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Ireland odds-on not to qualify - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCXueTvhjNo
Russia hot favs to win - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHgxi57Um0w&list=RDgHgxi57Um0w

But this interests me: Bulgaria are 12/1 to win the semi final and Ukraine are odds on. Am I missing something?

Bulgaria - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKsNfccUTuk
Ukraine -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxS6eKEOdLQ

Think Bulgaria a good bet for top 3 overall (around 10/1)

Borrowing Gay's Meaning of Life phrase - what do you think happens after we die?

Holy God. Serious. Campbell v everyone.

[The footballer who came back from the dead]

The footballer who came back from the dead

It has taken the Derry man a long time to get used to the end of his playing career - but working with The Cormac Trust which helped save his life is now making a difference to others

Declan Bogue

When you ask Kevin McCloy about his built-in defibrillator, he tells you to touch it.

No time to be squeamish. You reach out and touch him on the breastplate and there it is. A protrusion the size of a matchbox. There to keep him alive after the events of a sunny August Wednesday in Owenbeg, 2014 when he was temporarily lost to the world, before being revived.

A defibrillator that was at the ground got his heart going again, and now another one resides within him, where the surgeons scraped out a packet of muscle to house it.

Two leads emerge from it, travel down through a vein into two different chambers of the heart. Should his heart stop, a power surge is poised to give it a shock. In 12 years time, he will get the battery changed.

Sometimes, he catches people stealing looks at it in the changing rooms of the local leisure centre. That's his reality.

At night when he sleeps, a modem beside his bed downloads his heart readings, sending them to the City Hospital. Should they note any abnormalities, they would act instantly.

"If I go anywhere to train, say the Leisure Centre in Magherafelt, I have to tell them first and foremost that I have it fitted," he explains.

"If anything happens and I am on the running machine say, then it's a priority one ambulance you want. It leaves life a bit difficult at times, maybe explaining this to somebody who knows nothing about it!"

Back to that night in Owenbeg. He had never felt fitter when his Lavey side met Magherafelt in the Derry Championship. His manager John Brennan understood how to get him right, avoiding the "Heavy plundering" of years past, allowing him to train more often in the pool to protect his knees and back.

Lifted

"After ten minutes I tackled Emmet McGuckin and knocked the ball. He lifted the ball off the ground and the free went against him. I went to throw the ball onto my foot to take the free and I was gone."

He dropped on the spot. Utter panic spread through the ground until three doctors revived him with an external defibrillator, there because of The Cormac Trust.

The words that came back to his wife Cathy, sitting at home, went through the mangle of Chinese Whispers. She heard he had taken an asthma attack.

She learned more when she passed Owenbeg on her way to Altnagelvin, knowing that matches are never abandoned for asthma attacks.

"Mine was more of, let's say a mechanical or electrical failure, from your head to your heart," explains McCloy.

"That night, your heart would be up to 130, 140 beats per minute (playing a match). Mine started racing up to 200 bpm and it caused the heart to shake, rather than pump. The blood stopped going to your brain and you go unconscious, and then you go down."

It was touch and go for a couple of days. His mother Marie had been through enough tragedy in her life when Kevin's father - Michael - died at only 28 through cancer. Kevin, the youngest of four, was only three months old.

When he did come round, naturally he asked after his wife and children. But before long, he asked how the game went. By the time Lavey were to meet Ballinderry at a later stage, he wanted to put on the jersey again. He had already shipped a scolding or two from the nurses for his constant lapping of the ward.

"The first four weeks was a bit of a whirlwind," he begins.

"Tiredness... I just spent a lot of time sleeping for the first three or four days. I was put into an induced coma and went in and out of consciousness.

"Then they explained to me what had happened and I wasn't accepting it, to be quite honest with you. If I wasn't being truthful, it wasn't until five or six months down the line that I truly accepted what had happened."

He explains, "There was the... madness... of 'why me?' Why has this happened to me. Any person that I seen walking around the hospital, overweight or anything like that, I thought, 'why not him? Why me?' You are nearly grieving a death.

"I know my playing days were nearly at an end, but somebody had still taken that away from me. That might have come at a different stage anyway, six or seven months down the line.

"I didn't know where I was at. It wasn't until I had a realisation of coming back to work in January, everything starts to fall back into place a bit. You are back to work, you do a bit of training again. And you make the realisation here that, 'this is life.'"

His county days began with hurling for Derry. He was lucky to play in a Golden Age of Derry hurling as they ended 92 years without an Ulster title, beating Antrim in the 2000 final, McCloy at wing-forward.

Before long, Eamonn Coleman came calling for the footballers. A different age.

He recalls a pre-Christmas league game against Clare and an overnight stay in Ennis. Coleman let them off the leash. They acted like a stag-do for the night.

"And the day after?", McCloy laughs.

"Ah, schoolboy errors! The goalkeeper dropped one between his legs, I dropped one through my hands into the net."

Coleman said he was that embarrassed he wanted to walk back up the road to Derry, and left them with this ringing in their ears; "If you want to play club football, go and play club football, but ould weemen with straw arses could play club football."

His most recognizable moment as a player came in the 2007 All-Ireland quarter-final defeat to Dublin, when he rattled Croke Park with a thundering shoulder on Mark Vaughan.

"I couldn't have caught him any better, but it cost me a year and a half of my football career," he explains.

"All the muscles from my shoulder, right into my groin, diagonally across, the way we hit each other coming from two different directions at top speed tore all the muscles across my chest.

"I had to lie on the flat of my back all the way home on the bus because of the pain of it."

Physical pain is one thing. Emotional pain like in the hospital is another.

Little moments helped him get through it. A local girl Edel Henry compiled all the nice things people wrote about him on social media and presented him with them in a book.

Tentative

Getting back to work in January 2015, at first a tentative three-day week brought normality. But as he says himself three days a week doesn't work well on building sites. His employers, T Valley, were exceptionally kind to him.

Last summer, he felt the chord being cut with football.

"The lads and the management of Lavey asked me would I like to come back on board, even just to be along the line or in the dressing room for the presence," he recalls.

"Let's say last year I found it very hard to be there. The first time they walked out past me to play Slaughtneil... It nearly took the feet from me to pat every man going out that door on the back.

"It reminded me of when the Chairman used to stand at the door and patted the lads as they headed out. That was a realisation that did really strike. I mean anyone can play a league match. But the first Championship match? It was a killer."

His favourite memory of all was a knife-edge Championship match in Ballinascreen against Glenullin, and his direct opponent a young and hungry Eoin Bradley out to devour reputations.

"You knew that when he got turned he was going to go at you. Not left or right, but through you. I was in my prime and it was the best game of football I ever had." He glows with the memory of it, the concentration needed. Mind, body and reflexes all in harmony.

Life is about other things now. Work. His own family. Cathy understood what football mean because she is from a football household in Dromore, Co Tyrone herself. A year younger than Kevin, they met in Jordanstown when they were both doing their Engineering Degree. He jokes that she was only into him in the first place to get a look at his coursework.

His children are Michael (4), Cassie (3) and Cillian, who arrived just four months ago.

There is the Cormac Trust work. Something wonderful that came out of something tragic with the death of Cormac McAnallen, his family continue to spread awareness of defibrillators.

Next month, he will be appointed as a Trustee. Earlier this month he was in Stormont with the Trust lobbying Education Minister John O'Dowd to put more defibrillators into schools and introduce widespread training.

He says with conviction: "There wouldn't have been many defibrillators around Gaelic pitches only for the work that the Cormac Trust has done. Nearly all the pitches have it now because of the awareness they have brought about.

"If any club hasn't one, they are only kidding themselves. Imagine for all the price of it, and what it takes to run a club in a year, for £1,000 to buy one? If one of the youngsters dropped, I wouldn't like that on my shoulders."

And as he points out: "I would maintain that without the three trained doctors there on the night, I would have been a statistic. I would definitely be gone."

It's not just about defibrillators either.

"The Cormac Trust is a hell of a lot more than that. There is a project with the Mater Hospital in Dublin about Genetics research.

"Half the stuff that they are involved in, people would not know."

He is sustained by hope and faith.

"I would have my own religious beliefs, I wouldn't think I have a really strong faith, but I have a faith.

"Prayers do help. I don't think I would be here without them, to be honest."

He adds, "I came to the realisation is that the three kids are more important than getting out and playing a bit of football. It was only this year that I have begun to realise how much time I spent at the football field. It was my life.

"I played 17 years in a Lavey jersey, 11 years for Derry and how much time did I not spend away from my wife and family, but that comes with a certain love for the game."

And was it worth it?

"Oh aye. I think the camaraderie, the friends that you have met, it's worth it."

No regrets.

http://www.independent.ie/sport/gaelic-games/gaelic-football/the-footballer-who-came-back-from-the-dead-34389479.html

Your favourite?

For me Life on Mars: www.youtube.com/watch?v=v--IqqusnNQ

?

Are there any players in world football who'd keep you looking over your shoulder if you were good enough to play at that level?

Remember Julian Dicks, Vinnie Jones, Souness, Steve McMahon, Keane. Hard to think of any now.

What do yiz think?

We're off to Rio, lads.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/hockey/34627325

Good pic of Justy McMahon.

Who would you pay money to see? In any sport. Even natural phenomenons like Lomu seem scarce now - or are they still out there?

COLOURLESS COHESION

Is football losing its artists? If we look just at the 'last generation' of players, we see the 90s/00s were full of individualists: Baggio, Bergkamp, Zidane, Romario, Laudrup, Stoichkov, Weah, Gascoigne, Edmundo, Zola, Savicevic, Totti, Del Piero, Rivaldo, Denilson, Rui Costa, Le Tissier, Batistuta, Okocha, Cantona, Valeron, Romario, Salas, Figo, Hagi, Djorkaeff, Giggs, Kluivert, Ronaldo, Recoba..

What happened to the self taught individualists like these? They're not extinct but endangered, especially at the top clubs. We're not flooded any more with players we'd jump to call 'artists'. I think there's been a rapid decline in such players, the question is why.

The players above had each honed their own idiosyncratic technique. They each looked at the game in their own way, and they all played it differently. They hadn't taken much notice of advice on how to play, non of them off any type of factory line. Players that made you want to play. Not players whose athleticism you were in awe of. Players whose tricks, feints, and flicks you wanted to go out and copy. You likely didn't grow up admiring systems, but players. It was a player's magic that sparked your interest in the sport.

Coaching and artistic preferences

The coaches didn't always like it, but they didn't have much choice than to accommodate them. Sometimes they tried hard not to. Some examples from the last gen:

Roberto Baggio is to me one of the most gifted and certainly most productive of  number 10s in the history of the game, but couldn't get in Arrigo Sacchi's teams.

Rivaldo didn't fit kindly into Louis Van Gaal's and his systems, where Rivaldo wanted to play as a creative 10, LVG wanted him on the left wing (we're seeing LVG clash today with another individualist,Angel Di Maria)

Alvaro Recoba was allowed to drift, loaned out after two seasons to relegation threatened Venezia, came back but struggled for playing time.

Capello didn't seem to fancy Savicevic much despite being one of the most exciting 10s of the decade,

Dennis Bergkamp was shipped out of Italy with nothing but bad memories,

Eric Cantona was tossed around before finally being rescued by Ferguson.

Michael Laudrup's time at Juventus was mostly a failure. Coaches didn't favour them but they were still abundant because the game wasn't as it is right now, athletes hadn't completely taken over the game.

We can see that players who go against convention don't always curry the favour of coaches, unable to bend to their whims, on and off the pitch.

But when we talk about artists, in any field, we call them that because they are liberated from convention and eccentric. They take us for a while out of conventionality into a place we (and coaches) couldn't perceive ourselves. We see the world from their point of view for a spell, like when Dennis Bergkamp took the ball and himself on a parabolic arc around Nikos Dabizas, he took everyone watching with him too.

The process to reach the stage of an artist requires a suspension of our usual perception with how something should be or is usually perceived as being. If a football player is brought up from a young age in a rigid system of group think precepts, not being allowed to stray into his own whims for risk of not playing at all, there is the problem of the ability to think outside of convention. This is not a problem players of the past, playing and learning in dust fields, parks, streets with friends probably encountered much.

We hear a lot less of the stories today of the player who learnt to play in the street, with a ball of rolled up socks or something, that were still pretty common tropes even up to the 00s. They're far more likely now to have been brought up playing exclusively in club's academies from an early age.

What space is left for the eccentric in these systems, of improvisation and beautiful absurdity? The focus is on fitting in, and above all else, the team. In a coaches eyes this is rightly progression.

The transition

The progression in football has come in terms of professionalism, driven by economic imperatives and contingencies. This in turn has increased the culture of competition and performance. No player on the field is any longer allowed to saunter through a game without the ultra self-responsibility required to be a competent contributor to the team ethic. The team ethic is now predominately focused upon physical athletic performance of a type you wouldn't have stumbled upon had you not been honing your body for this moment for considerable time before.

Therefore, if you're not an athletic high performer, it's unlikely you will find yourself at this level of the game with the privilege of such a decision not to saunter in the first place. You've already been weeded out. The modern footballer now can be seen as less of something that has arrived at his destination through idle experimentation and early imaginative foolery and more as a thing of obligation. The lack of freedom of the modern player is something inherent in the obligations of the high-performance ultra-responsibility systems of professional clubs. It's also precisely in such highly competitive systems (not only sport, also in higher education) we see the rise of performance enhancing drugs.

No doubt coaches have been waiting for this era of academies, athletic domination, systems over individuals for a long time. But it has come to them by chance and irony thanks to the improvised, individual skills of the above players from carving a path to the attentions and imaginations of people around the world, big business quickly followed the phenomenon.  The business has quickly and eventually demanded new guarantees.

Two of my favourite players arrived soon after this generation, Juan Riquelme and Ronaldinho, where between 2000-2010 the true individualists were already starting to fade from the top of the game. But we really didn't know that at the time.  It wasn't easy for either of them though, most were saying Ronaldinho wouldn't make it at Barcelona, not reliable or serious enough, they said. Alex Ferguson, a man defined by obsession with the collective but a coach with lots of time and space for an individual, saw it another way, as he often did, but his coach at PSG, Luis Fernandez, didn't fancy him much (where have we heard that before?). Riquelme incredibly had to make do with Villareal after impatience and intolerance to deal with his whims at Barcelona. Thankfully Ronaldinho began life at Barca a bit better. Riquelme's failure at a top club was perhaps the biggest warning sign.

2015, and football has already largely moved on from the likes of Riquelme and Ronaldinho, two players considered at the top of the sport in 2005/6. In such a short space of time these types of strangely unique almost artisan players are almost completely absent (relative to the past) from the top level of football.

Cristiano Ronaldo began as a flair player but that's long lost history, he's now not much more than a stat production machine, rarely even going past players. The stats back this up.   Messi took over from Ronaldinho the ultimate expressionist but the two couldn't be much further apart in many ways. Messi's a realist. Messi plays like an engineer would design as the perfect, effective, efficient attacker. One of the greatest dribblers of all time but unmistakeably an academy product. It's mixed into his no-nonsense personality though.  Nothing needless usually happens, as mesmerising as he can be. Messi, unlike Maradona, won't knowingly play to the crowd, like Maradona would. Ronaldinho played like no one could've thought it up. He played like a million people were watching and he knew it.  Messi leaves you in awe of his inhuman proficiency, acceleration, quickness and focus. He takes the ball, and he puts it in your net. But there's something almost too perfect about him. Doesn't have the abundance of flair of Ronaldinho, doesn't have the unpredictable unorthodox trickery of a Zidane, doesn't have the unusual touch of a Baggio or Bergkamp.  He's not unpredictable, he's unstoppable.

Back to Cristiano Ronaldo. The most interesting example ever of a footballer metamorphosis since Ryan Giggs. 2003, he began full of flair, impish, an individualist, a trickster, street player, the new George Best. His life seemed to revolve around the desire to not only beat a player, but to humiliate them. In 2015 he's a industrial machine, a bulldozer, single tracked to goals. The dribbling has long gone, the power has taken over. The ultimate modern player. Hasn't lost all of the flair though, just a lot of it.

His colleague Gareth Bale, a great player, but a long way from the memory of Luis Figo in the white shirt, who'd shuffle, feint and nutmeg you to oblivion. Real Madrid fans seem to be torn and adjusting on their opinion of him, clearly an effective, exciting player at his best, but not exactly with the magic touch of players of past they're used to.

Athletic domination

Obviously football has objectively changed from what it was in the 20th Century. A big bang of athletes. In 1970 the average player ran 4km a game. Today it's 10km. The pace and athleticism of the game has totally ballooned. There's little time now to accommodate any player who isn't an athlete, regardless of how well he can open up a defence. The speed of the game also limits creative players in ways that it didn't so much previously.

This has been driven by the professionalism that big business demands. Between 1952 and 1992 15 of the 17 transfer fee records were paid by Italian clubs (the other 2 by Spanish).



Italy was far ahead of other nations in terms of money, and in turn, levels of professionalism expected.

In his autobiography, Gianluca Vialli said when he came to play in England in the 90s, he was shocked by how Premier League players still seemed view the game through amateur eyes. Like it was "just a game". He thought players didn't think football was all that serious, it wasn't to be taken too seriously.  He couldn't believe professionals could view the game this way, and not care about their diet, on the booze after each game. This was the mid 90s. This is the game Arsene Wenger arrived into, and single-handedly revolutionized.

Academies

Looking at the modern ascent of the academy, Barca's La Masia being the benchmark of all. Factory line of players all designed to play more or less the same way. It's not a bad way, either. It directly produced one of the best club teams of all time, and it's desperately being copied all around Europe.  But contrast Fergie's fledglings. His 'Class of '92': Giggs, Scholes, Beckham, Butt, Neville. They couldn't be 4 more different midfielders. One a dribbler, one a crosser, one a goalscorer and passer, one a tough tackling defensive midfielder. Bound more by a psychology than a skill set.

The current belief is that young players need advice on how to play. They need coaching. Pep Guardiola is the uber-coach, Alex Ferguson rarely got too involved in that.  But in reality at Barca they're just being industrialised to fit into a certain and demanding system that requires a certain kind of player.

Today's game is increasingly based upon pressing, speed, fitness and organisation. Pioneered by Van Gaal, the grind is no longer limited to the central midfielders, the strikers are equally expected to put in as much of the hard running. In contrast, the previous famous revolutionary system from Holland, Total Football, featured a chain-smoking individualist, Johann Cruyff, controlling it all. Not based on athletic prowess, but rounded ability and positional fluidity.

Some players born on the cusp are getting trapped in the current. Mesut Ozil, and Shinji Kagawa often look at a loss. Big teams are struggling to fit them in more than ever. Someone like Ozil is so good is production and chance creation is still high, yet he's operating on the very limit, at extreme pressure. Kagawa is an example of a player with a speed of thought and turn on the ball almost unmatched, but his lack of physical presence ultimately ended his chance at a top club. Zlatan is another individual pushed around clubs, never settled, widely debated and mistrusted. Most notably, by Mr Masia, Guardiola, the system obsessive.

Is there hope?

Will the artists ever return? The risk is that the individualist free thinker has been forever humbled in the face of overwhelming corporate fiscal and professional pressures on the game. Even the most gifted of players (see Ozil) are now aware of himself/herself merely a fractional part of a greater force, no longer is the brave risk taking individual desired to win the game. And who could argue this is not the optimum state for a team sport obsessed with the returns of winning?

https://thegiggsboson.wordpress.com/2015/06/02/colourless-cohesion/

Kevin McManamon seems to promise a score or two when he's brought on.

Any others out there who regularly hit the onion bag but rarely start?

 Of the 4 semi finalists who are the certs.

Not sure if any Tyrone player has nailed one yet.

Big Quigley a chance?

Last year nearly everyone called it moreorless correctly (apart from the Delusional Brendans) - http://gaaboard.com/board/index.php?topic=24764.0

Any changes this year? I think Utd will be challenging this year. Any from Chelsea, Arsenal or Utd to win it. City might fall away. A sneaky 4th - Southampton?

It's a bit like Maradona managing Argentina.

Not sure about the Mexican syllabus but up in Alaska here it's compulsory.

What do yiz make of him? A must-read or a bollocks we're force-fed?

Honest opinions

Do the rules need to be changed?

Or should we just ride out this period of ultra defensive tactics by mediocre sides (bar Kerry)?

Do forwards need to improve their shooting with men hanging off them?

Or do these tactics make sense if you have players capable of breaking at speed?

I was doing a bit of number stuff and it turns out Mayo have never lost an All-Ireland Final on September 20th. This year's final is on..........September 20th.

For the record, Mayo have been pipped on:

December 17th
June 17th
September 17th, 17th, 22nd, 23rd, 25th, 26th, 26th, 28th, 29th.

 

And not how many fingers am I holding up.

From BBC:

Which pop song is summarised thus: "A man stands in a severely dilapidated dwelling and realises he won't have the chance to do the necessary DIY before he dies"?

And: "In an area of low pressure and high humidity, a series of bodies falls from the sky at approximately 22:30"?

What connects... a single by the Pogues, an Italian island resort and a unit of electrical current?

Which film features dialogue which has been mistranslated as follows: "No Christ - this is an imp"?

And: "Thoroughfares? Where we shall be, we are not wanting thoroughfares"?

Which TV show begins as follows: "A man peruses a selection of leather-bound books, rejecting a couple, finally choosing one with a cheaper book hidden inside"?

And: "A bus causes an ironic wardrobe malfunction"?

Right. Someone isn't owning up. Who's watching it?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-30637200