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Eamon Burns won an AI with Derry in 93 and was still playing senior club football for Ballinascreen last year. Last time I was talking to him he said he was hoping to play this year too. I've only managed to get to a couple of games this year and he wasnt playing in either so I'm not sure if he's still turning out. But he'd be 40-41 I think.

Kerry Mike? No sign of him over on the Kerry v Tyrone thread.

Rid out.

He must be going with a tyrone wench then!

lynchboy?

I agree with a lot of the comments around Duffy on Sunday. I didn't really care which of the two teams won but I just thought the amount of mistakes the ref made was unbelieveable.

Yet here were are on discussing this and I'm shocked how many people on here who are saying you should just shut up and not even discuss it. You should turn a blind eye as its such a hard job and the amount of flack they take is so unfair. We're not saying that isn't true but in  my eyes if someone does a good job they should be praised and if someone makes a mess of something then they should be told so as well. Why should it be all swept under the carpet.
I think 2 years ago Sludden made a mess of that final and deprived Louth of their first title in years.
Are you guys saying we should comment on that and should just shrug our shoulders and say ah well, its a hard job. Leave them alone.

Would any of ye defending them be refs at some level yourselves by any chance?

+1

Why should referees be excused criticism? They play a part in our games and in a way you could argue that the current standard of refs do as much to ruin the game as any tactic teams may use.
On the topic of Sludden, he's now dropped from the panel of intercounty refs. Seems to me like he has been punished but not officially so. IMO, he should have been dropped off the referee panel after that game, but no...the GAA keep him there as they dont want to be seen to scrutinise a ref, but then 2 years later drop him of the referee panel under the radar.

[The biggest problem with Duffy in that game wasnt the goal he allowed, it was his almost completely biased bit of referring for the whole game.]

The biggest problem with Duffy in that game wasnt the goal he allowed, it was his almost completely biased bit of referring for the whole game. It seemed like one rule for Monaghan and a different rule for Down. I thought that was one of the most unprofessional jobs of reffing I've seen. Consistently inconsistent would be the best I could say about him.
I agree, refs can get things wrong as they are only human, but the amount of errors made in that game was beyond just a "bad day". In player terms, if you'd an inter-county player who put in an equivalent performance he'd be off the panel let alone the team.

And now we have the joy of him in the qualifiers. I can only hope he learns from his mistakes last week and at least applies the same rules to both teams....I'm not hopeful though.
There's 3 other refs who spring to mind as being just as bad mind, that boy Hughes from Armagh and the Fermanagh ref (who's name escapes me) and the other M. Duffy.

It's just not good enough given that counties spend lots of money preparing teams which can get knocked out as a result of a bad referee. I'd imagine if the standard continues you could see legal challenges in an attempt to get compensation for the money spent if it can be argued the team was beaten due to poor reffing standards.

I agree fully with you and am surprised this hasn't been given more prominence. The Sunday Game analysts never even picked up on this. I'm not from Ulster but this was incredible display of 'different rules for different teams'

That's my point, of course a referee can make some mistakes over the course of a game but in this particular game he seemed to make a lot of mistakes in favour of Monaghan. It was almost completely one sided refereeing and for me that's why he should be reprimanded, not spcifically the goal as that single incident could be chalked down to a judgement error. The biggest problem with refereeing is this perceived bias with some refs and the inconsistency of the application of the rules from ref to ref.

Beileve it or beileve it not; derry played defensive against Donegal! They may just say 'f**k it' and go for it in the qualifiers.it probably be good enough against the poorer teams but not against the likes of Donegal

Derry did play defensively against Donegal and up until 32 mins it was working from a defensive point of view, but we couldn't get the ball worked out for a score was the problem. Donegal have that tactic nailed at this stage whereas we dont. Add to that the fact we've had so many injuries and our general lack of fitness in general.

I would be more of the opinion that we should start rebuilding for next year from this game, and if the long term plan is to play the same "style" as Donegal we should be sticking to that now and trying to find a way of defending en-masse and attacking in waves. If we get beat, so be it because we're not going to win Sam anyway so nothing lost. Play the long game and forget about this year, as it's gone now anyway.
There's no guarantee if we were to  "go for it" (which I assume means to play an all out attack mode) we would win anyway. Longford are a decent side who seem to do well against us. They'll be in our division next year so in that regard we are on level terms. I think if Longford click on the day, it wont matter too much how we play.

The biggest problem with Duffy in that game wasnt the goal he allowed, it was his almost completely biased bit of referring for the whole game. It seemed like one rule for Monaghan and a different rule for Down. I thought that was one of the most unprofessional jobs of reffing I've seen. Consistently inconsistent would be the best I could say about him.
I agree, refs can get things wrong as they are only human, but the amount of errors made in that game was beyond just a "bad day". In player terms, if you'd an inter-county player who put in an equivalent performance he'd be off the panel let alone the team.

And now we have the joy of him in the qualifiers. I can only hope he learns from his mistakes last week and at least applies the same rules to both teams....I'm not hopeful though.
There's 3 other refs who spring to mind as being just as bad mind, that boy Hughes from Armagh and the Fermanagh ref (who's name escapes me) and the other M. Duffy.

It's just not good enough given that counties spend lots of money preparing teams which can get knocked out as a result of a bad referee. I'd imagine if the standard continues you could see legal challenges in an attempt to get compensation for the money spent if it can be argued the team was beaten due to poor reffing standards.

Ah here - a creditor who's owed us since January had the cheeck to tell us today that he'd paid us last Wednesday, from his Ulster Bank account.  Jaysus.   

That's a gas; the honesty of folk is inspiring!

It stops being funny when pay-day arrives. 

+1
I dont bank with the UB, but my employer does! Meant to have been paid on Friday....still no word!

I did a placement year in UB way back in the 90's and I worked on some of their mainframe programs. From memory the batch jobs had failover in that if one crashed, the subsequent batch jobs didnt run. The general consensus was they didn't roll back, they'd just re-run the batch. Processed records would not be re-processed so they weren't concerned about a few corrupted records as generally the customers who these records pertained to would eventually complain to their branch. The branch would contact IT, who would query that customer's data and manually "fix" the data.
So if the customer didn't notice a problem...well I always wondered about that!
I don't ever remember there being a rollback in the entire time I was there. To do a rollback of a live mainframe db, which may well have had more transactions between the start and fail of a batch, is not straightforward either. An failed rollback could cause worse problems than a failed batch as if the rollback fails you have no reference point to go back or forward to.

That's a long time ago mind, and I was still green so I'm sure I probably missed the big picture about how it all worked and I'd imagine it has improved since then (or maybe not). I used to bank with UB, but left about 10 years ago for a variety of reasons....including customer service. They then tried to charge me close my account...I said feck that and left the account with £1. It's cost them a fortune since in statements.

If the problem was with a software update, it's very bad management on their part. The update should have been tested offline as should the deploy of that update. They should also have had a tried and tested rollback strategy should the udpate fail AND all data should have been backed up before starting.
If they had followed these measures for a software update, there shouldnt have been this level of problem. So either they didnt follow these measures, or they are spouting BS.

One of the worst referees I have ever seen. A completely one sided bit of refereeing if ever I saw it....he almost managed to hand it to Monaghan.
Fair play to Down, deserved it all the more for the fact they had to bet the ref too.
Cant seem them beating either Donegal or Tyrone though. I think Donegal will win 2 in a row at this rate.

Derry team to play Donegal:

gillis
mc camley
mc caigue
sean leo
barry
craig
scullion
friel
diver
lynch
lynn
gerard
gilligan
paddy
emmett

Joe says it as he sees it.....whilst I wouldnt agree about it being a boring game (I thought it was a good match) I do agree with the comments about diving, tyrone seem to have it ingrained into them to dive at the first opportunity and the Cavanaghs are probably the biggest culprits (though Dooher and wee petie were the masters of the art). Armagh on the other hand maybe dont dive as much, but they engage in a lot more of the off the ball stuff, in particular 3rd man tackles.

Personally I'd like to see us incorporate a bit more of this underhandedness into our game, we might do a bit better if we did. As the late Mr. Coleman once said, "nice boys win nathin".

Joe's a legend....

I take it all back, Brennan says we're in good shape.
Derry by 6 points. 

Given that John Brennan says that Derry are in better shape this year than they were before the final last year then it's obvious that Derry are going to win Ulster. 

McBride, and O'Boyle definitely out for us and Eoin Bradley is extremely doubtful all due to injury.
Gerard O'Kane is supposed to be making progress on his return from injury but I'd imagine he'd be doubtful too.
Not looking good for us at all at the minute. We're in dire need of O'Kane and McBride in defence IMO as we've really struggled without them this year.
It's all on the day, but it's looking like we're going to be quite a bit off our first team for this game so I wouldnt be at all confident.

A new music festival in Westport this year

www.westportfestival.com/

I see Seasick Steve is playing there...always wanted to see him.