5 metres. Upon which, no doubt proceeding on the principle that a little complication might liven things up, Liam Mulvihill and Seán McCague chimed in speaking in yards. Seán thinks the pitch is ``at the present time nine yards shorter than usual.'' Now 1 metre = 1.0936 yards. And 138.5 metres + nine yards = 159.97 yards. So, if Seán speaks true, the pitch was, up to the present time, 159.97 yards long, i.e. maximum length, as long as, say, Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Sadly, but most manifestly, Croke Park never in its history was that length.

Corporate man Mulvihill, in the throes of expansionist passion, envisions the pitch being ``15 yards longer than ever before''. If realised, his vision would take the place away over the maximum permissible length. Even the increase proposed for the upcoming hurling semi-finals, 10 metres, will make the pitch 148.5 metres long: 3.5 metres over the permissible maximum and, consequently, illegal.

Liam Mulvihill further announced that the pitch is currently 10 metres wider than it was last year. Therefore, the pitch was 72 metres wide last year, i.e. well under the permissible maximum; thereby, very arguably, rendering all the results achieved thereon null and void and open to objection by whomsoever cares to object.

Responsibility for causing, or permitting, very many matches to be played on a pitch of illegal dimensions rests with the GAA's chief executive, Liam Mulvihill.

The rules decree that the halfway line be a minimum of ten metres long: last Sunday, it was not one half of that. And the grass was cut on Friday morning. At those stadia, where farmer's boys, who remember that grass grows quickly in high Summer, remain unbanished by the Tribunal class, the grass is cut late on Saturday. And what's wrong with Sunday morning?

THE sight and sound of Croke Park's great nabobs expatiating on pitch dimensions, a topic obviously remote indeed from their competence, revives once more the ancient proverb: ``The further up the tree the monkey goes, the more you see of his arse.''

On even so vile and regressive a project as Corporate Park, a few ordinary decent carpenters must be working. Give one of them the tape, tell him and his mate to lay out a rectangle 145 metres x 90 metres, or 160 yards by 96 yards and keep all nabobs well out of the road.

Yours etc,

Kevin Cashman

[Hurlers as sacrificial burnt- out lambs is a myth]

Hurlers as sacrificial burnt- out lambs is a myth


WE HAVE arrived at probably the most unappealing ending - that approbatory epithet `climax' is clearly inapplicable this year - to the senior championship since 1958, when Galway were given a bye straight into the final.

And therein lies a paradox: it is unappealing because of the participation of Offaly, yet, when the spirit moved them, Offaly played more than one county's share of the most economic, effective, tasteful - in fact, downright appealing - hurling of the past eight championships!

This emphasises the failure, the foolishness, of the protraction of the back door experiment beyond the initial two years. The experiment had been a success - shaky and uneasy; nevertheless, enough of a success to open the road forward to the solid ground of the Open Draw. And the notion, or option, of further progress towards an equitable championship, by means of a double round, i.e. home and away, in the Open Draw, was widely acceptable. Yet those trusted to point the way forward came up with nothing more illuminative than more back door - and that in the face of the flagrant fact that the events of Autumn 1998 had tainted the back door with a nasty dose of woodworm.

Two years ago, Offaly were given the McCarthy Cup - they did not win it. They were beaten twice - by Kilkenny and Clare - and, by the time they were presented with their place in the final, they still had not beaten Clare: the score at the end of the 207.5 minutes was 48 points apiece. Better executives than Clare's would have demanded that they carry their three-point lead into the third leg; better sportsmen than Offaly - after the glorious success of their sit-in - would have suggested without prompting that Clare's lead stand.

(Isn't it the quare phenomenon that the strategy of the sit-in didn't even occur to the Gaelic football folk of DERRY(!) when their minors were done down, short weeks since? Where were Eamonn McCann and Nell McCafferty when they were needed?)

The first decree of the Truth and Justice Commission, in this most distressful country, will render the 1998 championship null and void.

Coming on top of all that, Offaly's sidling twice more through the Leinster back door could hardly endear them to a populace floating high on the stimuli of the '99 and '00 Munster finals; each in its turn fresh in the public mind from the preceding Sunday, and each containing adequate rations of those aliments which send puffers and poetasters of `The Unique Munster Final Occasion' scuttling to mount banks.

While Offaly slink onward again, Clare are stranded - and Loughnane has passed into history. It is rather too much to ask hurling, or any romantic, blood to bear.

``The great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us arise!'' In his message to the hurlers - and to the non-combatants, too - of Clare, Loughnane was the resurrection of Jim Larkin; and is now just as immortal.

Of course, that is not to suggest that these men were of equal stature. For one thing, Loughnane could never concede parity of esteem to forwards. That diminished him, and, in the end, undid him. Fine forward lines are assembled and melded - not spilt out of a lucky bag. Nor could perming any four out of 14 after Gillie's and Jamesie's security of tenure had again been guaranteed and graved, continue to prosper.

Paradoxically, when the end came - against Kilkenny in '99 rather than Tipp in '00 - slowness, or obduracy, about replacing Conor Clancy at centre-forward was quite as costly as the howler at the other end, which was the failure to take Anthony Daly off Brian McEvoy and put Frank Lohan - who would single-handedly have taken on the Tuatha de Danaan, the same day - on McEvoy.

Of course, Clare and Loughnane were unlucky that O'Connor lost form in the absolute prime of his years - as were Cork with Brian Corcoran. It is somewhat ironic that such losses of form occurred after these men consorted with the ``Show Me The Money'' mob?

After Páirc Uí Chaoimh in June and the departure of Loughnane, the customary claptrap, about pressure and sacrifices and burnout, was bawled about the land - perfectly conveniently, of course, for the ``Show Me The Money'' mob. So, once more: the individual who trains with an inter-county hurling team does not make sacrifices - he makes a choice between pleasures. The pleasures of supreme fitness and sporting camaraderie and liberation of ego and free hurleys and hotels and holidays compete against the pleasures of pubs and pissy pals or home and couch and TV or going to the dogs, or whatever. The individual chooses one out of many ways to enjoy himself - that is all.

A sacrifice is, of its nature, selfless: it is done in the service of others. Reverend Peter McVerry SJ makes sacrifices, Che Guevara made sacrifices, Captain Lawrence Oates made sacrifices - including, like Che, the supreme one, for the benefit or love of other people. What hurlers do they do for themselves, in quest of fame, fulfilment, recreation, perks. Hurlers do not make sacrifices. It is high time for abuse of reason and language to stop.

If all that is not true, our next generation will find themselves thumping their craws over another `abuse scandal'. Consider: every modern inter-county team has a highly qualified doctor in constant attendance; if a coach is subjecting players to `pressure' or demanding `sacrifices' or placing players in danger of `burnout' - or in any other way bullying or abusing human persons - that doctor is in duty and conscience bound to put a halt to the proceeding, and, if he cannot, to report it to the police; otherwise he is in breach of his Hippocratic oath.

Naturally, in the still amateur, non-pharmaceutical world of hurling, nothing of the sort ever happens, nor is in danger of happening, for the doc knows that all, including himself, are there for the crack and the fulfilment, and in the hope and expectation of glory.

Some of the Clare players may be a trifle stale, as may the man who's played a vast amount of darts or Don. Reinvigoration is hardly an unheard of phenomenon.

Anyway. The age, brief as it has been, of the omnipotent - or allegedly omnipotent - coach may be drawing to a close. Close - or harsh - scrutiny discovers, or attributes, too many errors. It is natural and sensible that some diffusion of responsibility, and culpability, should be aimed at.

One example. For 20 minutes against Waterford in '99, Limerick had an extra man, Ciarán Carey, who did a workaday job. But Mark Foley, who was capable of doing as good a job or better, was stalemated inside at No 13. In his last inter-county outing, Mikey Houlihan's mighty heart and matchless power were seriously discomfiting Waterford inside the 21. (Taking the view that the pashas of Corporate Park might, at any second, make the place all-ticket, Mikey established his squatter's rights inside the Waterford square, just as Dave Clarke was letting fly from behind half-way; the result was the last great one-inextricable-heap-in-the-back-of- the-net goal.) Next door to Mikey, the subtlety, the coolness, the accuracy of Carey would surely contrive scores - the move was never tried. Eamonn Cregan patrolled the touchline, and ne'er a Limerick hand dared stay him to point out where salvation lay. Of course, we'll never know whether it occurred to e'er a mentor or official. Still, to this observer, a strong case for collectivity arose that day.

On August 6, Cork's cabinet froze collectively, while the catatonic foosthering and bunching of their charges proceeded without interruption. We should not be too hard on them, for the sole solution to their plight was a bit of skulduggery of the sort which came naturally on the sidelines of long ago, but which would be intolerable - in Cork - in this law-abiding age, wherein respectable mentors do not encroach onto the soggy but sacrosanct sod of Corporate Park. Tough Barry - or Paddy Leahy - would have had a back go down with a most grievous injury. And, when Tough and his colleagues had finished disentangling the brains of the afflicted forwards, Tough would have had that back make a most startling recovery.

But those were the bad old times.

[Awesome in execution of enemy]

Awesome in execution of enemy


KILKENNY have the makings of a treasure of startling value ... Eamonn Kennedy is raw ... not thoroughly attuned to the step up in pace. But he has the instinctive anticipation and positioning of a genuine centre back; the gift of materialising in the most troublous spots which is innate in that rare breed, too; and he is strong and brave under the falling ball. Maybe not in '99 - but we should see and enjoy a great deal more of this Kennedy.

YOUR correspondent wrote the above on 9 May 1999. It was a happy and proud recent rediscovery, for some say that even so minor a declaration of faith from so distant a believer may help sustain a lad of pastoral aspect and bearing, like Kennedy, through such a swamp of sciolisticpunditry as he was dumped into during the summer of 2000. He was accused of every inadequacy in the lexicon of cliche - and that while growing from the competence of early days to the true magnificence of Sunday last.

He and his wing men, Phil Larkin and Peter Barry, with Andy Comerford in front of them adding another huge battle honour to his escutcheon, constituted the real bedrock upon which Kilkenny's victory was founded. The corner forwards, Henry Shefflin and Charlie Carter, were awesome in their completion of the execution and dismemberment of the enemy, with DJ Carey often lending an effective hand.

None of these easily observed facts affected the brass bands and raucous choruses who now attend every adjustment of Carey's chinstrap; from the moment of the final whistle they were in croaking, cacophonous crescendo. This carry-on has outstripped reason and decency: it is reminiscent of the Eircom affair of 1999, where dissent about the sheer saintliness of shareholding was drowned out, or the campaign - a little quieter in the aftermath of his selection on the nastiest English league eleven in history - to have the Keane person officially replace Father Mathew or St Finbarr or Frank O'Connor or someone in the pantheon of Cork's great.

Last Tuesday, Carey told the readers of The Irish Times that he spent his time in school thinking about money. The, doubtless ill-adjusted, scholars of our day dreamed about Brigitte Bardot or the sacred vocation of keeping Tipperary in their place. Like Groucho Marx intoning ``Why don't yah let me feel yah, Celia?I got two winnin' hands I wanna deal yah!''

Carey's confession of lust - though it was for mere sordid silver - is no harm at all: it tells, or emphasises, some little more about where the `Show Me The Money' mob are coming from, and about their protestations of some sort of superior motivation. (Perhaps, if their manners improve a little, the claptrap about motivation may be given some audience. But last Sunday's second shabby gate-crashing, this time with an advertising aircraft, promises no such improvement.)

ANYHOW, admiration for Carey's candour in the matter of his youthful avarice should be tempered by recollection of his many weeks of coyness about his membership of the Greedy Players Alliance. It was hardly for want of opportunity. We have been assured, umpteen times and by `experts', that availability and willingness to talk are among his chief merits. Strange development that: garrulity as an indicator of hurling distinction! But - no doubt - progress.

WELL over twenty minutes had gone before Kilkenny hit their second wide. That period of enthralling virtuosity was comparable to Tipp's suppression of Limerick in the first half of the drawn Munster final of '96. In fact, probably better, for Offaly's resistance was better than Limerick's.

Kilkenny's advantage of pace - as forecast here - was crucial. And, when you are faster than the opposition in almost every position, it is fairly easy to look wittier and more stylish, too. But, of course - unlike deluded Tipp, four years since - The Cats were never going to allow such advantages to lull them into self-indulgence and attempting to put on an exhibition. The Mon's Brother Vaughan used to asseverate, long ago, that the time to start putting on an exhibition was ten minutes from the end, 25 points ahead, and playing with a hurricane.

Kilkenny came out for the second half as focused and ascetic as they were at the beginning. Of course, those few frontal tackles, and ensuing longish medical interventions, early in the second half, knocked a deal of flow and continuity out of the game. And, once he'd become convinced that no outright malice had been engendered by those tackles, Willie Barrett was inclined to permit bits of holding and dragging which made for episodes of scrappiness. So that it was unsurprising that The Cats failed to double their interval tally, a scheme of retribution for 1998 which was on many minds.

Pilkington, Duignan, Errity, Joe Dooley, and possibly Kinahan and Troy and Claffey will hardly rush into committing themselves to another campaign involving another confrontation with this current assemblage of Cats; lither legs and lungs are requisite. Only Cork have those benisons in sufficient supply - matters of wits and skills we'll not start on again for a while.

NOBODY quite knows what decoctions are to be laid before the Special Congress. One version suggests that we're to have more back doors, rather than the fewer we were promised and which a greater than ever proportion of the populace thinks necessary after the letdown of September 10. For a huge majority is now convinced - wrongly in this writer's view - that Offaly's victory over Cork was a fluke.

So that if more back doors are forced upon hurling, Offaly would be well advised to be more considered, and consistent, than they've been since '97. Offaly claim that they opposed the back door with more resolution than anybody else. Making proclamations of principle from the house tops and doing precisely the opposite in practice should remain the preserve of politicians: it is properly called gross opportunism.

If Offaly were so opposed to the back door as they like to assert, they could have stated, the moment they were beaten in the last three Leinster finals; ``We are now out of the championship of this year, and will not be appearing in any championship fixtures until next year.'' That would have been standing on principle. A more old fashioned term: `having the courage of your convictions'.

[World does not wait for Cork]

World does not wait for Cork


IT is almost certainly a mistake. Consider: the quare crowd won a perfect All-Ireland. Cast your mind back over the first 20 or 25 minutes of September 10, or over the full course of the championship of 2000, and you'll find yourself agreeing - admiring - that everything Kilkenny did, or attempted, was appropriate and purposeful.

Yet, The Cats are vincible. Now that Galway have installed Noel Lane, they are most likely to do the deed. But Jimmy Barry Murphy might have been the man to achieve that righteous and profoundly necessary mission if he'd elected to stay.

The most grievous penance of living in this land of ours is daily annunciations about the wall-to-wall probity of the RUC and/or Cork's right - or alleged innate ability - to win All-Irelands. The people who take that stuff seriously are the same who take Willie Clinton for a virgin or Henry Kissinger for a pacifist.

When Jimmy Barry Murphy accepted the Cork job in 1996, hurling in this city was in decline - although only this Marxist Sindo was prepared to say so at the time. The Marina, Dunlops and Fords, the industrial heartland, had passed into history, and with it the proletariat, the Twomeys, the Hartnetts, the Cliffords, the Mahers, the Brohans, who made Cork special. Nobody wishes to denigrate Avondhu or Carbery or Imokilly, or their achievements; but, nowadays, Melbourne and Chicago and New York see more of the youth - the third level generation - than Páirc Uí Rinn does. It is fashionable nowadays to stick boots into the Rockies, Glen and Barrs; the harsh truth is that without them the GAA would be about as important as the PDs.

The Mon prospered, The Glen prospered, The Piarsaigh prospered. Cork prospered. It was a law. Now, the North Monastery is in deep trouble. The Christian Brothers have all but disappeared; soon the greatest academy of hurling the world has ever known will be no more. That is the hurling environment in which any Cork coach, or selector, has to operate. Things are easier in Clare and Tipperary and Galway and Kilkenny, startling though that assertion may sound.

Sciolists of all shades, and none, blame JBM and Johnny Clifford and The Canon and anyone you care to nominate for Cork's failure to win more then two All-Irelands in the '90s. The world and Katty Barry ought to know that neither Jimmy, nor Frank, nor Con, nor The Doc nor any other Murphy who ever lived could have reversed, or even affected, that law of the Celtic Tiger which dictates that a family shall consist of 1.8326 persons. When Cork hurling was great, a northside family consisted of eight persons - and counting.

Cork trained last St Stephen's Day. A few years before then, at a seminar dedicated to the future of the game in Cork, (Into The Millennium, was it?) the whole notion of exhausting, wrecking, players, by so-called endurance training in the early months of the year, was given the most exhaustive (!) examination, and condemned by speaker after speaker: the Bossman himself, Willie John Daly, Johnny Clifford, (Johnny told his own lovely Glen yarn about Good Friday) Justin McCarthy, agus daoine nách iad. But, five years later, Cork trained on Stephen's Day!

It is difficult indeed to comprehend. Loughnane and McNamara get most of the blame for this carry-on. Yet, as anyone with a splink of sense knows, Loughnane and McNamara had nothing whatever to do with it.

When those extraordinary men were torturing and testing the Clare panel, half a decade since, they were searching for CHARACTER. Maybe the notion of fitness occurred to them about, say, once in every leap year. But, in those days before the first round of the Munster championship of 1995, when Banner men were being flayed up and down the sides of mountains, it was about "Will you? Dare you? Trample on the toes of the people of Tipperary and Cork, as generations before you failed to do?" And somewhere on those mountainsides Loughnane's men said YES, and gave us four or five years of hurling ecstasy.

And, while the Banner were doing that, Cork were winning Under 21 titles by the new time. So, what follows - that Cork do not need character building, or further sessions of slogging and masochism on December 26 - may be obvious enough. That Cork do need hurling education is less so.

And that is why Jimmy's going is a mistake.

"They're all right in their own way, Gawd help them! We'll go out and play our own game." Last August 6, that most ancient - and asinine - of Cork attitudes was surely consigned and condemned to oblivion for all eternity. The world does not wait for Cork.

DIARMUID O'SULLIVAN needs to be taught to keep out of RTE's lenses. As, no doubt, you noticed yourself, O'Sullivan sustained a fairly hefty frontal charge before he elected to assert himself; but, that is not of much service when the full weight of Liam Griffin is brought down on top of you, as it was upon young Sullivan, without right of reply, away back in June.

That is a relatively minor problem by comparison with the Ben O'Connor problem. Here we have an absolutely superb athlete with the capacity to become, not a Doran or a Nealon, perhaps, but certainly a Shefflin or a Jamesie. But Ben adheres to the school of solo and hand pass.

Similar thoughts occur about Timmy McCarthy - but don't ye be getting me going!

The point is that, on August 6, Cork learned, or were taught, more about themselves than ever before in hurling history. Any number of persons may, in theory, be qualified to apply the lessons presented by Offaly; only Jimmy Barry Murphy had, has, that rapport with the players, and the people, of Cork to start from before that handy All-Ireland of 1999.

Jimmy should have a rethink.

And, if Jimmy does not, Tom Cashman should take a lease on Alcatraz and keep Timmy McCarthy there until such time as Timmy acquires, say, one quarter of of that divine artist's artistry.

[Take us back to Thurles, to our roots]

Take us back to Thurles, to our roots

Unite, cosmuintir of the hurling world! You have nothing to lose but your nabobs!

REMEMBER how, when Corporate Park in all its pomp and spectacle was being mooted, or fanfared, assurances abounded that, as time went by, every aspect of the project would be most minutely dissected and debated? Time has gone by, all right, nearly a decade of it and has provided dissection and debate manifesting all the intellectual rigour and independence of the earth's orbit round the sun, or the bluebottle's orbit round the cowdung.

The ideal, ambition, resolve of the GAA's founders was to bring recreation, health, self-reliance and communal pride to the cosmuintir; in defiance of the usurpers and racists and their toadies and flunkies who monopolised and misgoverned every brand and branch of organised sport in the land. What the GAA's founders achieved is self-evident. But the methods and manner of the achievement the native genius and spirit of the meitheal: co-operation, service, voluntarism ah! there are pages to be torn from the history books and obliterated, if the "new" and "better" GAA is to be moulded in the image of the "successors" of Cusack and Davin.

When I was a garsún, both hurling fields in our parish were given free of charge, year after year, by their owners. What would the insiders of the Golden Circle, and the worshippers of the Golden Calf, have made of that? We routinely overloaded the cars of our few farmers and well-paid tradesmen, and never heard the word 'mileage'. The parish hall was built entirely by meitheal, in the early '50s. And, short years later, the oldest, 1845, school in the place was converted, by the same means, into another terrific community centre. None of that was exceptional; it was, if anything, commonplace, the length and breadth of the land.

Ten years since, the outlines of Corporate Park began to shift from the desks of sundry draughtsmen to the desks of persons 'behind the fluted columns of the Bank of Ireland, which lots thought was the Temple of the Holy Ghost, but that was all bankum, and it was a mighty den of highly respectable, and greatly honoured, thieves' as the literary and insightful Mr O'Casey once put it. By then the GAA had moved or had been "modernised" or misled far from the bedrock of its founders. The official GAA was a bedmate of Power, private and State. The GAA was preaching and practising sponsorships and endorsements and VIP boxes and premium seats and suchlike ordinances springing from the three sovereign commandments of the new state religion: Thou shalt magnify and obey no other god than 1 The Market; 2 Privatisation; 3 Globalisation.

Thus any critique of the Corporate Park project coming from outside the principles of the state religion became outright unthinkable or, at the very least, subject to stern interdict. You probably know how it works: to be respectable, the critics remain inside the framework of permissible thought; they restrict their critique to matters of tactics or percentages that arise within the framework.

A perfect current example: the more the GPA and the opposing faction of initials in Corporate Park, and their respective militias in the media, wage war over percentages and proportions of pelf for elite intercounty players, the more the doctrine of maximum money for those with the power to extract it the Eircom executive syndrome goes unquestioned. Simultaneously, fundamental matters such as egalitarianism, the role and worth in the community of a benevolent society of the sort the GAA used to be, where the GAA and the community are heading, or drifting, go utterly unaddressed. Thus those "critics," who observe the commandments, become primary contributors to thought control, i.e. brainwashing, and are duly honoured and rewarded.

(Just try to recall how many award schemes, run by big business, for every conceivable and inconceivable species of journalist, are currently operating in this distressful country.)

By departing from the model of the meitheal, by pandering to and relying upon the gluttony and ostentation of power and privilege ensconced in Corporate Boxes, by monstrous admission charges, Corporate Park has become an instrument of exclusion and oppression of the cosmuintir. It is the very antithesis of what the GAA was founded to establish and advance.

PLEASE ponder a single example, no, make it two inside a fortnight: the hurling and Gaelic football finals of 1999. Just how many tens of thousands of genuine followers of Cork, Kilkenny, Galway and Kildare were denied the ecstasy of watching their counties? Now ponder the hurling final of 2000 and how the Minister for Maximum Tolerance of Dodgy Drivers was able to get six tickets No Bother! for a brood which has achieved neither fame nor notoriety for hurling rabidity.

Corporate Park is an ethical slum. Those who are excluded from it are precisely the same who were excluded from any sort of consultation about its construction; it is a manifesto of, and a monument to, discrimination.

Which makes it just perfect for modern Irish rugby. This is the floundering business which taints itself by denying the rights and claims of its own club members in order to flog club ticket allocations to Mike Burton, or whoever the main man servicing corporate hospitality is at the moment. The design of Corporate Park is perfectly in tune with the class gradations i.e. pathetic snobberies of the business. And the FAI and the hordes of supporters (Gawdhelpus!) of Manchester Child Labour Merchandise Monopoly, would, with a bit of application, soon make themselves at home in the home of vulgarity. And then Bernard O'Byrne and Brendan Menton could kiss and make up.

And it is in Baretea's constituency! Instant immortality beckons! Now is the time for him to present the GAA's nabobs with an offer they can't refuse or a compulsory purchase order. Thereby allowing the GAA to get back to Thurles, to its ideals, to its roots, to its true nature, to its comity, to its service and simple goodness. For if that is not done the GAA faces revolution, or professionalism or extinction, which is the same thing as professionalism.

Two years since, the present writer was all alone when ruminating along those lines. Now, no less a hitter than Liam Griffin has come on board. Soon the movement will be unstoppable. Cosmuintir of the Hurling World! Unite! You have nothing to lose but your nabobs!

Let's begin with a referendum on what we've discussed here. And, finally, would self-styled pragmatists who aver that the maintenance of a people's stadium for 200,000 souls in Thurles would be impossible, please explain how they find that maintenance of an excrescence of grandiosity in Dublin 3 will be no trouble at all?