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Michael Walsh, John Clarke, James Colgan, Mark Poland, James McGovern, Conor Laverty and Sean Parr

They're all very useful players, but at the same time there aren't too many people who would would have the latter five anywhere near the Championship XV. Walsh has generally been disappointing for Down, while Clarke was disappointing in last year's Championship after an excellent league campaign.

Bringing those 7 in wouldn't turn this Down team around.

why pick tubes to play for county when there is far better players within the clubs.

I can't wait to see the list of players you would bring in. Mickey Walsh is the obvious one, but let's not pretend that Walsh didn't regularly have games as bad as anyone had yesterday when he was a Down regular. Ross and DJ's squad isn't far off the mark at all.

Downs style off play this year is not pretty to watch.

If the last 15 years have taught us anything, it's that Down's free-flowing style of football is never going to win anything - and just as importantly leaves us wide open for a hiding from a well-organised, tactically aware team. Whether Ross and DJ are the right men to implement a more disciplined system is questionable, but i for one am delighted that they at least have recognised the need for change - something their predecessors shunned away from.



To be honest though, there is some amount of shte being talked all the way above. Please put the match in its proper context:

1. The outcome of the game didn't matter, not not bit. Winning a division 3 title or getting promoted from division 3 - it's the same thing. Nobody cares.
2. The under-21s plus a number of key senior players were missing.
3. A number of players picked up knocks and/or were removed from action with the now defunct yellow card ruling.
4. What a tactically inept Tipperary team throw against us is no preparation for what is coming against Fermanagh. The standard in terms of talent isn't going to be much different, but O'Rourke's men will be thinking a whole different ball game.
5. It was a crap Saturday evening in front of a crowd of maybe 300 people.
6. If Down are going experiment with players and tactics, better now than in May and June.

Orior, 3 things really - storage, RAM and keyboard size.

It apparently is kinda tough to get used to the keyboard size on a netbook - but those clever buckos at Samsung have made the difference negligible.

As for RAM and memory, well we're back about 4 years in comparison to heavy duty laptops. But as I've been cracking away on the same laptop for 5 years now, I'll notice the difference!

Yep Down Fanatic, I know all about it. But sending a rubbish group of players on an 80 mile round trip just so as they don't get tanked is not the answer.

And no matter what you do, some mentors will be blinded to how bad their teams really are, and other mentors will be sneakily doing what they can to lift a cup even if it means playing rubbish teams every week. So the leagues will always have anomalies.

I have to disagree with you entirely DownFanatic.

The one thing that will guarantee you juvenile footballers and mentors walking away from the game is a series of excessive away trips, especially for 7pm throw-ins on week nights. It takes the likes of our club the best part of a hour to hit half the clubs in East Down.

Why would a 14 or 16 year old from Newry, half-committed to anything and everything, go the whole way to Belfast to play GAA when all the soccer matches he wants is on his doorstep in Newry? What about when's 17 and working for a living? How many clubs really have a healthy selection at all grades to risk losing their half-committed players.

But there's worse. There's travelling for an hour to find out the ref hasn't turned up and you opponents won't play a friendly. Worse again, there's travelling an hour and finding out that your opponents have decided not to field because of a game the next night involving some of their players (this happened to our u16s last year). Did they phone ahead and let us know? Did they hell. That's when even your committed players and managers start walking away.

Let juveniles enjoy football, don't make them sick of it in an ill-advised attempt to make things more competitive for a team here or there.

My Samsung NC10 should arrive in the post today.

I did a fair bit of research Aidan and its seems to be the closest thing you can get to a normal laptop. Can tell you more next week though.

Clarke played well, and was involved in most of Kingdom's scores, taking about 5 or 6 for himself. He missed a couple of frees, whcih was surprising, but he looked sharp.

Harps were played off the field by An Riocht tonight. Ballyholland were very disappointing - nobody put their stamp on the game at all. But I was well impressed with the Kingdom - they looked a bit more physical and determined than in recent years.

The ref (I can't recall his name) was a disgrace. We had the same man in the reserves a few weeks and he obviously doesn't like yellow shirts.

It's a tad unfair to suggest that McCarthy isn't a good enough manager for a premier league team. Being an unfashionable Yorkshire man he has never been offered a job on the next pedestal - a settled Premiership side like Villa, Everton, Blackburn,West Ham or Man City. Until he gets a job like that - where his season isn't just about avoiding relegation - I don't think you can really judge his Premier League credentials.

I'm delighted for him anyway. His sides play decent football to watch, and he calls a spade a spade, which is unusual for a manager.

Pete's record for lifting trophies is amazing, but he completely lost the team in his last few years as senior manager. And at least half a dozen of those players (Coulter, Hughes, Sexton, Murtagh, Walsh, Doyle, Clarke, Gordon) would still be in contention for starting places for the next few years. So I don't think he is the answer.

Besides, the way Pete sets his teams up and the way Ross sets his team up isn't that dissimilar, and both are plugging in the gaps in defence rather than working a defensive strategy. The emphasis from both is "we're Down, and we'll outscore you". It would appear to be an easier ideal to achieve in under-21 football, but let's not forget how badly Kildare exposed this strategy in the under-21 semi-final last year. Sometimes you just have to throw as many men behind the ball as you can.

If you build your site using logical structures, i.e. placing headers and content in the correct order, together with good, relevant META information, then before long Google will place you correctly in the natural order of things. You can spend a lot of time and money tweaking and twisting the Google algorithm, but it's almost like Catch 22 once you go up that road; to maintain your artifically high position, you have to keep retracing your steps. Get the nuts and bolts right at the start and it's the best medicine of all.


In terms of HTML, use logically ordered mark-up. The order you read content should be the order it is placed. There should only be one H1 tag on a page. H2s, H3s etc should be nested appropriately. Use UL/LI and DD/DT tags for lists and for navigation, not images, and not tables. Don't use images for headers without an image replacement technique. Have a sitemap, and preferably an XML sitemap in the background.

In terms of META information, use targetted descriptions and keywords for your company name, products, services, expertise and crucially, location - but don't overdo them. Short, relevant descriptions serve a better purpose than long-winded, catch-all descriptions on every page.


Do submit your site to as many search engines as possible, and if time allows, set up reciprocal accounts on the likes of Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Youtube, Flickr and LinkdIn. These shouldn't require a lot of maintenance once you've them up and running - their purpose is to direct people to your site.



Regarding hosting, traditional ASP is a dying language, and .NET can be a bit of a f*cker to get started in - so I'd recommend avoiding Windows Servers. LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) is normally a cheaper, easier to upgrade, easier to get help with solution - and the fact that Wordpress, Joomla etc. are more easily customisable with Linux is a big plus for beginners.

I've used hosting-unlimited.net a few times and have found them to be excellent. If you exceed the limits of their £20 p/a account then you must be doing sometihing very right (or very, very wrong!) with your site.

123-reg are cheap but they'e one nasty shower of b*st*rds to deal with and I'd avoid them if possible.   

The Down leagues start this Friday and my opinion would be to  get these under-21 fixtures wrapped up as soon as possible, and not prolong it any longer than it has to be.

I'm genuinely delighted for Down, and especially the Ballyholland men involved, but it's time for the club season to take precedence.


I'm sure some of you bright sparks who are doing all the whinging about fixture pile-ups have a solution? Funny enough, I haven't actually read a solution yet from the complainers. Make sure you consult the fixture calendar before stating nonsense like "there has to be a better way".

Besides, considering that Sigerson players can play 2-3 games back to back on a weekend, I don't believe 2 games in a week should be beyond your average 20 year old.

One of the most effective and best all -round midfielders of a generation. A rare footballer in that he was happy to play as a second midfielder - decoying for kick-outs, doing the dirty work, cleaning our breaking-ball, acting as a defensive shield - even though he had the skill, athleticism and awareness to be the leading midfielder, as he showed on many an occasion.

Truthfully though, his retirement is at the right time and might do Armagh a favour. Experience is hard to beat, but a 70 minute engine is more vital. They've at least 4 solid, youthful options at midfield to cover his tracks.

ill decide -

When you get to Hilltown from Rathfriland, take a left heading downhill through the village. Continue straight for about 4-5 miles. You'll then come to a staggered crossroads with a pub on your left.

Take a right at the crossroads and after about a mile you'll be in Kilcoo central. Oh, the fun.

Plough on through Kilcoo and not too long later you'll see a country pub on your left. Take the next left after the pub onto a road that looks like it leads nowhere. It actually leads to their pitch, after about 200 yards, on your left.

I can't stand James Nesbitt. His two acting techniques consist of talking quickly and moving his eyes. How does he get so much work?