16,870 attended the Dublin v Mayo match at Dr. Hyde Park last year. Iâd imagine that would go down to about 14k were there a repeat clash this year. The buzz has gone right out of the Mayo support since the 2021 All-Ireland final. Theyâve had enough for now anyway.
Theyâll never have enough bless them.
Itâs reasonably well believed that 2025 will be Aidoâs swansong in the green and red. Likely therefore the support will mass behind them for the last hurrah! They have a history of rallying round those who just came up short in the pursuit of the Celtic cross as witnessed in their noble gesture toward the late Dermot Earley on his final day.
Or mallow or clonakilty
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Good weather for Munster hurling games on Sunday. Tough break for the living in the past brigade.
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This is what the split season simpletons are now reduced to try and justify themselves. Desperately looking at the weather forecast and overlooking the next four days of rain and cold forecast to the vague hope it might not rain on Sunday.
This vague hope it wonât rain on a Sunday in April apparently justifies the mutilation of the GGA championships.
You couldnât make these simpletons up.
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Tommy definitely looks in here. Surprised at him not knowing Dennis Taylorâs victory was on a non-bank holiday Sunday night though.
Tommy Martin: The real lesson from Roryâs win - stop fiddling with sport
The great thing about McIlroyâs Masters win was that everyone knew it was big.
Rory McIlroy celebrates on the 18th green after winning his playoff during the final round of the Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, USA. Photo by Kyle Terada/Sportsfile
Wed, 16 Apr, 2025 - 15:04
Itâs four days on and people are still talking about Rory McIlroy.
New angles keep coming. How many majors can Rory win? How many majors can Rory win this year? What Leinster can learn from Rory McIlroy. Arise, Sir Rory â King Charles to knight golf champ. The lonely passion of Harry Diamond. Masters mindset â 10 business lessons from Rory McIlroyâs triumph.
The last one is LinkedIn. Iâd avoid there for a while if I were you, unless you agree that hitting your ball into Raeâs Creek on Masters Sunday is the exact same thing as missing a quarterly sales target.
Four days, and everyone still wants to talk about it. I ring my parents, who normally prefer an episode of Death In Paradise on a Sunday evening, but they watched it too. I got to the barbers, and he talks about the drama of the final round for the entire duration of a haircut. Admittedly only ten minutes these days, but still.
I take my son to get a check up on his braces. The orthodontist usually likes to explain what he is doing while he is rummaging around with pliers and wire cutters.
I think he feels the need to justify why I am paying the price of small second-hand hatchback just so the kid might get a slightly better looking girlfriend some day. But this week he is all Rory this, Harry Diamond that and I almost forget about the hatchback for a moment.
A few people have pointed out that Sunday night reminded them of the Dennis Taylor snooker final in 1985. Thatâs exactly right. Both protagonists were charismatic Nordies taking on dour automatons.
For Taylor against Steve Davis, read Rory and every other golfer (apart from Shane! Please, donât swear at me Shane!). Both stretched on into the night and were unbearably tense expositions of the limits of human performance at things that donât require that much exercise.
1985 was late on a bank holiday Monday night, this was a Sunday, so unless you are a reprobate you were probably watching both at home with family. I remember my granny watching that one with us; she loved the snooker, which was mandatory for grannies at the time.
This one I watched with the kid with the future girlfriend, who was so gripped by the action that he stopped machine gunning people to death on his PlayStation for most of the back nine.
Most people, even the LinkedIn guff merchants, agreed that it was great, the whole thing, everything about it. Rory. The Grand Slam. The ups, the downs. Nick Faldoâs barnet. Butch Harmonâs wobbly lower lip. Harry Diamond and the way he might look at you. Augusta. The Masters.
The great thing about it was that everyone knew it was big. The Peter Allis of the barbering world, the orthodontist who definitely doesnât drive a small hatchback, my parents skipping Midsummer Murders for a night. You didnât need to know anything about golf or sport or even life to know this was big.
Thatâs because the Masters is always there and always the same. They donât fiddle around with the format or move it around the calendar. The course is the same as it always is. The only way it changes is when a storm blows a tree down or when they buy some land off a neighbouring municipal course to push back a tee box, because why should ordinary people have golf too?
Itâs the same plinky plonky piano music, the same birdsong, the same flowers, the same cheese sandwiches. Well, not actually the same cheese sandwiches, but you get the point. There are always old duffers milling around the place in green jackets (Faldo again). They do replace these, but the old ones are so rich that they serve as excellent fertiliser and are therefore cremated and scattered on the flowers.
The point is that Roryâs win, as well as everything else, is another argument for not fiddling around with sports things. Golf has been fiddling around like mad lately, or being fiddled with more accurately. By the Saudis mostly, who are frankly fiddling with everybody. There has been so much fiddling with LIV and the PGA and TGL and FedEx this and Rolex that, that nobody watches golf anymore, apart from the Masters, precisely because they know it hasnât been fiddled with.
And itâs been a good run of that sort of thing lately. Take the recent Grand National, where Willie Mullins, Irelandâs most composed man, broke down in a blubbering mess after saddling the winner for his son, Patrick. Willie Mullins has only ever shown one emotion publicly before â hat-wearing contentment â so it took something special to get him crying like a parent who has just seen the orthodontistâs bill.
Thatâs because the Grand National is the Grand National. Yes they have reduced the field and lowered the fences because â woke nonsense! â people donât like watching horses die on telly anymore. But it has fundamentally been the same thing for nearly 200 years â horses jumping over lots of fences cheered on by Scousers wearing too much fake tan (pretty sure I read that in a Jane Austen).
The same day as the Grand National was on, they were advertising coverage of something called the Dubai World Cup, which despite also involving horses and being called a World Cup, nobody was remotely interested in and certainly not crying over, because it was clearly something that had been fiddled.
The Champions League has been endlessly fiddled with â indeed, might be described as fundamentally a fiddle â but its best bit is the knockout stages, which are basically the same as they always were, even back when it was Puskas and Di Stefano rather than Yamal and DembĂŠlĂŠ trying to calculate aggregate scores in their heads. Yes, they have sadly fiddled with the away goals rule â source of the best comedy TV arithmetic this side of 8 Out Of Ten Cats Do Countdown â but it is essentially unfiddled.
Best example of all comes closest to home. The GAAâs decision to move the All-Ireland finals out of their traditional September slots shows the dangers of sports fiddling. Where once the association had these sacred dates etched into the national psyche, now the finals are some vague time in midsummer, when everyone is mowing the lawn or slapping sunscreen on a child in an overcrowded French campsite.
So thatâs the big lesson from Roryâs win â stop the fiddling. Put that in your LinkedIn.
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Thatâs a great piece. There is a time and a place for reform in sports and activitity based events but the last 10 years is a mess.
What I find odd about the GGA though is that they alternate between out and out commercialism and dullard decisions like moving their most well know competitions out of calendar.
Lads quoting an article by Tommy Martin is a new low for the things were better in 1989 brigade. I was at Cork.v Waterford Munster hurling championship first round game in 1989. Some 12,000 at the game and Waterford beat by 16 points if i remember correctly. Yet times were better then.
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Hard to believe sky hasnât got more viewers for a Liverpool game or something. I find this hard to believe.
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1990 actually. I was a year outđ
Different measurements
Thatâs a fluff piece
Waterford have been regularly beaten by cricket scores since the round robin came in and that format has returned them to the bad old days.
Back in 1990 it would take people three days to go to a match.
The headline readers lap that shit up
For people in rural areas of Waterford getting to Thurles then was the equivalent of getting to La Rochelle now.
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Not 1989 anyway. We bet Cork after a replay in 89 and disgraced ourselves in the Munster Final. Kevin Cashman described us as the Black and Tans in Blue and White after the game. We were hammered plenty of times by Cork in three quarter empty stadia in the 70/80/90s but 1989 wasnât one of them.
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The Munster final didnât go very well if I remember rightly. A game that was live on television!
It went quite badly. It was the first Munster Final broadcast live and we were lucky it wasnât the last. We had two men sent off (Damien Byrne and Noelle Crowley) and lost 0-27 to 3-9 in an era when conceding 0-27 was absolutely unheard of. Going back on the train I had to listen to Tipp fellas saying things like âI wouldnât beat my cattle the way your fellas bet Nicky Englishâ.
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At least I donât recall Nicky laughing.
Tipperary v Waterford has to be the most played Munster final pairing since 1989. 7 times I make it.
Itâs my least favourite Munster final pairing.
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