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Cheers Tayto, much appreciated and don't mind those wannabe Westmeath people....

[Kildare]

We had this thread before but would be grateful if I could gather them all again...

E.G  Kildare - Lilywhites, Flourbags, Short Grass, Thoroughbreds....

Kildare but considering we'll probably have to beath Meath then Dublin then Offaly and then Wicklow in the final it will be a tall order.....

Was out of the country so couldn't make this game but wasn't surprised at the result. Aramagh had a very weak side and don't have the strength in dept of a Kerry or a Tyrone. Neither am I surprised that JD scored 11 points, a class act and just unfortunate to be from Kildare in that he doesn't get the recognition his talent deserves. Kildare need to follow this win with an away in Down.

So how do we get to this Newbridge ground coming from the north?

M1, M50, M7 - take the Newbridge Exit, first one after Naas exit (Big Ball). Pitch is right bang in the middle of the town on the left as you head up the town. No pay-parking on a Sunday so park the car anywhere although closer to the bridge should ensure a quick exit...

I'm confident because Armagh won't be at their strongest, it will be a heavy pitch so a big side will help and we generally have a good home record in the league but I know I shouldn't express those feelings but a man can be an optimist...

So where is Scanlon from? Are the Donnelly's the Ellistown ones?

Scan is from Round Towers  He's younger brother is a bit special although a bit mad. The Donnelly's are indeed the Ellistown ones Ken is worth a shot not sure about Murt.

Not sure about Hogarty either, but Foley will be back but personally would love to see Ross Glavin get a run

Jesus that's a big side, you'd think Anthony would just retire. Still would be pretty condifent about Sunday...

With increasing strain on young GAA stars to fulfil commitments to numerous teams and managers, Cliona Foley examines the alarming trend of acute injuries that are decimating careers prematurely.

IF THE GAA really wants to protect its underage talent from developing acute injuries that will decimate their careers prematurely, it should look at introducing a 'cap' on the number of games they can play in a season, according to Ulster Council's Director of Coaching Eugene Young.

Young has witnessed first-hand the sorts of extreme over-use injuries that are becoming far too widespread amongst the GAA's best youngsters.

"Walking wrecks" is his damning description of some of the young stars who come before him, many of them in their late teens and in the early stages of potentially rewarding inter-county careers.

Just this week he was one of a group of experts who stood up in the Glenavon Hotel in Cookstown and warned over 100 mentors from local schools, clubs and county teams about burning out their players.

The recent McKenna Cup tussle between Tyrone and UUJ demonstrated just how college players can get caught trying desperately to serve more than one team manager and demonstrated the huge demands on their time, bodies and loyalties.

The National League doesn't kick off for another week and yet the country's best young footballers and hurlers are already in the thick of action for their clubs, colleges and counties.

Immediately

Senior county training only formally started in January, but this only seems to be the case in counties who were involved in the late stages of the All-Irelands. For many, training begins almost immediately after the All-Ireland final.

That is especially the case for U-21s, many of whom are in the thick of college action while also preparing for provincial U21 championships that start in late March (Leinster and Connacht) and early April (Munster and Ulster).

Many of them already are, or are aspire to become, senior county panellists and even if they did not have regular squad sessions before Christmas most senior inter-county panellists were doing weights programmes twice or three times a-week.

Young is one of a growing group of fitness and coaching specialists within the GAA finally crying: Stop!

That influential group includes Croke Park's own recently appointed Player Welfare Manager Paraic Duffy, who recently went as far as calling for the abolition of the U21 championships to stem the tide of burnout.

The GAA own's Medical and Scientific Committee, headed by Dr Pat Duggan and including former Dublin All-Ireland-winning manager Dr Pat O'Neill, has already commissioned a pilot study of 240 players to try to discover what is causing their injuries and whether particular training styles are compounding them.

This came in the wake of a University of Glasgow study which found that the injury-rate was 64 for 1000 player hours in GAA - almost twice those reported for soccer. This study of 511 gaelic players also found that more injuries were suffered in training than in games, an extremely alarming statistic.

But Young says it is not just over-training that is causing the problem but playing too many games and trying to serve too many teams and managers. This is especially prevalent at underage level, if players already carry undiagnosed postural and biomechanical problems.

"Some of them are walking wrecks when we see them first," is his frightening comment on the first-year UUJ students that are invited to join the Sports Institute of Northern Ireland's (NIIS) support scheme for talented athletes across a range of sports.

"We screen them for core stability, running technique, biomechanical problems, the sort of stuff that really should be done when they are nine to 10.

"We'd find 90 per cent of them suffer from things like repetitive groin injuries, bad posture, curvature of the spine, things that all contribute to serious injury problems."

One of the support services that the NIIS offers athletes is muscular-skeletal screening, to identify and correct their physical weaknesses that might be exacerbated by heavy training and competition and Dublin City University (DCU) is another institution pushing for such screening. Two years ago Young made a serious attempt to address the GAA's injury worries. He called all of Ulster's senior and U21 and college managers to a summit in Ballygawley where county managers agreed to "keep their hands off" panellists who were involved in Higher Education competitions during the months of October to February.

But the recent Tyrone/UUJ debacle showed the sort of opposition this notion still engenders.

Inter-county managers, Young points out, are often the worst culprits, demanding that players travel home mid-week or at weekends for county action while they still have heavy training and playing commitments elsewhere.

Understandable

"It is the nature of a lot of team managers, it is understandable because they want to win at all costs. Each of them wants his pound of flesh," Young said.

But they are not alone and it is the demands of serving multiple teams at an even younger age, at county and club level, that most alarms Young.

Teenagers who are talented at sport, inevitably, play more than one code before the demands force them to specialise.

"We have an Ulster Development U16 squad and there was one youngster on that who had 12 different coaches in one season because he played gaelic, soccer and basketball at several levels." Young revealed. "And it is fair to imagine that every one of those coaches expected a lot from him."

Young's is not a lone voice in an increasing plea to stop the treadmill that threatens to chew up and spit out some of the best of the GAA'S next generation but, as a new inter-county season begins, it remains an ongoing problem.

Closed season

"You could say we haven't completely cracked it but the process has been started," Young said. "But still, if you looked around before Christmas, there were club U21 league and championships starting and that was meant to be the 'the closed season'.

"And the introduction of college teams into competitions like the McKenna Cup have actually made it more high-profile and competitive, even though it was designed just to give college players more games ahead of the Sigerson Cup."

Player welfare manager Duffy recently added his voice to this argument by revealing his controversial views about the axing of the U-21 competition: "My own view is, and this is not widely accepted, I would get rid of all inter-county competitions outside minor and senior. We've got to give the club players a better deal. The more inter-county competition you have, the more difficult it is to play club games. We have to do something radical. U21, junior and intermediate - they will have to go," he insisted.

"We've had a number of studies undertaken on the issue of player burnout. There's absolutely no doubt that our players need a rest, and a proper pre-season.

"I would hope that towards the end of the year to work with inter-county managers on the issue of burnout. We don't have to start training as early as we do, some teams are back as early as September. This issue is near the top of my agenda." Duffy added that raising the age of minor players from U-18 to U-19 has also been discussed by the GAA. But the former GAC chairman is not in favour of such a move.

"At U-18 level, players are generally in their last year in school and living at home. If you go to U19, you're bringing in players probably in third level and living away from home. You're bringing them home from college to train and that poses its own set of difficulties."


CASE STUDY 1
NAME: Liam Moffatt
AGE: 31
CLUB: Deel Rovers, Crossmolina (Mayo)

WHENEVER Enda Whyte, a lecturer on DCU'S 'Athletic Therapy and Training' degree course expands on a new injury topic, there's a fair chance that one of his second-year students has actually suffered it.

It was actually his litany of GAA-related injuries that got Liam Moffatt so fascinated with physiology and the science of training that the NUIG economics graduate decided to pursue it as his second career.

Close examination of his horrific medical history reveals exactly why the former All-Ireland club winner with Crossmolina in 2001 threatened to retire after this year's provincial club final defeat.

Only one of the three main tendons holding his right ankle is still intact. By the time he was 24 he had arthritis in it and was advised to quit.

You name it Moffatt has suffered it: cruciate surgery on one knee, cartilage surgery on the other, cracked ribs, back problems, lost teeth and gum surgery, broken fingers, an eye socket injury that saw him hospitalised for three days, three serious concussions and too many hamstring and calf tears to remember. But he refuses to give up.

He actually only spent one season with the Mayo seniors and admits that he "was never athletic enough" to make it as a county senior footballer.

He did represent his club, college and county at all other levels and admittedly his star-studded club, arguably, competed to an inter-county standard, contesting two All-Ireland club finals in three years.

But Moffatt insists the demands on his body were, by GAA standards, usual, not exceptional.

And, having been through the wringer, he wonders if there is not a better way to do it; particularly to prevent GAA players suffering injuries that could be avoided with better screening, training expertise and fixtures planning.

Take 1992.

That season Moffatt, who would captain the Mayo minor footballers a year later, played at U16, U17, U18, U21, junior and senior level with his club.

He also played minor and senior hurling with Ballina that year and county minor with Mayo. In addition, he also played U16 and senior football with the school and also with the Mayo vocational schools team. That's 12 teams and he was just 16.

Three years later it had hardly abated. He was out of minor grade and in college but in 1995 he played in two All-Ireland colleges' finals (Freshers and Sigerson) and won a county senior title with Crossmolina.

Apart from all the training, league and challenge games; he recalls playing a whopping 27 championship games that summer.

"Yet I was only an average player," he stressed. "There are people like me in every county."

He accepts that, in a contact game, sudden impact injuries are inevitable but he points out that his most problematic, recurring ones were biomechanical.

If the weakness in his right ankle been spotted and corrected in his teens through equipment like 'orthotic insoles' and specific training techniques, things could have been very different.

Moffatt believes he was actually lucky that John Maughan was in charge when he got called into the Mayo senor panel in 2003.

Maughan was intelligent enough to heed the team medics' advice and modify his training.

So three times a week, when his team-mates were doing their fitness work, Moffatt - whose ankle could not take heavy impact - would be doing a 24-mile cycle.

His experience and insight makes him questions many GAA practices: the regular fixtures pile-ups, the lack of rest periods, the dragging of top players half-way across the country for mid-week training sessions, all of which contribute to fatigue and, ultimately, injury.

He believes, especially, that the GAA should be screening youngsters early to identify and correct their physical weaknesses.

In a desperate effort to make a vital club game he once visited Ger Hartmann who gave him a regime of quadricep extensions and hamstring curls. "I did it three days a week for three months and then once a week and I've never had a problem since" he revealed.

"That experience alone showed how you can prevent injury if you have the expertise."

He once had a weekend where he played a minor club game on the Friday night, a minor challenge game for Mayo the next day, a junior championship match that evening and a club senior league game on the Sunday.

"Don't get me wrong, I loved it. I was very appreciative and delighted with my playing career but, given the field I'm studying now, it is becoming clear to me that the body can't take it.

"With all the sports science we have now, there is surely a better way of doing things in the future, if we want to keep players fit and minimise their injuries?"


CASE STUDY 2
NAME: Ross Glavin
AGE: 21
CLUB: Moorefield (Kildare)

BACK in 2002, when he was just 17, Ross Glavin was corner-forward on the Moorefield senior team that won the Kildare title.

This summer he was their midfield-sweeper when they repeated that feat and went one further when the club became only the second Kildare team to win the Leinster club title, lining them up for the All-Ireland semi-finals in the coming weeks.

In between, Glavin spent two years in the army cadet school, followed by a year in the Cathal Brugha Barracks in Dublin before starting a four-year degree course in the Dublin Institute of Technology this autumn.

Yet the second lieutenant openly admits that his football workload today, and combining it with his daily life, is much easier now than it was two years ago, when he was just 19.

In the 2004 and 2005 seasons Glavin was a teenager feeling the strain.

Just out of the minor ranks, he was playing U-21 and senior for Moorefield, third-level league and Trench Cup for the army, and U21 and senior for Kildare.

It is a common problem for many talented teens and his problem was compounded by his army career.

Fitness is a key part of their 'work' and cadets train physically once-a-day. Add in county and club training, on top of a hectic match schedule and he admits it was exhausting.

His load was actually lessened because Pádraig Nolan trained both county teams and largely concentrated them in senior training until about 10 days before an U-21 game.

Yet Glavin admits to days when "you'd just show your face at county (senior) training" and hope for understanding.

The army's Trench Cup team were successful, reaching the semi-finals two years in-a-row. They actually played in the FBD League for pre-season experience which meant trips to Connacht for matches.

And it was then that he understood the massive demands on other cadets like Galway's Seán Armstrong or class-mate Andrew O'Shaughnessy, the brilliant schoolboy hurler so heavily tipped to be Limerick's new superstar.

Born and reared on the Curragh, he only had to go down the road for county or club. "But Andrew was trying to get up and down to Limerick and keep everything going which was really hard," Glavin remembers. He was lucky with injuries until damaging ankle ligaments in 2005.

Glavin helped Kildare defeat Dublin to win that year's Leinster U21 title but lost all of the subsequent summer, even at club level, to the injury.

And when a new manager - John Crofton - took over the county seniors last year he could not get back into the panel.

Moorefield's recent success has earned him a recall but his club's commitments means their contingent will not rejoin Kildare training until their AIB odyssey is over. Yet at this level club training is as demanding as county.

Coached by former county star Sos Dowling, Moorefield train Wednesday, Friday and Sunday and at one stage included Monday as well.

Leinster glory earned a restful December but they actually trained on St Stephen's Day and the following Friday before resuming their full schedule in January.

Yet Glavin still finds this a lot easier than his 2004-2005 seasons.

"For a start I'm not playing U-21, which is a big factor, and the second thing is that I'm a student now.

"We have to do 24-hour duty on Saturdays every few weeks but as a student you'd still have way more energy than lads who are working jobs nie-to-five and then coming to training."

If Moorefield were not still flying high he would be training and playing league and championship not only with Kildare now but with DIT, who compete in the college's premier Sigerson Cup level.

That will eventually happen but for the moment Glavin, who turns 22 in April, has the 'luxury' of concentrating all his energies on Moorefield's bid for All-Ireland glory and his vigour appears renewed by the eventual prospect of re-establishing himself as a county senior.

He also detects one encouraging change in training patterns.

"In the last 18 months it definitely seems as if coaches are not pushing people as hard either, they seem to be realising the importance of rest, that's my experience anyway," he said.

"And not having been involved with Kildare last year I'm really dying to get back training with them," Glavin admitted. "I'm a lot more motivated after being out of it last year."

Why hate Laois so much?

Nobody likes Laois 

For what it's worth I think Chelsea will over-haul Man U. Can't see Jose giving youth a chance, he's under too much pressure..

Larsson has looked brilliant starting nevermind as a sub!

Do you think? I agree with ONeill he should be used as an impact sub, he hasn't impressed me that much and I think a lot of people are looking at him through green/red tinted glasses. Man U's ability to put average to poor sides away is amazing but the jury is still out and if they win the title they will be the poorest side to win it since Blackburn although I still believe Chelsea will close the gap.

The question is - does Arsene continue with the likes of Almunia, Hoyte, Traore, Walcott, Denilson, Diaby and Aliadiere - or play the big guns?

I think he has to stick with the young guns, they got the Arse to the final and deserve their chance...

Team I'd play

Almunia, Hoyte, Gallas, Toure, Traore, Walcott, Denilson, Fabregas, Diaby, Aliadiere and Adebayor. With Henry, Silva, Rosicky, Mad German and Senderos on the bench.

As an aside the Goons never looked like losing last night and Defoe and Keane just does not work as a partneship.

Kildare, you heard it here first   

The bold Dermot Earley has been announced as Kildare Captain for the season and will make his debut as Captain against Armagh this Sunday.

Is throw in time 2:00 or 2:30 pm?

As a Tyrone man living in Kildare trying to find a good post-primary school for his kids this is a major concern!

Naas CBS or the PBS in Newbridge, both have good academic records and excellent sports programmes. Naas currently hold Leinster Titles in Football, Hurlng, Soccer and Rugby whereas the PBS hold titles in Football and Basketball. If what junior to do well academically avoid Newbridge College but Clongowes does quite well, only around 15K a year though 

Will Junior be a future Rags and Lilywhite?