Galway v Clare

[Sidney]

@Malarkey

The Sligo Rovers book dates from 1997. ES was trying to beome the Irish Nick Hornby, following the huge success of Fever Pitch (1992). There are dung beetles out there less adept in the opportunism stakes. Seven years later, ES had set about reinventing himself as ‘A GAA Fanatic’ for The Road To Croker (2004).

Most books about sport are “opportunistic”. When reading books like those two by Sweeney I’d be more interested in whether they’re any use or not. I thought both were pretty entertaining.

I’d have thought that it’s not at all implausible to be both a Sligo Rovers supporter and a GAA fanatic.

@Malarkey

He is a spectacularly bad writer. The Photograph (2000) bids fair as the worst Irish novel of the last 50 years. Have a gander at the descriptions of gaelic football matches, the descriptions of the Joe Dolan type character’s sex life. Same old story: an Irish ‘writer’ trying to make himself appear ‘sophisticated’ by satirizing ‘De Valera’s Ireland’. Those people without imagination and talent – George Byrne, Julian Gough, Declan Lynch, Dermot Morgan et al – go this low road. Slight credit where slight credit is due: ES at least desisted from trying to hammer a novelistic nail into the anvil of severe mediocrity.

As previously stated his newspaper columns are usually dreadful. They’re like something put together in a pub for a pub audience. He’s been phoning it in for years.

Not sure what your beef with Lynch or Morgan is, apart from their varying levels of dislike for the GAA.

Lynch generally writes good columns in a shit newspaper.

If ever anything deserved to be mercilessly mocked, it was “De Valera’s Ireland”, as you put it.

[Malarkey]

Maybe so in general about sports books (although I would query this nostrum) but the passage from a LOI fanatic to a GAA fanatic in less than seven years is the quintessence of journo opportunism. If you like those two books, you like those books. I think they are half successful bilge. Then again, my aesthetic standards would be way higher than your criteria.

DM had certain small abilities. DL is putrid on any level. His Sindo columns…? Embarrassing, as per his fluffing of BO’C’s television career. You are way too impressed by someone having a national print column. DL is beyond dreadful.

I realize the vacuities of satirizing ‘De Valera’s Ireland’ represent a touchy point, because you are fond of the small low road. But so it goes…

[backinatracksuit]

I’d be surprised if 1000 people read the Red Army book,

But I know lots of hardcore LOI and GAA fanatics, that’s hardly unusual?

[Sidney]

@Malarkey

Maybe so in general about sports books (although I would query this nostrum) but the passage from a LOI fanatic to a GAA fanatic in less than seven years is the quintessence of journo opportunism. If you like those two books, you like those books. I think they are half successful bilge. Then again, my aesthetic standards would be way higher than your criteria.

Maybe there was no passage though, maybe they were always two cars running on parallel lanes on the same carriageway, and one alighted the slip road at one exit, while one got off seven exits later.

@Malarkey

DM had certain small abilities. DL is putrid on any level. His Sindo columns…? Embarrassing, as per his fluffing of BO’C’s television career. You are way too impressed by someone having a national print column. DL is beyond dreadful.

If I was impressed by somebody having a national print column I’d be praising Sweeney’s or Eoghan Harris’s or Stephen Collins’s.

@Malarkey

I realize the vacuities of satirizing ‘De Valera’s Ireland’ represent a touchy point, because you are fond of the small low road. But so it goes…

I love travelling on both the wide, elevated road, like the one over the Pennines on the M62 or the (Johnny) Brenner Pass, and the narrow, low road like the one out to the local dump on the Headford Road just outside Galway.

The narrow, low road is great for throwing out toxic stuff which needs to be thrown out.

[flattythehurdler]

Crikey, the m62 over the pennines is as unlikeable as it gets. Rochdale to the left, Brady and hindley to the right, and traffic everywhere.
It gives me the creeps.
As you were.

[Sidney]

To be honest I was just trying to think of any sort of big, wide, elevated road, mate.

Maybe it’s proof that the big, wide, elevated road isn’t so beautiful.

[flattythehurdler]

That one isn’t.
I’d be fond of small roads low and high myself.

[Malarkey]

We fundamentally disagree. So there is no value in stretching the elastic of this disagreement.

One last thing: Eoghan Harris…? Boring and predictable. The one thing a good columnist cannot be is boring and predictable. A Stickie narcissist turned Neo Liberal narcissist.

More significantly, EH disgraced himself with An Tost Fada (2012), his Peter Hart-derived ‘documentary’. Even John A Murphy, hardly a sneaking regarder, Hush Puppy variety or otherwise, called out EH.

[Sidney]

Eoghan Harris is a gobshite.

[Special_Olympiakos]

Read him on Sunday first time in about 18 months. He’s all over the shop somehow trying to link varadkar with sf to destroy Martin the only politician who stands up for Ireland kind of thing.
He’s really lost what few marbles he had left

[Breaking_my_balls]

PM, is that you again?

[the_rattler]

Harris lost all cred when he cried for fianna fail in the 07 election

[Malarkey]

Too true, amongst many other bells.

[Malarkey]

And there we tee totally agree.

[Malarkey]

So true… Every Sunday is the same bilge.

Boring and predictable, as mentioned.

[anon67715551]

Just when there’s a possible internet haggling match between perceived intellectual heavyweights over the prowess of some quasi-successful “scribe” - in jumps the “I’ve skin in the game here” merchants to ruin the thing.

The internet is serious business. @flattythehurdler you could have kept our beak out of it cos you ruined it. Who gives one solid fuck about the M62.

[Sidney]

@anon67715551

Who gives one solid fuck about the M62.

Rugby League fans.

[flattythehurdler]

You what mate?