Mugsy continued

[red hander]

Look at the guys who say Mugsy fouled the ball when he scored that wonder goal.
They want to take away any glory the man might get cos they don't have the balls to be a bit different and to take the flak with that.

I didn't read the original thread, but got the jist of it - neither he nor any other GAA player should be named in the tabloids.

Just please stop saying that he didn't foul that ball!

What? Like Peter Canavan did for Sean McLaughlin's equaliser  in 1995 when the Dubs 'needed an All Ireland' and there might have been famine and pestilence all over tbe land if they didn't get one?

[reddgnhand]

I believe under certain circumstances, the likes of Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler could also be civil and good craic as well

How many times have you met and spoke with Mugsy?

[heffo]

Look at the guys who say Mugsy fouled the ball when he scored that wonder goal.
They want to take away any glory the man might get cos they don't have the balls to be a bit different and to take the flak with that.

I didn't read the original thread, but got the jist of it - neither he nor any other GAA player should be named in the tabloids.

Just please stop saying that he didn't foul that ball!

What? Like Peter Canavan did for Sean McLaughlin's equaliser  in 1995 when the Dubs 'needed an All Ireland' and there might have been famine and pestilence all over tbe land if they didn't get one?

Aside from both being fouls, I can't see the connection between Canavan & Mulligan..

[nrico2006]

Heffo wind your neck in!

[Fuzzman]

Did any of ye see this article in the Irish Indo on Sunday?


Mugsy's playing it one day at a time
Owen Mulligan tells John O'Brien that after a frustrating injury layoff, he's keen to make the headlines again -- for the right reasons

He thinks back and smiles ruefully at the grim irony of it. He'd passed the winter in good spirits, enjoyed the company of his mates, sometimes casting the odd rueful glance back at the summer and their unexpected exit against Meath in the All-Ireland quarter-final. Spring was approaching and he reckoned he'd never felt better. The blood coursed around in his veins. He was flying, he tells you. "Flying."

He'll admit it rightly enough. A new season would appear on the horizon, Mickey Harte would tell them sombrely that there was work to be done and a knot would form in his belly. He'd never been able to acquire that grá for the hard yards. But this year he felt different. This year he felt fresh and focused. Then came March, a league game against Laois, a tweak in the back of his left thigh. Snap. A torn hamstring and the grim certainty of weeks, maybe months, of frustration.

He won't lie to you. They've known tougher times in Tyrone this past decade but still it wasn't easy. Himself and Raymie Mulgrew beavering away in the gym downstairs in the Glenavon Hotel in Cookstown, trying to restore strength to aching limbs. All the while there have been streams of texts, from Brian Dooher, Brian McGuigan, Joe McMahon. "Keep the head up, Mugsy," they'd say. "Take it one day at a time." He knows they worry about him. The day they stop is the day he'll start worrying himself.

Ach, but they'd keep you going, he thinks. What age is Dooher now? Must be 40 if not a day. "He's 33 or 34 now or something and I'd say he's one of the fittest boys there. You see him playing week in, week out and he shuts all the critics up. Against Donegal last year he was unbelievable. He's a good fella too, a good captain."

The other lads shame him really. The likes of McGuigan and Kieran Hughes. He's soldiered in the trenches with them for the guts of a decade now and still he sees them bursting out of their skin, in better shape than ever. And Owen Mulligan? Well, he knows he'll never be able to embrace the spare, ascetic lifestyle of others around him but so be it. They inspire him to be the best he can be. On the biggest days, it has been enough.

At his core there is a simplicity and honesty that charms them. With Mulligan, there are no glib pronouncements or idle patter. Suggest that he is heading inexorably towards the veteran stage now, that he is the last remaining link with the full-forward line that devastated Kerry in the 2005 All-Ireland final, and he shrugs knowingly, recognising where the conversation is going. That sense of leadership, the ability to lead by mere presence alone, isn't part of his DNA and he would never pretend otherwise.

He can't be sure where the game is taking him, just that when he's Dooher's age he won't be out there, bursting a gut to regain fitness, to have one more spin on the All-Ireland merry-go-round. In three years, he'll be 30 and he'd like to think he'd have another All-Ireland in his back pocket and that he'd be satisfied with that, ready to go back to the club that reared him and to which he feels a heavy debt he'll never be able to properly repay.

He's never been the analytical type, seeking answers to questions that would merely drive him to distraction anyway. He leaves that to sportswriters and to the people who constantly ask him about that goal he scored against Dublin in 2005 that ignited his and Tyrone's season. Three years on he is no closer to understanding where it came from or the strange torpor that had gripped his game and sapped his confidence in the weeks preceding it. Why the need to know anyway?

It has always been his way. When tragedy befell Paul McGirr during an Ulster minor championship game in Omagh in 1997, Mulligan was standing behind the goal, unaware that a year on he would be drafted in as the talented forward's replacement. He came into a squad that was bonded tightly by adversity, driven by a spirit he could scarcely understand. They surfed a wave of emotions and he allowed himself to be carried with it.

Eleven years have passed now, much of it in a hazy blur. He thinks of 2003 and the days leading up to the final, the cloying nerves he felt, the relentless banter on the streets, the overwhelming feeling shared by two counties that this was a game they simply couldn't afford to lose. And then there was Francie. He remembers words and Bellew's suffocating closeness and afterwards a warm embrace and a sense of comradeship formed out of the ashes of battle.

"You know, I still haven't watched the full match of 2003," he says smiling. "I will sit down one day and watch it but not yet. It's just a thing I have about it. I don't even remember much about it. Just the nerves I felt, the deadly pressure up around the two borders. The second time around in 2005 was more relaxed, more enjoyable. In 2003, we had to get that monkey off our back. That was the important thing."

Sometimes the strangeness of it all sinks in. A couple of years back Frank McGuigan came up the few miles from Ardboe to train Cookstown and would deliver speeches that left the hairs on the back of Mulligan's neck standing. Here was this great footballer, arguably the best to have pulled on the shirt of Tyrone, and yet he had no All-Ireland medals while Mulligan sat there with two. Nothing crystallised better what they had achieved, the sense of privilege that belonged to them and how precious a thing it was.

Home gives him that too, its rootedness and simplicity. Home made him. Before Tyrone, he'll tell you, there was Cookstown. His father Eugene had won an All-Ireland vocational schools' title with Tyrone. His brother Stephen was playing with the club, his friend Stephen Conway with the county. These were his first heroes. Having Canavan as a teacher and mentor at school was a bonus.

Cookstown and the little rituals of home life have kept him right. Always before he left for games, his mother Heather would sprinkle him with holy water while Eugene, his closest confidant and critic, administered his final pep talk. Then he'd visit his grandmother, Minnie, who lives next door and bow his head as she recited a prayer. Maybe he didn't share their absolute faith, but the ritual was the thing.

And as he talks about the blessedness of his life, it brings home how errant he was when he got involved in an altercation outside a local pub last month and became a feature of the front pages of newspapers at a time when he was largely absent from the back of them. "I shouldn't have been in the place I was," he says. "But when you're injured and you've a lot of time on your hands, you get frustrated. That's what it was."

Unless you've been away on a long holiday or living in a cave, you'll know the bare details. A day after Tyrone were dumped out of the Ulster championship by Down, Mulligan was drinking with friends in the Conway Inn, a few hundred yards from his home on Cookstown's long main drag. An argument started, spilled onto the street outside and when the police arrived, Mulligan was questioned and released without charge. A day later, the matter was settled and put to bed.

Even though he thinks the papers blew it all out of proportion, he won't sit here and play the victim. It isn't his way. That morning he'd been in the gym as usual but nowhere else that day was he where he should have been. The day kicked off with drinks while they watched Cavan play Armagh on television, three months of frustration finding its release in the noxious fumes of alcohol. He offers details as an explanation, he is keen to clarify, and not as justification. He doesn't mind that there is another side to him that goes unreported, random acts of generosity he commits that don't make for good copy or go against the thuggish stereotype that some people are only too happy to accept as fact. In his club they will tell you about the stand they are building largely on the back of the £30,000 they raised when the boots Mulligan wore against Dublin in 2005 were donated for auction.

"At the end of the day, I don't mind that stuff like that doesn't get reported. I'm not going to sit here and say 'oh that should be in the papers, all the good stuff'. Don't get me wrong. I don't want the bad stuff either and then all the phonecalls from friends and family wondering what's going on. I let them down. I let the club down and I let the county down. It was stupid what I did."

He lives with his mistakes, though, and ignores the rest, the baseless rumours about his lifestyle that float freely in cyberspace that he has shrugged off for half a decade and more now. For a player of such apparently brittle confidence, he has worn it well. If he didn't, he thinks, he'd never have had any place in the white heat of an Ulster championship dogfight. Peter Canavan explained it years ago. If he could survive in the cauldron with Francie Bellew, there wasn't much that life could throw at him that he couldn't handle. "I'm never on the internet," he says. "I don't buy the papers so it doesn't bother me. You hear plenty of things but so what? When you're playing football for Tyrone you need to be thick-skinned.

"That's something you learn quickly enough. Sure the worst stick I get is from the lads at work but you know they mean well too. So does Mickey [Harte]. I wouldn't say he was okay about it but he was supportive. We make mistakes and that's it. You live with them and get on with it."

Getting on with it is thinking about Louth next Saturday and another step on the road to regaining his sharpness. Against Down, he was a frustrated spectator but he couldn't understand the level of pessimism he detected among the Tyrone supporters around him. From where he's standing, things haven't looked so good for so long. Key players are returning from injury, appetites are sharpening again and Tyrone look set to thunder once more through the qualifiers. Or so they hope anyway.

A week ago, Mulligan came through 70 minutes in a club championship fixture against Eglish. Cookstown lost and he hardly got a kick, unable to find his way to the pitch of the game. So he left frustrated again but happy that he'd got some playing time behind him at least. He expects Harte will hold him in reserve next Saturday and he'll sit there on the bench, kicking his heels, waiting for the chance to get on and make up for the hurt he knows he's caused his family and friends.

"People say about Tyrone we can't score this or we can't score that, but you seen against Down what we can do," he says. "I just want to get back and help in any way I can. Maybe it's too soon against Louth. I probably won't be starting but I'll be pushing the lads who are. I just want to get back into the shape I was in before the Laois game. I want to be buzzing again."

It's the same old story. All that eagerness and pent-up frustration washes around in his bones and Owen Mulligan only knows one sure way to fix it.

[heganboy]

good article- Tyrone, to paraphrase Gerry Adams, haven't gone away you know

[Puckoon]

Mickey Harte wrote about mugsy in his kicking down heavens door book. Said all people see is the hair, or the tattoos, or the pictures of mulligan hanging out with Jordan (the model, not the half back) at night clubs and they make assumptions about him, but that he is actually a very shy fella. You can see that he's a confidence player.  Ive only met the fella once, but a genuine solid man he is.

Thats a good article, and I really liked the part about Tyrone thundering through the qualifiers.

Lets get it done.

[TacadoirArdMhacha]

People will always remember Mugsy as the man who made sure Francie Bellew didnt step out of line or get near an injured Canavan in 2003,

"Mugsy" was roasted in the 2003 final and Canavan, by his own admission, was barely even going for the ball in play during the final.

Good article there. He's hardly the first young fella to be involved in a row after a few pints.

[Puckoon]

People will always remember Mugsy as the man who made sure Francie Bellew didnt step out of line or get near an injured Canavan in 2003,

"Mugsy" was roasted in the 2003 final and Canavan, by his own admission, was barely even going for the ball in play during the final.

Good article there. He's hardly the first young fella to be involved in a row after a few pints.

Ack now TAM - Thats an indulgence if ever I read one. I thought it was a great battle between the two of them.

[tyssam5]

Roasted? 

Is that why Francie was isolated against Mulligan at the edge of the square and was in the book after about 10 mins?

Couple of great frees at the start of the 2nd half was the winning of that game from Mulligan.

[TacadoirArdMhacha]

Couple of great frees at the start of the 2nd half was the winning of that game from Mulligan.

Indeed, scoring frees really is an excellent indication of how you are doing against your marker. 

Francie was well on top of Mulligan throughout the All Ireland Final and his performance was probably one of the main reasons he got an All Star that year.

The game was won for Tyrone far away from their full forward line.

[Zapatista]

I think Mulligan is going to score 10-35 against Louth. All from play

That article has a real feel good factor about ti.

[The Gs Man]

Did any of ye see this article in the Irish Indo on Sunday?



He lives with his mistakes, though, and ignores the rest, the baseless rumours about his lifestyle that float freely in cyberspace that he has shrugged off for half a decade and more now. For a player of such apparently brittle confidence, he has worn it well. If he didn't, he thinks, he'd never have had any place in the white heat of an Ulster championship dogfight. Peter Canavan explained it years ago. If he could survive in the cauldron with Francie Bellew, there wasn't much that life could throw at him that he couldn't handle. "I'm never on the internet," he says. "I don't buy the papers so it doesn't bother me. You hear plenty of things but so what? When you're playing football for Tyrone you need to be thick-skinned.

Wonder is that the GAABoard getting a hit??