Messages

Monaghan and  Mayo have announced a groundbreaking and innovative partnership ahead of this year's all Ireland football championship. The Mushroom county has never won an All Ireland despite 16 Ulster titles. Mayo have lost their last 7 finals.

Both counties have high performing teams but suffer from the same problem. They only have one scoring forward, aside from freetaking. Only one man who can call for the ball and lamp it over the bar with 2 minutes left.

Conor McManus recently scored 12 points in a match against Dublin that Monaghan lost. He scores about half of Monaghan's points. But the next best forward scores only 20% of what he does.

GMTFB Timeshare® is a unique development in gaelic football. Mayo need a "give me the f**king ball" forward and so do Monaghan but they won't be playing on the same day given the playing schedule. So when Mayo need him, McManus will join the full forward line. Mayo have agreed to loan Cillian O Connor and O Shea to Monaghan for matches other than Mayo v Monaghan

Should either team end up winning the all Ireland it will donate half the medals to the other county. Sam will spend 6 months in each county.

Should the 2 teams met in the all Ireland semi there will be no timeshare transfers. It will be winner takes all.
No need for sc**bag tactics. Just give him the f**king ball

More fluffy hurling nonsense. Hurling is much more of a lump it up the field game than football. Less room for strategy. That's both a strength and a weakness.

It's a much more skillful game Syf. Strategically the 2 sports may be similar.

2014
When Cody took over as Kilkenny boss , Kerry had won 31 All-Irelands to the Cats' 25. The Kingdom were out on their own. Now, it is possible that Kilkenny could become the most successful GAA county in the history of the association in a mere three seasons' time. You can bet they have their eye on that. And the most ominous statistics concerning Kerry and Kilkenny are not the titles they won. Kerry have also finished runners-up on 21 All-Ireland final days and Kilkenny on 25. Just imagine how many they might have won by now.

the French song isn't bad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boYQovCybYQ

This is an awful story


http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/husband-jailed-for-savage-assault-that-left-wife-in-a-coma-34700250.html

http://www.independent.ie/sport/hurling/top-small-ball-aficionados-stick-the-boot-in-25992846.html

Ó Muircheartaigh recalled how former Waterford great Ned Power claimed that there were 129 skills in hurling, Kelleher chipped in that football had just two - catch and kick!

Kelleher spoke of how only 'special people' hurled because hurling was such a special game.

The blows kept coming and the big hitters were waiting. "It doesn't interfere with us in Kilkenny and that's the way it should be," said Cody.
"They are two totally different games. Hurling is strong in Kilkenny and it just can't sustain both games. We get all sorts of flak about it from Croke Park. We're told now that we have to enter teams in the Tommy Murphy Cup this year.

"I'm speaking for myself but we're not interested in playing football at any major level in Kilkenny. We compete at underage level play our schools competitions and it's grand. Fellas enjoy it. But we're a hurling county and we intend staying that way."

My money is on the Ukraine. It's different, emotional and I love the chorus where she's singing in whatever that exotic language is. I like the Bulgarian song too. Again, it's different and way better than both the Russian and Irish songs which just sound like harmless, sub-par pop songs to me. Sergey(Russia) just isn't doing it for me at all and I'm at a loss as to why he's such a hot favorite. To me, it sounds no better than Nicky's effort or the UK song. All very bland and interchangeable. Always the greatest show on earth though, so roll on Saturday.

she's a Crimean Tatar. The song is about the stalinist deportations.
the history of that part of the word is gruesome

The Irish Times - Saturday, September 29, 2012\
The night Dougal belted out the Rose in Dungannon\

John Hoyne and James Ryall were freewheeling spirits who enjoyed their view from the back seats as Brian Cody drove Kilkenny to glory, writes PM O'SULLIVAN

JAMES RYALL is a natural born storyteller and one of his best involves the time John Hoyne and himself got waylaid by Ulster hospitality in Dungannon.
It was January 2003, the Saturday before the Walsh Cup final against Dublin in Parnell Park. It was Ryall's first start as a Kilkenny senior. Brian Cody had signed off on the trip, instructing them to make the Burlington Hotel for Sunday noon.

Strikingly reminiscent of Spud Murphy, Ewen Bremner's character in Trainspotting (1996), Ryall snorts as he recalls how his comrade had "only a banger of a car at the time". Bald front tyres were replaced and the two of them, tight friends as well as Graigue-Ballycallan clubmen, headed away.
Up grand and they spun through some drills in the afternoon. Afterwards they were to present medals to youngsters, the usual story, and it stayed standard when Ryall, pulling off his boots, turned to Hoyne and cocked an eye.

Reply came phlegmatic, Dougal to a tee: "We were never going to come up here and not have a few pints".The nickname hopped courtesy of the Father Ted character. Hoyne, before the bar, has a genius repertoire of gags, mimicry and oneliners and is, as they say, a panic. I have been in his company on such an evening and I wish it could be printed, because Dougal is savage goodnatured. But it cannot, because John Hoyne is a rifle.

That Tyrone night, the same pair ended up in a hall dropped from the sky in the middle of nowhere. The medals were presented.People started lashing down drink in front of them, the Kilkenny lads good enough to come up the day before they had to play Dublin.
Pints, shorts, vodka and Red Bull, all the shades of alcohols rainbow.
Through the warm blur at the counter, the mid-Ulster accents shouting and carousing, after the hours softened at the edges and started making for the centre, Ryall turned at the sound of an odd accent in the throes of song.

Dougal was up on stage, letting loose The Rose of Mooncoin.
"It must have been three or four o'clock in the morning," Ryall says. "And we didn't head off any time soon either . . ."
Eventually they were deposited in a guesthouse as night crept away.
Ryall, wildly ambitious, set his mobile for eight o'clock. Next thing Hoyne was sticking his head in the door and telling him take a look: 'eleven o'clock!'.

They jumped, heads sticky, realising they would have to ring their manager and come some way clean.
Then James Ryall remembered the purchase.
Out on the road, John Hoyne rang Brian Cody and told him their front tyres had been slashed, Free State registration and all that. Phenomenal hard to get a garage open on a Sunday morning up here. Burlington is out.

Okay, said Cody, nothing like as severe in private as his public image suggests and probably undeceived in any case. Head straight to Parnell Park. 'Be as quick as ye can'.They belted down at a ferocious slant and closed in on Donnycarney."Not a scrap to eat," Ryall laughs, shaking his head. "Just a bottle of Lucozade between us."
He makes it cinematic, pure point of view:

"We came in heads down, naturally enough. All you could see was a row of Kilkenny socks, togged out."
They got sat, conscious of knowing looks along the wall, got stripped fair quick.
Cody was over to Ryall with his jersey, telling him 'you have it now and you should keep it' and James Ryall was rummaging in his kitbag, getting as frantic as he ever gets, which is not frantic at all. Then it dawned. Taking off his boots while sussing Dougal's intentions, he had missed on landing them into the bag and now would have to get them from the car.
Kid Adrenalin took over. He sprinted back, barely, to line out. How did it go? "I hurled well," replies Ryall, still a bit in wonder at that version of himself. "I was substituted near the end, but I must have done enough, because I held my place that year."

Getting out on the field did not solve John Hoyne's headache. Cónal Keaney immediately creased him with a shoulder. "Never forgot it," Hoyne says. Then his distinctive twisted grin: "Just after the throw in. I was on the ground, he had me on the ground and I was looking up at him. I was fecked. And I was saying, to myself, looking up: 'If you only knew the hardship Ive gone through to get to this match' . . ."

Stock notions of a robotic Kilkenny panel conceal the beauty of nuance. Personality-wise, the grouping has always been a mosaic rather than a wall of emulsion. Cody has long been canny about dynamics, a believer in personalities who leaven the mix.

Sure enough, Hoyne and Ryall were back-of-the-bus merchants, never taking themselves too seriously, never enthusiasts for gym work. They could self-deprecate for Ireland.
Ryall remarks of the draw with Clare in 2004: "A bit of a tennis affair, up and down. I was the free man the first day but not for the replay! They were on about the supply of ball . . ."
John Hoyne hangs candid about 2004's cusp status:
"After 2003, Brian Cody had a schoolroom of a panel. (Charlie) Carter and(Brian) McEvoy were gone. The manager had won three All-Irelands.
"He had total control of the situation, the foundation of everything he achieved since. And you can only get that control, in Kilkenny, through winning."
The moral of the Dungannon story is slanted but clear, a measure of indiscipline bespeaking iron focus from sliver start.
There was never anything but total respect for management. James Ryall's open, alert face is a key to turn. He is testing me out, whether I can see beyond the superficial hint of controversy.
2004 chimes with 2012, as Ryall summarises:
"The way you get caught out, and the way Kilkenny got caught out against Wexford in '04, is that it's hard to get yourself right for every game.
"Everyone was worrying Dublin were coming with a woeful drive. There was big fear in Portlaoise. And then Kilkenny annihilated them. Then the whole county: 'Ah, they'll win the Leinster Final . . .' You'd never be shut off from that as a player. A big performance nearly always means a lull."
Tony Wall wrote in Hurling[ (1965), his still fresh monograph on the most beautiful game:
"The high ball into the full-forward line from centre field or half forward is practically useless".
John Hoyne's conversation is dotted with references to the many GAA books he has read but he has no need to consult Wall. This emphasis is part of his hurling DNA, one he tried to pass on via a six-year stint with the juveniles of Graigue-Ballycallan.
Back in the early 2000s, there was a lazy view of him as a Didier Deschamps figure, a mere hewer of ash. I never agreed. Even now, his recollections are flecked with frustration about an absolute "win your own ball" philosophy, a disregard of finesse about deliveries forward.
"Dougal would be messing and the big gallery," Noel Hickey once said to me. "Then wed go into a team meeting, and start talking hurling, and he'd be the smartest of us all."
"My own form was never consistent enough to be complaining about anything," Hoyne says, not quite grinning this time. Although retired by the time Cha Fitzpatrick became a midfielder, he loved him: "Cha isn't just low ball in the ordinary way. He was able to lob it in, a low lob, if you like, into a space."
Hoyne rounds out matters: "Tommy Walsh crossing the ball to Henry Shefflin against Tipp last year probably wasn't a training ground drill. Can't say for certain, now I'm gone, but that's what I'd think.
"Cody might have picked Shefflin at 12 for a particular reason, that he might win more ball in one spot. But it wouldn't have been 'feed Henry, feed Henry, feed Henry'.
"Tommy comes and he's sweeping the ball that way, and Henry's winning it. So it's more a case: 'Give him another one, give him another one. You go with the flow on the day. Cody lets us at it. And the flow comes alive on the day."
Hoyne instances the Cork puck out in the first half of the 2004 All-Ireland final:
"Cody hardly spoke beforehand about Cusack's puck outs, did he?" Ryall nods. "But everyone knew," Hoyne continues. "We'd all watched the Munster championship, wing forwards coming out and all that.
"We knew what to do: block it out, stand up tall. Nothing went through in the first half. But the wides killed us . . ."
Ryall picks it up: "Beforehand, it's not a matter of Cody saying: 'This is how the game is going to go'. There's no big science behind it.
"Theres no massive science with Kilkenny. And maybe that was what was half lacking the last day against Galway . . ."
Hoyne cuts in: "It was the difference between the first half against Tipp last year and the draw. With Tipp, it was six positions and six positions: six pairs, like an Under 14 match, everyone in their exact position. Against Tipp, all the Kilkenny forwards were on the ball early, Eoin Larkin nearly in for a goal . . . So Anthony Cunningham did his homework.
"When Kilkenny play six-on-six, you'd say: 'Maybe hit the ball in this way or that way'. But, with Galway now, it's hard to have a method for the forwards."
They are alike firm on how use of possession must improve for the replay.
Hoyne notes: "There was a lot of silly stuff going on around the half-back line: on the swivel and boom, up in the air. Eoin Larkin was crippled. He had his own man and a man in front of him, waiting for the breaking ball.
"The same with Colin Fennelly, the one Johnny Coen caught behind him . . . walloped up in the air. Colin needs ball in front of him."
Ryall offers the yang of a defender's perspective:
"An awful lot of the Kilkenny clearances the last day came from around the 21-yard line. What was drilled into me was to try and clear from high up the field. Work it out to between half-back and midfield, if you can.
"Or make sure youre intercepting in the right place. Look at Tommy (Walsh) last September: he's nearly out in midfield when he's crossing those balls to Henry."
Hoyne adds: "I think the two managers' heads must be wrecked with tactics . . . Kilkenny probably have more to worry about, because Galway know the Kilkenny backs will mark, man on man."
Ryall spools back to sport's foundation: talents lunge into genius. "I wonder would Galway have the balls to go out and play a proper XV," he asks. "Play Joe Canning full forward and leave him there for the hour.
"Look at the football: Michael Murphy, like. Started full forward and won the game for Donegal. Say what you like but his goal was pure brilliance. Then (Jim) McGuinness took him out of it . . .
"The second goal was pure luck. Came off the upright and yer man missed the drop. If Donegal hadn't got that second goal, Mayo could have won that All-Ireland with Michael Murphy off out the field, after he did such damage in there off the first ball . . . It's hard to mark pure brilliance."
It is getting late and we have talked ourselves out. Sunday awaits, the skirl of tactics and talent.
John Hoyne offers one last grin:
"Make sure you say I was an awful loss when I retired, that we'd have won the five-in-a-row, not just the four-in-a-row, if I'd stayed on after '05 . . .!"
James Ryall looks over, smiles and sings dumb.

Brits out. Keep Kilburn Irish.

Fermanagh might be an outside bet for Ulster

If Fermanagh beat Antrim, they play Donegal and if they win that they play the winners of Tyrone/Derry.  That's just to get to the final.  A tall order to win it from that side of the draw.

Pete McGrath is cute. They will be coming in under the radar

Fermanagh might be an outside bet for Ulster

Ken Early: Guardiola failed in his main task at Bayern
Bayern's idea was to dominate the Champions League as Guardiola's Barcelona had
about 6 hours ago
Ken Early

0


Pep Guardiola: let's not pretend what happened at Bayern was anything other than a bitter disappointment for everyone involved. Photo: Alex Grimm/Bongarts/Getty Images
   
 

'I've done my best here," said Pep Guardiola after losing his third and last Champions League semi-final with FC Bayern. "But if you say that I had to win the Champions League, then I've failed. Go ahead and write that I have failed."
Actually, the verdicts have been rather restrained. Last week, when Atlético Madrid knocked Bayern out, the crowd in Munich didn't boo. They had too much respect for the effort they had seen from their team. But the fact that Guardiola and Bayern tried doesn't mean they haven't failed.
Guardiola's Bayern dominated the Bundesliga so thoroughly that the three leagues they won under him rank among the least exciting title races in German history. But Bayern did not hire him to win the Bundesliga. They have 80 per cent more money than their closest rivals, Borussia Dortmund, and keep buying their best players.
As Felix Magath pointed out: "In these circumstances it would have been more surprising if he had not won the league."
No, Bayern's idea was to dominate the Champions League as Guardiola's Barcelona had done. They wanted to stamp the name of Bayern indelibly on the era. Instead, 2013-16 will go down as an age of Spanish dominance unprecedented since the start of the 1960s.
Too perfect
Catalan writer Sònia Gelmà suggests that Guardiola's problem is that he is simply "too perfect". "Too educated, too elegant, too neat, too successful." She argues that Guardiola's extreme accomplishment aroused suspicion and resentment. She advises those who would judge Guardiola a failure: do so by all means, but at least be consistent. "Judge yourself by the same standards, and then try not to kill yourself."
Guardiola is certainly one of those guys who seems to have it all, and when such a figure suffers a setback there is often more schadenfreude than sympathy. And Guardiola has had an incredible career; the charge that he is "a failure" is absurd.
But the charge that he has failed at Bayern is not. And the notion that any criticism of the maestro must be rooted in envy of his perfection is laughable. Guardiola was good at Bayern, but he was far from perfect.
For a start, a perfect coach would not have been so quick to point the finger at others when things went wrong.
Marti Perarnau's book Pep Confidential records that Guardiola spent the night of Bayern's 4-0 defeat to Real Madrid in the 2014 semi-final cursing himself – not for having lost 4-0, but for having allowed his players to talk him into an excessively-attacking approach. This, he reckoned, had been the biggest mistake of his career. Ostensibly taking all the blame, he found a subtle way to share it with the players.
In 2015, it was the doctors' turn to let Guardiola down. There had been rumours of discord between Guardiola and Bayern's medical department for weeks by the time of the match at Bayer Leverkusen in April, when the coach reacted to Mehdi Benatia's injury by turning around to his bench and ostentatiously showering the medics with sarcastic applause. A few days later, the medical department quit en masse, saying they were no longer prepared to put up with Guardiola blaming them for bad results.
Their replacements have fared little better. Guardiola seems unwilling to accept that injuries are part of the game. Last week, Bild reported that he had again lost his temper with Bayern's doctors, demanding to know why they couldn't get Arjen Robben fit when Atletico Madrid's doctors had got Diego Godín back in action after barely a week out injured.
The coach reacted to that report by blaming a mole who, he claimed, had blabbed dressing room secrets "in order to hit me". Disagreements in football are normal, he said, but usually they stay in the dressing room. A pity that last year he couldn't remember his own rule about disagreements staying in-house, instead of publicly humiliating his medical team in a packed stadium.
These lapses could have been forgiven if Guardiola's football genius had made the difference in more of the key moments.
"They say you defend well if you have 11 men in the box, like Bayern had with Trapattoni and Hitzfeld," Guardiola said. "But my idea is completely different. I like to defend by playing the game 40 metres away from our goal."
Bayern would play this way against mediocre German sides, winning easily and barely conceding a shot. But the defining international image of Guardiola's Bayern will be of a superstar of world football – Ronaldo, or Bale, or Messi, or Neymar, or Suarez, or Griezmann – eluding through a high Bayern line and bearing down on Manuel Neuer. In the big matches, that 40 metres of space always seemed to work against Bayern.
There was one sure way for Guardiola to avoid the charge of failure. It was to stick around at Bayern until he had finished the job he had been hired to do. Instead, he joined Manchester City, who offered him more money and more control. At City he will face very different problems from the ones he faced at Bayern, and he can prove new dimensions of his greatness.
But let's not pretend what happened at Bayern was anything other than a bitter disappointment for everyone involved.

Gaelic football could do with a smaller ball and sticks to make it more watchable

In an interview after the 2009 All-Ireland triumph against Tipperary, which made Kilkenny the first county in 65 years to record a four-in-a-row, Cody was asked – entirely reasonably – by RTÉ's Marty Morrissey for his views on the controversial late penalty that had turned the match.

The Kilkenny manager replied that you'd be busy if you decided to readjudicate all of the frees in a match. There followed: "Did you think yourself it was a penalty, Marty?"
"I wasn't too sure but it did seem a little bit dodgy in the replay."
"I have no idea, Marty. Did you check all the other frees as well to see were they dodgy? [Uneasy laughter] Maybe you should. Maybe you should."

"What did you think of the referee overall; do you think he allowed a lot to go?
"Marty, please, give me a break. The referee – we're supposed to say nothing about referees and I make a habit of saying absolutely nothing about referees. Diarmuid Kirwan, I'm certain in my head was going out to be the very best he possibly could be. You seem to have had a problem with him. You tell me."
What we can deduce from this is some striking double standards. When a controversial decision has benefited Kilkenny, Cody rigorously opts to say "absolutely nothing" about the referee beyond that he went out "to be the very best he possibly could be".
When however the controversial call – and for the purposes of the argument I'm saying nothing about the merits of either refereeing decision – adversely affects Kilkenny, it's alright to launch a swingeing public attack on the match official.

an unsettled people by Susan McKay is a good read. The Unionist population is lost

http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/othelem/people/accounts/mckay00.htm