Antrim Hurling

[Minder]

someone sent off minder - who

from what i have seen off cushendall this year, they cant be classified as byes for any team.

they got beat by a poor ballygalget team yesterday i see.

Paul Mc Donnell, straight red for verbal abuse to the ref i think, so it must have been sweet whatever he said to him.

[Maximus Marillius]

imtommygunn....there is a considerable diffence in getting stuffed by...what was it...26 f**king points year in and year out than gettiong beat in a semi final by 2 points after winning the national league against Kerry. Now if Antrim hurling could win a National League titile agianst Killkenny I'm sure ye would be happy with that also.

Skull...you are a real tool...and for quite a while...just to remind you of my first post which was not insulting. Infact it was statment of fact. I would support hurling and certainly would not try to discourage anyone from playing on my own door step. Our club tried in the 80's to start hurling, we actually paid for man from your own club to come over every week to coach the kids...it all stopped, not because the club did not want it to succeed, there was no interest, demand for it...all very simple.

Unbelievable performance from your hurlers at the weekend. Getting beat is one thing but to throw the towel in is another. WTF is that all about? Seen sambo on the Sunday game last night, he should have apoligised to the county for the teams performance.

Once you replied as you normally do with a grunt....I thought to myself lets really take the piss with this tool...and guess what...you fell for it line, hook and sinker. Now away off with you

[imtommygunn]

Max for the talent there is in Derry football and the pitiful performances they have returned in ulster semi finals over the last few years I don't think you have too much to crow about either. Maybe you won the national league yes but if you go whimpering out against Monaghan what will that mean?

We struggle at this level of hurling. Always have and probably always will. Offaly, Laois and probably Wexford and Dublin would probably all be in the same boat as us though they are a step up on doubt. The big guns are a level above everything else. Structures at county level and at national level need to be improved. That defeat, like Offaly's against Kilkenny, is no good to anyone.

[theskull1]

It was shite stirring ...plain and simple. Mission accomplished Max. Well done. Now piss off

[Trouble Ahead]

Minder, as a down man living in Antrim, my sources say that your no 11 was cut and was attended to on the pitch for at least 5 minutes, so what do you expect. I am told the abuse you lads gave him after the game was out of order, i hear he let you play hurling and let the game go on as much as possible, but all you lads did was abuse him, surprising the jonnies did,nt get invoved, Micky J must have them well disciplined.

Sounds like just sour grapes, my advice leave the refs alone and maybe we can all play hurling for a change!!!!!!!

[Minder]

Minder, as a down man living in Antrim, my sources say that your no 11 was cut and was attended to on the pitch for at least 5 minutes, so what do you expect. I am told the abuse you lads gave him after the game was out of order, i hear he let you play hurling and let the game go on as much as possible, but all you lads did was abuse him, surprising the jonnies did,nt get invoved, Micky J must have them well disciplined.

Sounds like just sour grapes, my advice leave the refs alone and maybe we can all play hurling for a change!!!!!!!

Why would St Johns get involved when they were being given all the time in the world to claw themselves back into the game? Maybe your "source" would explain how when asked how long was left in injury time he said "two minutes" yet played another 4 or 5 after that with minimal stoppages in that period. I was standing beside the St Johns subs and they couldnt believe the additional time but were obviously quite happy with it..........

[Trouble Ahead]

Ah Come on Minder, get real my source was playing and he said all you lads did the whole game was cry and complain, for Christs sake give it a break, usually its the jonnies that do the bitching! Was your no 11 attended to or not for a good few minutes, if so then give up on the old added time. If you where good enough you would nver have been beaten in the end, always always blame the man in the middle. Give it up, its wearing a bit thin at this stage.

[Arthur_Friend]

TroubleAhead, you couldn't have chosen a more appropriate avatar.

You seem to have a lot to say for someone who admits he wasn't even at the game......

[Tony Baloney]

You seem to have a lot to say for someone who admits he wasn't even at the game......

Yes but he has the totally impartial views of a St. Johns player to back up his story... 

[johnneycool]

someone sent off minder - who

from what i have seen off cushendall this year, they cant be classified as byes for any team.

they got beat by a poor ballygalget team yesterday i see.

Cushendall have still got plenty of time to get things in order. They will be there or there abouts

Now I'm one of our biggest critics but there has been a good bit of improvement in our lads over recent weeks, we're now moving the ball on a lot quicker into the forwards with the defence tightening up considerably. It was a keenly contested game throughout and with cushendall missing a few plus they had another few who already had 70 minutes of hurling done the previous day making a game of it. I wouldn't dispel the dall either, they'll not be far away.

As for refereeing I posted a few weeks back about referees letting the game go but that players also had to play their part in a better, tougher brand of hurling. Well the ref did let a fair bit go and he got nothing but abuse and whinging from players, mentors and spectators looking for frees which IMO weren't frees. Once the players knew that frees weren't going to be easy got the game improved immeasurably and was one of the better flowing games I've seen this year. Now the problem lies in that the next referee we get won't be so tolerant and blow every bit of contact and players don't know if they are coming or going. No easy answers but yesterdays game was a whole lot more entertainment than our previous win in the UHL over Ballycran which never got out of first gear.

[slow corner back]

Div 2-3 is serving up a lot of better matches than I and many others thought it would initially. We (Armoy) lost out by a point to Randalstown yesterday, I thought we had broken that habit?? Carey ran St Galls to five points and Clooney Gaels beat Glenarm. Clooney are going really well and must be one of the favourites for the intermediate championship. Rossa seem to remembered that they actually used to play hurling to and are beginning to show some form. Meanwhile Ballycran are a class above everything else and should win promotion unbeaten, only Gort na Mona might trouble them now. Were you playing in Carey Milltown?

[theskull1]

Spotted this on AFR...the galway match

Vincent Hogans take..

By Vincent Hogan


Monday June 30 2008

Sambo McNaughton's face is a gaping window into his soul. Every tiny nick and blemish speaks of cursed obsession, like the soft pages of a melancholy diary. His eyes swell with the hurt of Antrim's predicament. His mind bursts with the injustice of managing a team on the very fringes of hurling's affection.

You can tell how pity scalds him. Something in the set of his shoulders, the way he leans against the cold wall of a dressing-room tunnel and waits for journalists' questions to pick at an old scab.

He greets us with "alright boys" and we shuffle towards him as if there's a coffin to be closed.

On Saturday, the team he co-manages with 'Woody' McKinley lost to Galway by 26 points at Casement Park. It was championship in name only. Next weekend, they play Waterford, after which McNaughton and McKinley will be able to put their training schedules in a drawer and thank their players for listening.

And, no doubt, they'll tell them not to lose faith, despite every last molecule of their being aching with a sense that there is not much left to lose now.

Antrim weren't exactly at full-strength on Saturday. Their captain was away on honeymoon, their best forward chose to be at home. When they brought big Joe Kernan in to speak to the players last Thursday night, McNaughton and McKinley were __ effectively __ asking him to keep a candle lit in a gale.

Kernan did his best too, recycling the very same, evangelical message that they themselves have exhausted now.

Trouble is, there are only so many times you can sell the message that every game is important, that even bad beatings carry a deposit of nourishment before you realise that the faces looking back at you have silted eyes.

Last year, 55 out of 72 delegates at a Special Congress voted for changes to the hurling championship that, effectively, told McNaughton and McKinley to take their love of the game and shove it where the sun doesn't shine.

Worse, the purveyors of this travesty then had the gall to speechify about how no system could ever be "perfect". The words carried all the comfort of a used coal toppling in a grate. Antrim were being told to go to Hell.

McNaughton, you can tell, has little stomach for this now. Scandalously, the bulk of Ulster counties voted for pitching them into this penal system. Yet, when he says that Antrim should play in Leinster, the same counties accuse him of elitism.

At the end of Saturday's game, Ger Loughnane offered him the sincere handshake of a man who could take no comfort from the sums. Interestingly, Alan Kerins and Damien Joyce also made a point of seeking him out. The body language wouldn't have been out of place in a cemetery.

Later, Loughnane would draw us into a little trophy room under the old stand and heap praise on his young prodigy, Joe Canning, for having the wit to "ease up" on his championship debut and not kick Antrim into the dirt.

It was all unavoidably sad. You looked around the gaunt stadium, set hard against the M1 motorway. You gazed out across the forest of chimneys, jutting up out of prim little housing estates with their tidy, repressed lawns. You gaped at the distant, long spine of the Harland and Wolff crane. And you had to remind yourself what to be a hurling man once stood for in this city.

McNaughton often recalls the league game against Down here in October '93, the day after an explosion on the Shankill Road killed 10 people. Fear of reprisal had people sick in their stomachs that day in Casement. They played the game, then all but ran to their cars and sped back to the Glens.

As it happened, the reprisal came one week later, a gun attack on the Rising Sun bar at Greysteele.

Back then, you lived with the worry of UDR checkpoints and random shootings. Being a hurler made you a terrorist target. He once got a bullet in the post with his name engraved on the side. He learnt to keep his hurleys out of view, knowing how they labeled a man.

Yet, he won an All Star and played in an All-Ireland final. He was an abrasive hurler who wore his heart on his sleeve. McNaughton once estimated that he averaged five stitches per game and you knew he was only half tongue-in-cheek when he said it.

As it happens, his first championship game was against Galway, marked by Iggy Clarke. Father Iggy. "That day he didn't really bring his collar onto the field with him," jokes this son of Cushendall. Then as now, Galway beat them well.

On Saturday, McNaughton vowed that Antrim would neither hide nor take up Gaelic football. They stayed with Galway for half an hour and, in his estimation, that suggests there is something to hold onto. But for the Wexford-Dublin draw, they would have had a decent preparatory challenge beforehand. Little things keep falling against them.

But he knows too that their championship ends next weekend. In truth, he knows it never began.

The game still has its back turned. The betrayal perseveres.

[girt_giggler]

Div 2-3 is serving up a lot of better matches than I and many others thought it would initially. We (Armoy) lost out by a point to Randalstown yesterday, I thought we had broken that habit?? Carey ran St Galls to five points and Clooney Gaels beat Glenarm. Clooney are going really well and must be one of the favourites for the intermediate championship. Rossa seem to remembered that they actually used to play hurling to and are beginning to show some form. Meanwhile Ballycran are a class above everything else and should win promotion unbeaten, only Gort na Mona might trouble them now. Were you playing in Carey Milltown?

PJ O'Connell was the difference between Clooney & ourselves on Sunday. Game was nip & tuck til they switched him til full forward & within 5 minutes he scored a goal & set up another.  Excellent prospect to be fair

[Trouble Ahead]

Referee Abuse-Has to Stop04 July 2008
It has been brought to the attention of County Committee by the Referee's Committee that the verbal abuse of our match officials by mentors and club officials is on the increase.

In conjunction with the CCC, it has been agreed that further reports of verbal abuse of out match officials will be dealt with in the most severe manner, and when possible the maximum suspension will be awarded to the perpetrators of the abuse.

We are determined to eliminate the abuse that is unfairly directed to out match officials, and I ask for your full support in our attempts to remove this from our games.

Seamus O'Muiri


Name : Antrim Onlooker01 July 2008Referee Abuse-Has to Stop

I would just like to add to this as i've seen it at first hand and it's one of the reasons why I will never Referee again. Referees really need to be more consistent and more strict as moving the ball forward does'nt really work and if ALL Referees were to book then send off players and mentors then the message would soon hit home as only a few do this now so you get players and mentors saying sure I/He told the Ref to F off last week and never got booked we need all the Refs to start dishing out cards for these offenses even if it means 4 or 5 players sent off cause it would soon stop. Some players don't realize without these men in the middle we would'nt have any games and we all should be doing our bit to help them and protect them.



Minder these quotes from your county website today, i can think of one club that has "Troubles Ahead"

[youngfella]

that canning thing is unreal. how many sidelines did he put over ?