All Ireland senior football final 2012 Donegal v Mayo

[muppet]

I've no opinion on whether he's biased or not.

My contribution to the thread was the hypocricy of Horan.

"It was endemic throughout the field. It was seriously disruptive. It is a matter for them how they choose to play. It is, though cynical fouling. I'm talking about tactical fouls. That is supposed to be a yellow card offence.

I guess Horan took quotes like the above personally. I think I would too.

Not sure why he would. Most counties cynically foul and haul down players. Dublin included. Don't think anyone who engages or sends a team out to cynically foul would take criticism of it personally.

The crux of his point (and my response to it) was Horan complaining about referee's being influenced ahead of games by a section of the media.

If that is true, can you explain Brolly's outburst then?

I've no time or interest in doing so.

I made the point about the hypocricy and I believe have backed up and demonstrated that.

You can agree or disagree with that point.

You also have really helped point out the nub of Brolly's misbehaviour.

[Sam2011]

John Fogarty does a good analysis on the interview and sums up my opinion on the interview in this article here:

Mayo start 2013 on the attack

Having a blast at RTE's Gaelic games coverage seems to be a rite of passage for top GAA officials.


In 2011, Jim McGuinness took The Sunday Game to task for comments following their Ulster game against Antrim.


At the end of last year, Dublin chief executive John Costello criticised the national broadcasters for what he perceived as a lack of Gaelic games coverage.


That's not to mention the seven inter-county managers who in 2011 initially refused to speak to RTE after sending a letter highlighting their alarm at the apparent downgrading of commentator Brian Carthy.


Nor is it considering former Dublin boss Tommy Lyon's dig at RTE and analyst Martin McHugh last year.


The latest attack by James Horan is nothing out of the ordinary even if it is coming from the usually mild-mannered Mayo manager.


McGuinness' ire was directed at Pat Spillane but just who was James Horan talking about when he said: "In a two-horse race, if you have the national broadcaster proclaiming about one team and one team only, that's going to influence officials and various things around the game.


"There should be no place for that type of biased discussion. It was completely unwarranted and incorrect. We'll eventually be proven right. Did it impact the game? It's hard to say."


We'll take an educated stab at this one and say Joe Brolly is the prime subject of Horan's disgruntlement.

In the build-up to the All-Ireland final, the RTE pundit spoke and wrote about Mayo's tactical fouling. This, in spite of Donegal who earlier in the summer could have been accused of the same against Tyrone and Kerry.


Brolly's cut at Mayo was a deep one. He told RTE Radio One three days before the final: "I had not noticed it during the Dublin game. I was conscious that they were pulling down the Dublin players as they were trying to mount attacks, but when I watched the video again the statistics were, even by modern standards, shocking.


"There were 27 times where a Dublin player was trying to work his way forward and he was simply held or pulled down.


"Of those 27 times there were 22 frees given by referee Joe McQuillan; three times he waved advantage and on three occasions he missed it altogether.


"But there was not a single yellow card, and it was a massive feature of the game that Mayo were able to disrupt Dublin in that way.

"It was endemic throughout the field. It was seriously disruptive. It is a matter for them how they choose to play. It is, though cynical fouling. I'm talking about tactical fouls. That is supposed to be a yellow card offence. It was difficult to see it on the day because obviously everyone was supporting Mayo."


Brolly is one of the most insightful pundits in the game but he does so a lot of the time wearing his Ulster hat. Kerry supporters need no reminding of that in the lead-up to the 2005 and '08 All-Ireland finals.


His forensic analysis of Mayo's dark arts wasn't extended to Donegal who committed 25 of 43 fouls and earned five yellow cards in their quarter-final win over Kerry.


Against Tyrone, Donegal fouled almost twice as many times as their opponents yet each team were handed out four yellow cards.


Horan's comments are ironic considering the amount of former Mayo players and managers who work with RTE and the wider media.


Martin Carney, although born in Donegal but very much an assimilated Mayo man, and Kevin McStay are the national broadcasters' leading game summarisers.


John Maughan works extensively with RTE Radio during the summer while Liam McHale either has contributed plenty on radio. Only David Brady said anything.


Not that Horan would expect it but from the horde of former Mayo players working in the press, only one took exception to what Brolly said about Mayo.


The same can't be said of McHugh in regards to McGuinness who played a blinder for Donegal last year. Even if he was outnumbered, he certainly wasn't outgunned.


If Brolly was the bad cop, he was the good one. In the All-Ireland series up to the final, he couldn't see Donegal beating anyone. Cork were going to win, Kerry were going to win. But did he actually believe it?   McHugh's son Mark is, of course, a mainstay in the team and the 1992 All-Ireland winner has never made any secret of his friendship with McGuinness.


What Horan's comments have done is raise the temperature of their rivalry with Donegal. The embers of September had been well and truly stoked by Aidan O'Shea before Christmas when he accused the All-Ireland champions of cynical play in the final.


"I don't just think it, (I know it), It's obvious if you look back over the tape," he said. "You can see the referee brought the ball up on numerous occasions but it's only 15 yards. It made no difference to Donegal because they get players behind the ball."


McGuinness' response to O'Shea's claim was a mixture of bewilderment and indignation: "He felt we were cynical!"   At social occasions since September, aggrieved Donegal players haven't been afraid to confront those from other teams who have questioned their style in the press. This writer knows of one incident over the winter. Expect some sulphur, then, when the counties meet in Castlebar on March 24.

What can't be lost here either is Horan himself is no daw when it comes to working the media for his own benefit.


Before the All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin which was refereed by Joe McQuillan, he took full advantage of a question about the amount of Dublin's 2011 Championship games the Cavan man had officiated in (four of six games) and the rumours of him taking charging of in-house Dublin matches.


"I have a lot of Kerry friends from last year that weren't too happy with some of his decisions but sin scéal eile. The referee has been appointed. The review committee is there to judge referees and that's not for us to do. I'm sure refereeing A versus B games will have no bearing on his performance against us in Croker."


As well as being a sports psychologist with Mayo, Kieran Shannon of this parish is also an award-winning journalist. It would be remiss not to suggest some pearls of wisdom haven't been passed on.

It's becoming more obvious just how much the media mean to inter-county managements. Just look at how Donegal's has used it to rally against some of the Football Review Committee proposals.


What Horan has done is laid down a marker. Mayo, for so long people's second favourite team because of their style with a healthy dollop of their perennial bridesmaid tag, aren't going to tolerate pity or uber-criticism. It's a path McGuinness has already taken.
  Mayo are an upward curve, following up a semi-final appearance with a final one. They are entitled to the respect Horan feels they deserve.


Isn't that more refreshing than playing the poor mouth?



I think the reason why there is such a reaction to the article is because Horan is known as a nice timid man my who rarely makes comments the have the potiental to become explosive, like previous Mayo teams.
You really need to read the full article in the Western to get a proper grip on the interview. It is essentially an interview reviewing the 2012 season. Horan is asked a broad range of questions including, the FBD league, the national league, the progress of Barry Moran, the Conor Mortimer issue, the national media, the All-Ireland final, to name a few.
Don't under estimate the astuteness of Horan. There's more to this interview than people think like the one he done before the Dublin game. You need to read between the lines.
Personnally, I was glad Horan came out and gave his honest opinion of the media as we've put up with the same sh**e from them every year. He was given the opportunity before the final to blast the media but he merely said look at the stats and your opinion may be different of us. This is the right time of year to be lashing out as the players have not got into the serious stuff yet so it's not a big deal if they're distracted by this taboo. Again Horan's cute nature coming to the fore. As Fogarty says he's an awarding wining journalist in his back room team and he wouldn't shy away from a few tips from him I'm sure.
I'm a big fan of Horan and I believe he's the man to lead us to glory but I as suprised he laid the blame of the two goals on certain players. Although the play leading up to the goals were partly to blame for the goals, I was diappointed he didn't take some of the blame for the goals as the match-ups were clearly wrong as he changed them a few minutes after the goals. Maybe he said all of this to protect Keane as its only his first year playing for Mayo. As I've said already don't under estimate the shrewdness of James.

[heffo]

Damn Fogarty lifting my post to write his article

[seafoid]

I came across this again - Keith Duggan from 2005, Irish Times
It is a pity the Follower missed last September


Sideline Cut: It is a pity The Follower was not around to post his views on yesterday's farce in Australia.  "They shall be spoken of amongst their people."

- The Follower, March 1988, the Donegal Democrat.

The sudden death of the inimitable Donegal Democrat columnist draws a silence on a GAA voice that was, in its way, as remarkable and original as those of O'Hehir or Ó Muircheartaigh. He wrote from a perspective that was as impassioned and instantly recognisable as the vintage Paddy Downey or John D Hickey or Pádraig Puirséal. A Convoy native who lived in Dromod, Co Leitrim, he had a foot in both counties and kept a close eye on Longford for good measure. But Donegal football was his love. From 1987 until April of this year, his weekly dispatch read like an open letter to the various generations of Donegal footballers, addressing them by first name only. And he regularly implored the Greek gods and Brian McEniff - The Follower placed Virgil and the Bundoran man on the same pedestal and often in the same line - to give it one more year, always one more year. Latin, Irish and English were his languages of choice. Born in the early 1930s, Cormac McGill was a classic Irish romantic, steeped in the language and song and unwaveringly true to the strong, anti-British rhetoric that would have been the common currency of his youth. Time never diminished the flame of those feelings, and although he was much too clever not to know that Ireland had become much too soft and wealthy to be stirred by his indignation, he never contemplated altering his stance. The Longford Leader, for whom he penned Leitrim notes, recalled a visit to the newspaper by a British ambassador in the early 1990s, with the ceasefire imminent. The Follower registered his protest by sheltering in a darkened corner of the Harbour Bar until the invasion passed. One of his last columns in the Democrat lamented the fact that Donegal had, to his eternal dismay, been among the counties to opt in favour of ending Rule 42. Under the heading "West Brits Win Out", he wrote: "Within five minutes of the decision by Coisde Chonndae Dún na nGall to permit the foreign games into Croke Park, the news reached me here in Leitrim. I was shocked. Dún na nGall. My Dún na nGall, the last bastion of our native language."
The Follower came into being through a happy accident. Gerry McDermott, now the soccer correspondent for the Irish Independent, was covering the Under-21 All-Ireland final between Kerry and Donegal in Roscommon when he was introduced to a grey-haired, bespectacled man who spoke in the soothing tones of a practised schoolteacher about Donegal football through the decades. Out of the blue, a missive was sent to the Democrat offices with notes on the game "From One Who Was There". To McDermott and Michael Daly, now the editor of the Derry Journal group, the emergence of someone who had been attending Ulster championship games since 1939 was like a godsend. They hatched the title of The Follower in the office and the column took off, a frequently beseeching, often funny and sometimes tearful commentary on the highs and lows of Donegal football - and there are only ever extremes where that subject is concerned.  "No more will Paddy take the boat to England," he declared triumphantly after flying to watch Donegal play London in Ruislip, "to work on sites and eat Pedigree Chum," a sentiment that seems outrageous until you consider the subject of the novels of his namesake Patrick McGill.  "Sam, Tá Fáilte Romhat," he wrote after the 1992 All-Ireland final. "I told you last week this would be my headline. I believed all along it would be my year." He did. He believed that most years. He did not always get it right. Excited by Donegal's dramatic draw against Dublin in front of 70,000 people in 2002, he predicted that his heroes would destroy the city boys a week later: "As Marie Antoinette, Banríon na Fraince, said: Après Moi, Le Deluge."On other days, he hit more mellow notes. "I never was a showband aficionado, my terpsichorean energies being mostly céilí. If you 'squared' a wee lass, then it was a great céilí. If you got 'shot down' it was a useless céilí or dance. Maybe things are different nowadays."For years, the identity of The Follower remained a secret. On Saturday night in the 1980s, Michael Daly found himself taking heat in a Kerry bar from some Donegal supporters outraged by a recent column. As Daly stood his corner, he looked across the pub and saw The Follower himself happily banging away at a piano, a half-one standing on the lid of the instrument, oblivious to the commotion. "Nero plays while Rome burns" - a phrase The Follower often employed - came to Daly's mind.
Although he was loyal to Pearse's vision and a trenchant Gaeilgeoir, The Follower was never a bore or a crank. Rather, he took sustenance from the future and from youth, always dreamily optimistic about the year ahead. If he could envisage booking into "the Dergvale for the August bed agus bricfeasta", then fine things were in store for Donegal football. In humdrum times, he ruminated on the great days and on young prospects. The likes of Ovid were quite likely to crop up in a column about training in Castlefin. In fact, there was a period when Rambo Gavigan was injured that several of us hoped The Follower, with McEniff's blessing and a divine intercession, might succeed in having the poet Horace line out at centre-half for a relegation tussle against Offaly.Tied down by age in recent years, he roamed compulsively for most of his life and regularly ended his columns with a Focal Scor, praising the tea, apple tart and conversation he had been treated to in houses in the Border counties he loved.  This week, they came in droves to his house in Dromod. Generations of the footballers he had idolised down the years, friends, readers. In a strange week in Ireland, when bewildered priests poured their hearts out to Joe Duffy, one man of the cloth was able to stand up on the altar and celebrate Cormac McGill's wholehearted devotion to his faith, to his family and to Irish culture. The Follower column was just a small part of a rich life, but it is safe to say Donegal football will never be the same.

[RMDrive]

Reminded me of this ....

The day the dream came true

Published on Friday 21 September 2012 11:45

My father, Cormac, attended his first Donegal football match in 1937 at the tender age of 5. His uncle George, a footballer of some note, made his bow for Donegal in the first round of the championship against Antrim that year and brought my father with him to carry his boots.

In such a simple manner was a lifelong love affair with Donegal football born; it was an affair that would frustrate, enrage, surprise, disappoint, amuse and delight in approximately equal measure throughout his 68 years following his beloved green and gold. But it was a love to which he was eternally faithful even in its darkest days.

Exiled in Leitrim from the early 70s, the fortunes of Donegal football and the county team became (to my innocent eyes at least) a crazy obsession for my father; normally an intelligent, calm and prescient observer of life, he was apt to lose all sense of reason and reasonableness at the thought, sight or subject of Donegal football. In the pages of the Democrat, from 1987 to his death in 2005, he chronicled the journey of successive Donegal teams in their quest for glory under the pseudonym of The Follower.

It is hard to describe just how consumed by Donegal football my father was. He literally ate, drank and slept it. It dictated his moods and dominated his view of the world.

Now I know my father loved me dearly, as any father loves a son. But there were genuinely times that all in our family wondered where we stood in relation to Donegal football! For instance, growing up in Leitrim, it was always my dream to some day play for the county; in 1990, that chance finally arrived when I was picked to play on the Leitrim team that would face (wait for it) Donegal in the U-16 Ted Webb Cup. Just before I got out of the car to go into the dressing rooms, the Follower asked for a quick word. He was proud of me he said, his only son going out to play his first intercounty game. He wished me luck, said he hoped I'd play well but that despite all of this he wanted me to know he'd be cheering for Donegal and he hoped I understood!!

On another occasion, when a Donegal championship meeting with Down in the late 80s clashed with my sister's confirmation, The Follower was entirely indignant at my mother's insistence that he attend the confirmation and not the match! In the end it was only the intervention of the Parish Priest that swung the debate – the Padre felt (most reasonably in fairness) that while missing his daughter's confirmation to attend a Donegal game was pretty much his own business, abandoning the rest of the children he had prepared for the Sacrament as Master of the local school was a rather more serious matter entirely!

Thus you will appreciate there is no hint of exaggeration when I say that he considered 1992 to be the pinnacle of his entire life! He told us with a tear in his eye after Mayo were beaten in the semi-final that he could die happy knowing he had lived to see Donegal qualify for an All Ireland final. He had no intention of dying of course (at least not until he knew whether it was Manus or Tommy Ryan that was getting the nod for the final!!) but there was no doubting he meant every word of it.

That glorious September game will doubtless be recalled elsewhere in these pages. Suffice to say, it was the magnum opus of a generation of sublimely talented Donegal footballers. I will never forget the emotional post match reunion with my Dad at the back of the Hogan Stand perhaps an hour after the final whistle. Despite being a man who thoroughly enjoyed a drink throughout his life, he had his mind made up that there would be no drinking in the days that followed - he wanted to remember every wonderful moment of the day and the celebrations unaffected by any illusionary effects the alcohol might generate!!

In the weeks after the final, the Follower did as his alias suggested he should – he followed! As Sam made his way through the towns and villages of Donegal, my dad disappeared for sometimes days on end as he kept on the trail of Donegal's newest citizen. Nobody minded that he was missing – it was his time, his moment and we understood that instinctively.

And a few weeks later he was enormously proud to greet his good friend and then Donegal goalkeeper Gary Walsh at the door of our house in Leitrim, Sam Maguire in tow. As my mother and sisters lined up to get the pictures taken with the affable Ballyshannon man, The Follower, in his own inimitable style said simply "Nunc Dimittis". It was a biblical reference to the Song of Simeon - "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word; For mine eyes have seen thy salvation"

Mind you, the Follower continued to ruminate on the fortunes of Donegal football in these pages right up until his death in 2005. He gloried in Donegal's successes; he despaired in their defeats. He watched the video of 1992 once a week for 13 years. He must have known the commentary off by heart!! And I swear he visibly tensed in his seat every time Charlie Redmond stood over that penalty at the Canal End. He was never fully sure it had all really happened you see and he dreaded that on one of those showings, Charlie just might find the back of the net!! Years and years of disappointment and hurt will do that to you I suppose.

Unfortunately, The Follower didn't live to see the current crop in action, but he would have approved enormously of what they have achieved in the last two years, and especially in the face of what has often felt like begrudgery from the broader GAA and media world. He would have approved heartily too of Jim McGuinness being at the helm. He always had a soft spot for big Jim.

But it is the character of this Donegal team, their willingness to work until the last drop of sweat has fallen from their brows, their togetherness on the field, their desire to triumph against the odds and against the perceived wisdom of how football has always been played, that would have resonated most with the Follower. For these are the very characteristics – of hard work, unity and innovation - that for generations have sustained and distinguished Donegal men and women, and made successes of those who have had to leave the rocky soil of the North West to seek a better life in Glasgow, Birmingham, Boston or Brisbane.

Another favourite Latin refrain of the Follower was that of "Per ardua ad astra"; in simple language it means "by hard ways to the stars". This Donegal side have chosen and bought into hard ways of a type endured by no other Gaelic Football team in the history of the sport.

I trust on Sunday they will finally reach their stars.

http://www.donegaldemocrat.ie/sport/local-sport/the-day-the-dream-came-true-1-4268911