Bubbles should be playing in the fucking Open today earning millions the cunt
You are talking complete shite. PH is a fine hurler, and wrisry out, but not remotely âthe best stickman of all.timeâ.
Off top of head, just in recent times, DJ Carey, Austin Gleeson, Eoin Kelly (Mount Sion), Eoin Kelly (Mullinahone), John âBubblesâ OâDwyer, Richie Power Jr, TJ Reid, John Troy and Brian Whelahan were better in both exact terms and in absolute terms. There are others too.
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Aaaa
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Ye may get going early. Iâm at the airport here but the motorway is down to one lane from just before the Portlaoise toll right up to exit 17 with a detour due to roadworks. Itâll be carnage
Horgan the best stickman of all timeâŚ
How many strokes did PH ever make with his back to the goal?
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Donât think Iâve ever seen Noel McGrath take a bad touch, would he be in the mix?
Clare for me. Think they need it more given their age profile. Cork may still be basking in the glory of beating Limerick. But from a Clare perspective would worry about Cleary against Connolly. Anyway cant wait for it and all the festivities after it. Good luck to all the Clare and Cork contingent on here.
Cork have a high ceiling and a low floor, if they play like they really can; I think theyâll do it, but theyâll need to fly as the Clare backs are stickier. Big day for the two Downeyâs, careers made and broken tomorrow. Mouth watering game.
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Is he fuck even in the conversation
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John Tri and the Baby Jesus Tonyo
The real stickmen had to use a smaller boss.
Michael Cleary was a lovely stickman. Tony OâSullivan. Kevin Hennessy and John Fitzgibbon were proper poaching stickmen. The ability to adjust and pull on a moving ball in an instant and rifle to the net is proper sticksmanship. Both were experts and they did it with actual hurleys, not shovels.
A stickman goal I felt was very underrated was one Nicholas English got against Limerick in 1991, where he rounded Tommy Quaid by knocking the ball around him on the ground and then pulled to the net. But it was the control that made it great. It was like Careca devastatingly rounding the Swedish goalkeeper at Italia '90. I canât think of another hurling goal like that off the top of my head.
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That is a very true point about the advantage of the modern hurley.
The poor lads of 100 years ago had to play with glorified hockey sticks. Now wonder you got the ridiculous scorelines you used to get back then. I was having a gander at the scorelines for All-Ireland finals there.
There were a few ânormalâ looking scorelines from 1904 to 1907:
1904: Kilkenny 1-9 Cork 1-8
1905: Cork 5-10 Kilkenny 3-12 (the result of this was overturned because a Cork player was a British Army reservist)
1906: Tipp 3-16 Dublin 3-8
1907: Kilkenny 3-12 Cork 4-8
None of these scorelines would have raised an eyebrow in 1996. What I donât understand is why we had these ânormalâ looking scorelines in that short period only. Did they briefly have hurleys with larger bosses in this period? Or perhaps lighter sliotars? Nothing else makes sense.
Then for 40 or 50 years or so scorelines went haywire, with bizarre scorelines like 9-5 to 1-3 and 5-1 to 1-0.
It wasnât really until the 1950s that scorelines started ânormalisingâ towards what we would come to expect until the point scoring boom of the 21st century.
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Kevin Hennessy was cak handed and completely one sided. Not a great sticknan but still a great goal poacher
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âChristy Ring got married â I hope that puts a stop to his gallopâŚâ
Ahead of the All-Ireland Final, Mick Clifford steps aside from his weekly column to make way for his mother, Aideen Clifford, who has a few pertinent things to say about hurling
Mick Clifford has ceded his weekly column to his mother, Aideen Clifford (nee Gohery) who is writing this week about great Cork hurlers.
SAT, 20 JUL, 2024 - 01:25
Mick Clifford writesâŚ
My mother is 90 years young. She is a native of Mullagh, Co Galway, serious hurling country, but has made her home in Cork City for the last 43 years.
At a recent gathering to celebrate her birthday, I remarked to her friends that in many ways she had gone native in the city. One element of her Corkiness, as far as I observed, is her interest in Cork hurling.
This is frequently expressed through her admiration for DĂłnal Ăg Cusack, whose passion for the game she often references admiringly.
Little did I know that she had far greater history with Cork hurlers.
A few weeks ago, she handed me a piece she had written some years previously but left to gather dust. She had in her younger years occasionally contributed to magazines or newspapers. Anyway, once I had sight of it, I was determined it had to see the light of day.
After negotiating an appropriate fee, and taking the weekend thatâs in it into account, I agreed to hand over this column space to my mother. And here she is, Aideen Clifford nee Gohery, writing about her thing for great Cork hurlers.
Aideen Clifford writesâŚ
I was in New York when Christy Ring got married.
Yes, a long time ago, but I remember it well. You see, I got a letter from my mother â letters were important then, no emails, no mobile phones â and the opening sentence in the letter was as follows:
Yesterday Christy Ring got married. I hope that puts a stop to his gallop.
That was important news â not an idle piece of gossip â for those of us who lived in southeast Galway where hurling was king. At that time in the early 1960s all the small villages and parishes had their own teams.
Christy Ring married Rita Taylor at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Ballinlough, Cork, on September 12, 1962. Pictured with them is Bishop Cornelius Lucey. Picture: Irish Examiner Archive
Places like Tynagh and Killimordaly and Kiltormer all featured in competitive games and there simply was no other sport.
Hurling was all we played. We talked about it, sung about it, dreamed about it.
You got a hurl (not a hurley) at a young age.
I was lucky enough as a seven-year-old to have one made by Larry Deely, the great hurl maker.
Once you had it in your hands, you hurled on the road, in the school yard, in the fields all summer long, and all the time dreaming that one day you might be playing for Galway and be part of fixing what was wrong.
You see, in those days Galway was always on the losing side.
On summer Sundays we used to all pack in to my fatherâs old Prefect car and head for Thurles or Limerick or Ennis only to be on the losing side again.But, for some reason, it was always more humiliating when we were thrashed by Cork.
They were so cocky, so confident that they made us feel small and worthless. Winning, they seemed to believe, was their right and they had their maestro Ring to make it that way.
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And as we slunk out of the stadium following the latest defeat there was always the ubiquitous ballad singer belting out âDe Banksâ lest we forget how they sported and played âneath the green leafy shade.
It hurt. The memory of it still hurts, and deeply.
The years rolled by and where should I find myself in mid-life with my family but in the heart of Cork City. Things had changed for me since my youth, life was busy now with work and family and when we first arrived, house hunting.
But not so my mother.
Glen Rovers full back John Lyons â a relation of Aideen Clifford by marriage â tapping the sliotar out to his team-mate despite being tackled by a St Finbarrs player during a match at the Mardyke in Cork on September 21, 1958. Picture: Irish Examiner Archive
She was still passionate about the game not least because my brother Seamus had gone on to play for the county for over a decade.
After we arrived in Cork I used to ring her on a Sunday night from a phone box on the Model Farm Road and it was there that I told her I had a juicy bit of gossip.
âMammy, somebody famous is living just up the road from us,â I said.
âWho, who?â she wanted to know. Fame in those days was far rarer than it is today. I teased her for a while before revealing my news.
âJimmy Barry Murphy,â I told her.
âMy God,â she replied. âIs there no getting away from them?â
I told her how a friend who had shown me around Cork pointed out his house and went on to list his great achievements.
My mother didnât want to know how many All-Irelands he had because even one for Cork was too many in her book. But from then on, any time she spoke of her daughters in different parts of the country, I was the one who âlives in Cork beside Jimmy Barry Murphyâ.
At last I had my own slice of fame.
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My mother, alas, had passed on to the Great Up Yonder when I had my final brush with famous Cork hurlers.
Over 20 years ago now my only daughter announced her engagement to, yes, a Corkman. A neighbour called to give me the seed, breed, and generation of my future son-in-law.
âYou know who the father is, donât you?â she inquired, as if she was about to extract a skeleton from a cupboard.
âWho?â I pleaded, all sorts of terrible vistas landing on my imagination.
âNot being a Corkwoman I thought you wouldnât but he was the best full-back that Cork ever had,â she said.
âA beautiful hurler, a great Glen Rovers man, John Lyons.â
Glen Rovers hurler John Lyons (centre) watching the refereeâs coin-toss prior to a match in 1958. John Lyons was the father-in-law of Aideen Cliffordâs daughter. Picture: Irish Examiner Archive
Not just a good or great hurler, but a beautiful hurler.
She went on to tell me that John Lyons had won a hatful of All-Irelands in the company of his clubmates Jack Lynch and that man again, Christy Ring.
All those depressing trips to Thurles came back at me.
Now my daughter was married into it. There was to be no escaping these great Cork hurlers.
And what about Sunday?
I will not be at the match. Croke Park is a step too far for someone of my tender years. Instead I will stay here and, as the song says âSit and Dreamâ.
And as the ghosts come peeping around I will perhaps think of those times long ago when nothing but hurling mattered and all the world was young.
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The one they canât enter because they are Senior A not Premier Intermediate?
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Best of luck to all today. If youâre travelling you better be on the road by now!! Safe on the road and get back safe to your family.
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