Monaghan v Kerry all ireland QF

[gwan-ye-boy-ya]

and yes i know what your thinkin.... tougher games  against connacht, ulster, and leinster, in semis and finals... but the %s are in your favour seen as munster is soooo easy to come out of in football.

[Seamus]

No matter what way you roll the dice, change the rules, introduce the back door and maybe in the future have an open draw you will find that Kerry will still average their three AI per decade.  Enough of attempting to beat Kerry with a stick as it's getting very repetitious and boring at this stage. Instead go try to match their skill and consistency with out moaning and bitching all the time. Is it just an Irish trend to try and find fault and even start to hate our best?

Where is the respect I ask, where is the respect?

[Maguire01]

No matter what way you roll the dice, change the rules, introduce the back door and maybe in the future have an open draw you will find that Kerry will still average their three AI per decade.  Enough of attempting to beat Kerry with a stick as it's getting very repetitious and boring at this stage. Instead go try to match their skill and consistency with out moaning and bitching all the time. Is it just an Irish trend to try and find fault and even start to hate our best?

Where is the respect I ask, where is the respect?

Well it's not here! Not much respect for Monaghan....

NOTHING stirs the blood of football followers more emphatically than a championship clash between Kerry and Dublin and it could be coming your way fairly soon because if both sides win just one more game they will line up against each other in the All-Ireland semi-final at on August 26. Now, that's an inviting prospect because after a fairly humdrum season there is room for one really good championship battle before winter comes " not that it isn"t like winter already.

[Maguire01]

This is me - signing off early, away to Dublin for the weekend. Roll on 2pm tomorrow and let's hope that by 4 we'll still be there!

[Frank Casey]

Will ye stop moaning about tickets. Check www.aaroadwatch.ie for directions to Croke Park and read this from the oracle of the Kingdom "The Kerryman" newspaper.

"NOTHING stirs the blood of football followers more emphatically than a championship clash between Kerry and Dublin and it could be coming your way fairly soon because if both sides win just one more game they will line up against each other in the All-Ireland semi-final at on August 26. Now, that's an inviting prospect because after a fairly humdrum season there is room for one really good championship battle before winter comes " not that it isn"t like winter already.

you posted a a bit after 12am frank. so in the kingdom of rural....your drunk... tis a HUMDRUM of a season for ye cause ye had only waterford and an overated cork side to play. one wonders mmmmmmmmmmmm i wonder if hurling wasnt the king pin of sport in munster would kerry have soooo many all irelands... its all tooo easy for ye down there... ya muppet !!!!!

That hurt. But anyway.

The status of hurling in the other Munster counties may be something but it does not and cannot explain Kerry's success in the All Ireland Series. Eg on average Kerry have one All Ireland per two Munster titles. In Cork's case its one per six. We're just better when we get on the road to croker.

[Oraisteach]

All right, Monaghan, county of my birth, you're our last chance.  Let's see a great game.

[thebandit]

[Ps. Can I use the "we're the worst club in the county" line when I see you in Taveys on Sunday night   

I said one of the worst .... If you start that I'll look for correct addresses for some so-called 'Blayney men'!!!!

[Hardy]

Good piece on Paul Galvin by Vincent Hogan in yesterday's Indo. I particularly liked the insight on the Aussie thugs.

Outsider on the inside looking back out

By Vincent Hogan
Saturday August 11 2007

"He was grim and cold, he was bad and bold. He was Dangerous Dan McGrew."
YOU don't know him and you probably don't much like him. He understands. That comes with the territory.

All his life, Paul Galvin has found strength in isolation. In picking at private sores. He belongs to a county where footballers, traditionally, have music in their feet. Jazz mostly. Sax and trombone and clarinet. Lazy rhythms. Then they pluck this kid from Lixnaw, hurling territory. A sworn rocker.

This stuff was never in Galvin's dreams. He never went to an All-Ireland homecoming in his life. His only vivid childhood memory of Kerry winning the Sam Maguire is of '86, his Ma roaring at the TV set as Micko's boys came back against Tyrone. He was seven at the time and, when it ended, he went back to the lawn with his hurley.

Football, to him, meant Manchester United. Glamour. A kid's pipedream. Later, he would play a bit with Listowel Celtic, but he was first and foremost a hurling boy. An outsider.

In his remarkable book, Keys to the Kingdom, Jack O'Connor devotes almost three pages to Galvin. He talks of him being "work sometimes", of him having "a tendency to get in trouble on the pitch". But O'Connor is unequivocal about what he brings to Kerry.

Describing Galvin as "the answer to a pile of worries", he says of his type "they'd be my men, hard bastards who'd go through walls for you. I can't get enough of those fellas around the place. They set the tone."

PAUL GALVIN leads a kind of double-life and some see one as being incompatible with the other.

He is a school-teacher. By all accounts, a good one. Next month, he takes up a new post at St Brendan's in Killarney, gentler waters after eight years across 'enemy lines' at Coláiste Chríost Rí in Cork. Last year, when he was sent off in the All-Ireland quarter-final against Armagh, some pundits set upon his character with a scalpel.

On television, one referred to him as "a corner-boy", seeing fit - it seemed - to question his suitability for the classroom. Another, in a Sunday newspaper, offered the view that "if there were All Stars awarded for acting the bollix, Galvin would win all 15". His family chose not to travel to the All-Ireland semi-final against Cork.
He rode the storm. He seethed.

This isn't the story of a wounded angel though. Galvin doesn't profess to any purity of soul. In Keys to the Kingdom, O'Connor also reveals his possession of a "little black book", in which Galvin writes down the names of people who "pissed him off".

That image expresses an ocean. Galvin's strength is his capacity to channel energy, good and bad. To remember who he is, where he came from and what brought him here.

"I have to keep proving myself," he says impassively. "And, to do that, I have to keep working very, very hard. Maybe this feeling of being an outsider is what keeps me going. The slights I might have had along the way. I always keep them in my head.

"I would never think of myself as an established player. You can't in Kerry. Maybe some of the greats can, fellas like Darragh Ó Sé and Gooch. But I'm not a Gooch. I have to keep on the edge and that means always having an angle.

"I'd be quite conspiratorial the way I work out things in my own mind."

His first three Championship games pretty much armed him for the hard road. Clare, Cork, then Limerick in '04. He was taken off. He was dropped. His marker got the TV vote for man of the match. The tea leaves had only bad news.

Accolades
Yet, he hung tough. Kerry won the All-Ireland, Galvin collected the 1,000th All Star. Last season, they got the old canister again and Galvin made another All Star selection. Two All-Irelands and two All Stars in three seasons. Not a bad haul for a hurling boy.

He loves this life now, yet it makes him wonder too.

His best friend on the Kerry panel used to be Eamonn Fitzmaurice. Eamonn didn't make the cut this year and retired. Watching him leave set Galvin thinking about the strange tyranny of the lives they lead. Fitzmaurice won more than most as a player but, when his time was up, he just left with a pat on the back. That jarred a little.
You see, not long ago, Jimmy Deenihan told Galvin a story of this year's Munster final day in Killarney. He stores it now.

Jimmy, an old Kerry legend and a stalwart with Finuge (where Galvin plays his club football), met an American at the game. The American had, literally, just followed the crowd out of curiosity to Fizgerald Stadium. He'd bought a ticket at the stile. He'd sat, slack-jawed through the contest.

Coming away, he tried to articulate his sense of wonder to Deenihan. At the atmosphere. The pace of the game. The physicality. Then Deenihan told him something that the American just wouldn't swallow.

That the stars of the show were amateurs. Ordinary boys who'd be working on Monday morning. And the American spun away from him, all but slapping his sides, laughing maniacally. Hooting at the thought of it. Amateurs indeed. Hysterical.

"Do you know this party line fellas have about pay-for-play?" says Galvin now, stiffening in his chair. "Where they say 'No, we don't want that. We just want to be looked after better.' I think that's a joke. Just fellas being politically correct.

"I was interviewed for a magazine recently and I said 'Yeah, I'd love pay-for-play!' And the fella interviewing me said 'Maybe we better not say that.' Why not? Why take the big step of letting the soccer and rugby boys into Croke Park, why be that open-minded and still push amateurism on the boys who have made the GAA what it is?

"I don't think the GAA can justify it much longer. Players are going to resent this when they see all the money being generated. I mean Kerry look after us well, but something dramatic is going to happen in the GAA. It has to.

"They can no longer justify what's going on. How much bigger is it going to get? I just think it's a joke at this stage and I've no bother saying it."

You ask him if he is a member of the GPA?

"No!"

Why?

"I'm just not, that's it. I was, but I'm not now."

You were unimpressed?

"Yerra, I'm not too sure what's going on there."

In what way?

"I don't know what they're doing. They need to get a hold of something. Of an issue and nail it."

He changes the subject. He wants to be sure that the interview doesn't depict him as a moaner. This isn't his thing. He has mixed views of media and how they dress things. They like to pigeon-hole. To caricature. To view everything in straight lines.

Of late, he senses he's being prejudged. In the Munster final, he was booked for his part in an altercation with Cork's Noel O'Leary. Yet, TV pictures showed O'Leary's boot swinging in Galvin's direction. The Cork man served a one-month suspension.

Galvin says that he is paying for how people see him.

He talks of another incident in that game, of tracking back and tackling James Masters as he came in along the end-line. Of a free being given and a point being scored. "It was never a foul," he argues.

"But I can sense it coming now. You just give a dog a bad name. That day against Cork, I just knew that my reputation had gone before me. Especially from last year and the big hullabaloo. The way I was labelled by certain pundits. Referees definitely have their eye on me now.

"The Sunday Game was only the tip of the iceberg last year. Look, I'm not moaning about it. It didn't affect me high up or low down last year. I mean I've been in scrapes since I was that high (spreading his palm about a foot from the ground). I know I'm no angel.

"But maybe it's having an effect on how people judge me this summer."
THIS IS NO apologia for what's gone before. It can't be. Galvin has been in enough bad places to know that there's a price to pay.

Not long after Kerry's defeat to Tyrone in the 2005 All-Ireland final, he was sent off while playing for Finuge against Ballylongford in the North Kerry final. A young Ballylongford player sustained a broken jaw in the incident, for which Galvin received a six-month suspension (subsequently cut to four after representations to the injured player's family from Jack O'Connor).

He understands too that, had Armagh won last year's quarter-final, the repercussions could have been ruinous to his inter-county career.

Galvin admits: "I was praying on the sideline, saying 'God, don't let this go wrong'. We won that game but, for a while, it was close to going belly-up. Don't think I don't know that. Because, if it had, I'd be gone. I might never have got a Kerry jersey again. That's how close it was.

"That day I was silly. It could have blown up in my face. I'm always conscious of that. Of the need to be careful. But then, I'm no good if ... Look, I can't stroll out there like Gooch and wait for it to happen."

Regrets? He's had plenty. But his style invites conflict. He is ravenous (and fearless) in pursuit of a ball. He plays without compromise. He hunts, scavenges, presses the space around a ball-carrier. In other words, he's not quite cut from the traditional stone of a Kerry footballer.

Galvin's a maverick who, maybe, occasionally suffers for his difference.

"Maybe there's been one or two incidents I regret," he accepts.

"But I've been sent off only once with Kerry. So, sometimes, I just don't know what it's all about. Maybe it's because people associate Kerry football with the greats, the Mikeys, the Jackos and the Gooches.

"Then I come along and I'm doing stuff Kerry footballers aren't supposed to do.

"I mean, sometimes I look at it and I wonder where did I get the name from? Who have I ever lamped? Who have I ever opened up? Who have I ever stamped on or head-butted? Or punched? Or kicked? Really? One red card in 30-odd games for Kerry? It doesn't really stand up.

"I'm not painting myself as an angel, because I'm not. Have I done a few things I regretted? I have probably, yeah. I might say to myself 'I shouldn't have done that. But it's done now. You can't go back. Power on.'"

Reputation
Famously, he was sin-binned before the ball had even been thrown in for last year's infamous second Test in the now suspended International Rules series against Australia.

The game descended into a wretched fiasco and Galvin watched the first 18 minutes from the sideline.

He had been drawn into an altercation with a muscle-bound Aussie called Chance Bateman.

His memories of the day capture the prevailing thread of farce.

"Sure we were walking around in the parade beforehand and the Aussies were yapping over at (Graham) Geraghty, 'We're going to f***ing get you!' All this s**t. And I'm just going 'Aw man! Am I mad here?'

"Next thing, this guy comes at me, all dreadlocks, shouting and hopping off me. So I just let fly once or twice. Sure, t'was the only way. Because he was going to do it if I didn't. And that was that. I missed the worst of it.

"I couldn't believe it when I got to the line. Tadhg (Kennelly) was on the ground in agony.

"I mean I'm off before the ball has even been thrown in and I'm wondering 'How did he get here before me?'

"But he'd just been nailed by a team-mate from Aussie Rules. A knee into the back.

"When I heard Hall had done Tadhg, I was thinking 'Anything goes here, I might be safer where I am'."

The series left Galvin with a low opinion of the visitors and their motives.

He senses they just travelled with a bully's charter.

"I remember one guy, especially," he says. "Massive, with black hair. He had no interest in playing at all. For the two games, he was just acting the maggot. So why did they bring him?

"They brought a lot of guys like that. Guys with no interest. All they wanted was to break us up and laugh at us then. They're looking at us as bums, amateurs. Laughing at us. There's no respect. That's the problem I have. The Aussie boys look down on us because we're amateurs.

"And yet, a lot of them are only mouth. If you do go for them, they're not too sure what to do. All they do is give off the oul' macho image. But, when they have to back it up, some of them can't. Looking back, we probably had a team that was too young and too light. They didn't do that to the John McDermotts, did they?"

Would he play the game again? His response is admirably honest. "Well, you take a selfish view. Would I like to go to Australia for three weeks? Yes, I would."

TOMORROW, the challenge is to rope down Monaghan now the other bulwarks of Ulster football - Armagh and Tyrone - have been breached.

Galvin daren't glimpse beyond it. He suggests that Kerry's form has been "scratchy" this summer and that the six-week break from the Munster final leaves them, essentially, starting cold. There is also the sense of still acclimatising to a new voice in the dressing-room.

O'Connor placed a big trust in Galvin and he likes to think he repaid that. But yesterday is history and history is worthless now.

"Jack is no good to me now," he says. "We had plenty of run-ins, but I'm inclined to have them anyway. I tend to talk straight. But it's all about Pat O'Shea for me now. And Pat owes me nothing. So the ball's in my court again. It's up to me to prove myself, to prove I'm good enough."

Same as it ever was.

[Bogball XV]

I'm taking Monaghan to scrape through - 2 pt victory - why do I set myself up for this ridicule I wonder??

[clarshack]

monaghan on top early on and look sharp. are we in for a shock?

[clarshack]

monghan 4 up. looks like the 6 week break has done kerry harm.

[tyssam5]

Harsh tellow for Mone, but Clerkin lucky to get away with high tackle on the Tyroneman.

Monaghan wasting too much ball, think Kerry will claw them back soon, Mon still 3 up though.

[tyssam5]

Gppd save, Woods should have took his point. Kerry FB line doing well. Some 'meaty' challenges. Mon need to keep discipline though, giving Kerry handy frees.

[tyssam5]

0.8 1.5 now. Two YC in Mon FB line now, wonder will they have to bring Corey bck again?

[clarshack]

plenty of big hits going in. tyrone never even put a shoulder in last week.