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Hope they're a nicer shower than the U21s.

Is that Tyrone fcuked? I'd imagine it'll be made up from Mayo, Dublin and Kerry players.

Enjoying the podcasts - https://player.fm/series/we-are-ulster

Particularly enjoyed this one - https://player.fm/series/we-are-ulster/ep-9-benny-coulter-niall-mccoy-doping-in-the-gaa-and-are-tyrone-over-rated

Looks like Italy are unbackable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj6tVGKzfhU

If you can guess why, you get a copy of my next book.

Often wondered. Some are obvious. But why stew, hardstation, tony baloney, Hardy etc?

Sean's shimmy will soon be lost to us. Are there other players out there who had/have a signiture 'trick'....not a Mulligan dummy but a move they would execute almost every game which threw opponents?

Gooch had a bounce which bamboozled defences....can't think of many others. Bellew used to kill people.

The mark to fail
Joe Brolly stirs someone around May
Dublin lose to Tyrone in the league and begin a spiral towards mediocrity with players falling out and a drugs sensation
Armagh do well
Mayo to win the AI

Any ideas?


http://ulsterherald.com/2016/12/14/podcast-red-hand-weekend-24/

Kanye West:

Only originals, only originals would have said that.
["Famous" starts playing and stops playing twice.]
If you don't got an iPhone, don't put it up. Only originals.
["Famous" starts playing again and West raps along.]

Stop it, stop it. Hey radio, f**k you! Radio, f**k you! Y'all don't want to lose again. A lot of people here tonight felt like they lost. You know why? Because y'all been lied to. Google lied to you. Facebook lied to you. Radio lied to you. Radio, f**k you! I know it's a lot of real niggas working at radio, real people, real programming directors with wives and kids that love music, that can't play what they want to play because they've been paid to play that bullshit over and over and over. And when I say that bullshit, what I'm saying is we love Drake, Drake is great. He's a great artist. But Frank Ocean is great, too. But you know who the greatest of all of us? Who do y'all think? [Crowd shouts "Kanye" and other names] Nope. Kid motherfucking Cudi. Radio, f**k you! Oh yeah, I'm on my Trump shit tonight. Radio, f**k you. Yeah, I'm taking his lead. I'mma just say how I say, be 'Ye, and win. I'mma take his lead. Radio, f**k you! Radio, f**k you! Wait a second. Eh, is it, "Radio, f**k you? That's what you're saying?" Exactly.

Not f**k the people that work at radio because these is real people that gotta feed they kids and they're not being allowed to play that real shit because they think that in order to feed they kids they gotta play the same shit over and over and over. I was raised by KMS 1, I was raised by Tribe Called Quest, I was raised by DMX. The last real nigga alive? Naw, nigga! We real niggas alive, we alive tonight, bruh! We alive tonight, bruh! Virgil Abloh is alive tonight, bro. A$AP Nast is alive tonight, bro. [A$AP] Bari is alive tonight, bro. Ian Connor is alive tonight, bro. [A$AP] Rocky alive tonight, bro. Aye, y'all love my show. When I say these names, y'all better scream for me. I don't give a f**k if you know the names or not, go ahead, Google them. They will give you a little bit of factual information. They will give you that. Why did I name A$AP? Because that's the future. That's the niggas they got me and Cudi [...]. It's life.

We've got a hundred years out here, a hundred years on this planet, bro, and we can have a utopia. We can love each other. But the rules gotta be fair. Khaled and Drake and radio and Doc and [Real] 92.3 and everybody. Is it just me or did you hear that song so many times "you say you wanna play for free." Aye, aye. You know what it is, though? Because aye, I love Drake. I love Khaled. But they set that song up, bro. And let me tell you something: MTV, f**k you! Once again, as always. I'm on my Trump shit tonight. Let me tell you what it is, bruh. Aye, you know me. I went down seven years of my life of motherfuckers hating me for saying Beyoncé had the best video. Hey, baby, let's rock and roll tonight. Y'all might be experiencing a lot of pop shit, but the vibes is back. The prodigal son, Kid Cudi, has returned. The vibes is back. I know it's going to be a lot of conversations after tonight.

Khaled, I know you got hitters from Miami. Please do not send them at my head. I just want to have a conversation about how we playing radio's game. Khaled, you a real nigga. Khaled, you a real nigga. You got the keys. But as we learn all the politics that niggas was doing for years. Obama couldn't make America great because he couldn't be him to be who he was. Black men have been slaves. Obama wasn't allowed to do this [screams] and still win. He had to be perfect. But being perfect don't always change shit, bro. Being perfect don't always change shit, bro.

So, when I talk about MTV, let me explain something. I was hurt. Beyoncé, I was hurt because I wanted to present a video called "Fade" and I don't expect MTV to help me. Mr. West, I don't respect you. I will let you know that Beyoncé is winning the video tonight for "Formation" over "Hotline Bling" and "Famous." They told me beforehand so I wouldn't run on stage. Hey, bruh, y'all ain't gotta f**k with me, but you know I got the vision and you know I'mma gonna keep it real with you. Beyoncé, I was hurt. I went down seven years on behalf of your—eh, nigga! Don't [...] no shit while I'm talking. I am putting my career, my life, my public well-standing at risk when I talk to y'all like this. This is a moment in the [...], bro. The vibes is back. The vibes is back. Motherfuckers might feel a way about this tonight. Beyoncé, I was hurt because I heard that you said you wouldn't perform unless you won Video of the Year over me and over "Hotline Bling." In my opinion—now, don't go trying to diss Beyoncé. She is great. Taylor Swift is great. We are all great people. We are all equal.

But sometimes, we be playing the politics too much and forget who we are just to win. f**k winning. f**k looking cool. f**k looking cool. f**k being cool. f**k all that, bruh! I've been sitting here to give y'all my truth even at the risk of my own life. Even at the risk of my own success, my own career. I've been sitting here to give y'all the truth. Jay Z, call me, bruh. You still ain't calling me. Jay Z, call me. Aye, bruh, I know you got killers. Please don't send them at my head. Just call me. Talk to me like a man. I'm not trying to be the man. I just am a man, the same as anybody here. I ain't above, below none of y'all. We all equal. We all equal. This is the vibes, bro. This is the future. This is the way of thinking to make America great again. Ha! You didn't like that! Guess what? Y'all need the vibes. I was hurt. Feelings matter, bro. The way motherfuckers put money up so high, popularity, radio spins. Feelings matter, bro. Feelings matter, bro.

It's a new world, Hillary Clinton, it's a new world. Feelings matter. Because guess what? Everybody in middle America felt a way and they showed you how they felt. Feelings matter, bro. It's a new world. It's a new world, Barack. It's a new world, Jay Z. Hey, don't send killers at my head, bro. This ain't the Malcolm X movie. We growing from that moment. Let 'Ye be 'Ye. And wait a second. Do y'all agree with that? Let 'Ye be 'Ye. Wait a second. I ain't hear enough screams on that. Let 'Ye be 'Ye.

People I'm not saying this out of my own well-being because it wouldn't be smart out of my own well-being to say things like this. Radio, I done talked to you a bunch of motherfucking times. Y'all motherfuckers is behind the times. Because guess what, the Saint Pablo tour is the most relevant shit happening. The Saint Pablo tour is more relevant than radio and if y'all keep following old models, your ass is going to be Hillary Clinton. You might not like it, but they gotta hear it. I ain't here to massage you with a fake truth, telling you that Hillary gon' win over and over and over and then you wake up [and] you still can't believe it! You know why? Because you was lied to by Google. You was lied to by Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg, you wanna call me now? Do I got the vision, Mark Zuckerberg? Was you wrong? When I said I was $53 million in debt and you didn't call me, was you wrong? You ate dinner, you asked my friend Anthony Schiller to have dinner with me. I told you about Donda. You said you would help and you didn't. Then you went to look for aliens. Me and Kid Cudi are aliens right here, bro. The vibes is back. [Talking to DJ] Take it all the way back to the beginning. Shia LaBeouf, Kid Cudi feels a way. Give him a call.

Q-Tip, I love you, bro. Don't tell me how to be me, though. I love you. The Tribe album is dope. I love you. Don't tell me how to be me, though. I've been me. I am me. There's a Richard Pryor interview that you can watch about people coming into power and not changing everything and just becoming a part of the power. That's happened with musicians because they're scared. I'm not scared. I'm here to change things. I am here to change things. And things won't change until people admit their own falsehoods. I got the visions, bro. That's what I've been blessed with. My vision. I'm not always going to say things the perfect way, the right way. But I'm going to say how I feel. Right now, press get ready to write your passive-aggressive, LeBron James, racist comments. Season 4, racist comments. Get ready to have a field day, press. Get ready, get ready. Because the show's over. [Drops mic]

http://www.thefader.com/2016/11/20/kanye-west-transcript-sacramento

Not what it used to be eh?

Just do whatever it takes. If it means 15 men behind the ball and every dirty tactic in the book, do it. It wouldn't matter if it finishes 0-1 to 0-0; even people in Africa want Mayo to win it.

Boys like Ricey and Gormley are free to talk.

Of the teams who have exited the Championship, who stands a tiny chance of a nomination? Any Cavan, Fermanagh or Monaghan lads? Corrigan had a couple of good games. Longford should get a couple.

Diarmuid Connolly 5/1 for POTY. Kilkenny and Harte on 8s. Brogan at 11. Sean Cav is 40/1 - tempting if he puts in a clinker in the quarter.
O'Donoghue at 12/1 and Cillian O'Connor 20/1. Damien Comer is the Galway choice at 33/1

Looks like it.

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

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