Off the Ball on Newstalk

Culture
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Ah here for fuck sake you don’t believe that do you?

Right lads here’s the team.

Pat you’re playing corner back. You’ll be playing on Jimmy Doyle. Jimmy is a frustrated musician, married to Mary and has three girls, Martha, Molly and Megan. He’d love a son but Mary has been sterilised. Mary has been knocking around with Joe, a mechanic. Jimmy, who failed Grade 8 on the piano, has reached the glass ceiling in the Bank. To go any further he’ll have to take night classes, but he won’t have the patience for that. He’s in a financial and emotional dead end.

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All fair. Cody seems key to it all though. Success will last as long as he is there. Once he goes they will not be as dominant and other counties seem to be getting up to speed with development squads. Cody influence means Kilkenny have over performed last year or two when everybody thought they were on way down. Their touch was off on Sunday and not what you normally expect from Kilkenny. I think they are beatable this year. If shanahan had gone for goal early and scored it, Waterford might have believed earlier they could win it. Against a different team I think he would have gone for goal but the jersey is powerful.

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Managers will need to pick more Neil McCauley types who have no attachments that can be used to get at them.

Neil McCauley: A guy told me one time, “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” Now, if you’re on me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a… a marriage?

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The danger inherent in that thinking is that effectively everyone sits on their holes waiting for Cody to retire, thinking he is the thing standing between them and success. First up Cody could easily be there for another decade and second he could be replaced by somebody even better, and we might be sitting back thinking, what were they doing sticking with Cody for so long, he was holding them back for years.
The other thing about Maurice not going for the goal and Waterfords demeanour generally is that there is a massive complex about Kilkenny in Waterford that was there long before Cody. We could occasionally beat Cork and Tipperary but we could never beat Kilkenny. Our 57-63 team is one of the greatest teams in the history of hurling and got the better of a Tipperary team that is widely regarded as the second best in the history of the game (after the Kilkenny team of 06-09) but that team absolutely seized up at the sight of a distinctly mediocre Kilkenny outfit, beaten by the jersey. We somehow struggled over the line in a replay in 59, but we blew winning positions in 57 and 63, in both cases due to inexplicable goalkeeping and defensive howlers. And we continue to do it to this day. We wouldn’t have conceded that goal last Sunday to any other team. We over defended the ball fearing Kilkenny cuteness and in our extreme caution, concern whatever we over compensated and made a mistake running into each other. Against anyone else De Burca would have trusted Coughlan to get a touch and would have picked up the break. Similarly with Maurice he wouldn’t have given a shit if it was Cork or Dublin, he’d have gone for it and damn the consequences. Against Kilkenny though, he’d have feared the lift that a miss or a save would have given them and genuinely might have feared that it might have been the only score we’d get, the scar of previous humiliations running deep.

There was a cunt sitting at my shoulder on Sunday who spent the day roaring, No Fear Waterford. For fuck sake. I’ve never heard that before. Why would you shout No Fear unless you were afraid that the players might be afraid. And the whole week the narrative was Waterfords younger players had all beaten Kilkenny in minor matches and so had no fear of them. You’d never hear that if we were playing Cork or Tipperary.

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391

Yes it was

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No it wasn’t. I suspect you fail to understand the meaning of the word.

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Diving, Feigning Injury - all the same thing really. The concept remains constant - cheat to get your opponent sent off.

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@Mac clamped good and proper.

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I have it on good authority Fagan.

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The photo shows nothing. Sure the photo from the weekend just past would have shown Hughes hand close to McCanns head and McCann falling as Hughes was pulling his hand back.

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‘The lowest point came in the final when Philip Jordan ran into Armagh’s Diarmuid Marsden off the ball and went down in anguish, cradling his jaw. The referee was conned and Marsden was dismissed.

‘When Central Council reviewed video footage, they revoked the red card and cleared the Armagh man. In his autobiography, Joe Kernan’s outrage waa still palpable. He wrote of “being disgusted by the actions of at least one Tyrone player who mockingly clapped Diarmuid off”. The video is on YouTube.

‘Afterwards, Marsden - a man of integrity - was distraught that his daughter, when she grew up, would find out that her father had been sent off in an All-Ireland Final. As Kernan remarked after the red card was revoked: “Thankfully, at least a good man’s name was cleared”.

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Tyrone player mocked Marsden after wrongful dismissal in 2003 final
Joe Kernan

15/10/2011

I’ve seen a lot on football fields and I have to say that nothing ever annoyed or frustrated me more than what happened to Diarmaid Marsden in the 2003 All-Ireland final. I’ll say it straight – his dismissal against Tyrone cost Armagh the title.

I haven’t a doubt that if Diarmaid had been there over that crucial finishing stretch, Armagh would have won the two-in-a-row. Now, if he had done something that warranted a dismissal we could live with it.
Do the crime, do the time and all that.
In this case, there was no crime but plenty of time. Well, certainly enough to sway what had been a tight, tense game where inches were always going to be crucial. Instead of having Diarmaid’s intelligent presence on the run-in, we were down to 14 men after he had been sent off by referee Brian White.
Tyrone’s Philip Jordan ran at Diarmaid, who instinctively put up his arm in self-defence. Jordan went down as if he’d been hit by a crowbar, the Tyrone crowd starting baying and suddenly Diarmaid was in the referee’s firing line.
If White saw the incident clearly, I have no idea how he could have sent Diarmaid off on a straight red card, which implied he had been guilty of striking. Was the ref serious? A guy is running straight at you and you’re supposed to stand there with your hands down by your sides and take what’s coming?
I was disgusted by the actions of at least one Tyrone player who mockingly clapped Diarmaid off the pitch. There’s an honour among players – or at least there should be – and to see a man gloating at an opponent’s bad luck in an All-Ireland final is something I could never understand. It’s not the GAA where I was brought up or one I ever want to be part of.
Diarmaid’s dismissal meant he would miss the first game of the 2004 championship and placed a black mark against his name which had to be challenged.
We were furious that he had been wronged. Diarmaid was conscious that, among other things, his little girl, Lara, who was too young to understand at the time, might ask him in years to come why was he sent off in an All-Ireland final. He could explain as much as he wanted that it was an injustice, but the record books would show otherwise unless he had his name cleared.
You would have thought that the Games Administration Committee might have decided in favour of Diarmaid on the basis of video evidence. But, no, he was suspended and we had no option but to set about having it overturned. The final port of call in that frustrating process was Central Council and, to their credit, they acknowledged that an injustice had been done. The suspension was struck out and while it was of no value to us or Diarmaid in footballing terms, it at least cleared a good man’s name.

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Oh dear

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Is that the sound of @Nembo_Kid being mugged off good and proper?

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The GAA always overturn technically correct red cards. Diarmuid Connolly struck a lad more than once and managed to have his red card overturned.

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Simulation a danger to the GAA
Joe Brolly
on May 17, 2012

WITH 12 minutes to go in the 1972 hurling final, the Cats were in dire straits, trailing by eight points to a rampant Cork.

Eddie Keher won a ball near the touchline and took a ferocious belt of a hurl in his unguarded face. Undaunted, he soloed through and drove a remarkable goal to the net. He turned and went back to his position, his face a mask of blood from the deep gash over his eye. The stitches could wait. Keher’s goal launched a legendary turnaround. He had been well held until that point, but after the belt went into overdrive. By the final whistle he had 2-9 to his name and Kilkenny were champions by seven points. It was a glorious and honourable day.

Mike Mac, Clare trainer during Ger Loughnane’s glorious reign, famously said, “Men win All-Irelands.” In hurling, this is true. I vividly remember sitting in the Cusack stand for the epic 2009 final. Tommy Walsh was just in front of us when he got a powerful belt in the face from Tipp’s Benny Dunne. The force of it knocked him to the ground but Walsh got straight back up, snarling.

Dunne was sent off because the ref had no option, not because Tommy was writhing around on the grass. Hurlers are men of honour. They zealously guard their dignity. Neither I nor anyone in the RTE Sports Department could recall an instance of a hurler feigning injury to get an opponent carded. This is because it does not happen.

The same can no longer be said of Gaelic football. There is a joke that did the rounds a few years ago. Why do hurlers not feign injury? Because Tyrone don’t play hurling.

In a 2002 World Cup group game, Brazil’s Rivaldo was waiting for the ball to take a corner kick against Turkey. A Turkish player kicked the ball towards him as Rivaldo was looking the other way. The lightweight FIFA ball struck him below the knee. The Brazilian dropped to the turf clutching his face, then writhed around in agony on the ground until the referee produced a red card for the hapless Turk. We laughed and smugly shook our heads, certain that such dishonourable behaviour would never deface our game. We’re not laughing now.

The following year, the Tyrone bandwagon rolled into town and the virus of feigning injury was injected into the game.

In the first round replay against Derry at Casement, Sean Kavanagh and Derry’s Padraig O’Kane ran across each other near the sideline. Sean went down clutching his face. O’Kane was sent off. Slow motion replay revealed minimal contact. In the Ulster final a month later, Down’s Gregory McCartan had a free awarded against him and petulantly tossed the ball towards Brian McGuigan who went down hard, hands glued to his face.

Another red card. In that year’s All-Ireland semi-final versus Kerry, Peter Canavan tried to get Michael McCarthy sent off in the eighth minute in an absolutely shocking incident that has been immortalised on YouTube.

During a break in play, McCarthy was standing with his back to Peter with his arms outstretched. Canavan ran from behind into his arm, then went to ground clutching his face. McCarthy was yellow carded. Type ‘Peter Canavan hits the deck’ into your search engine and watch open-mouthed as the incident unfolds. Wee Peter dived so much that year a cartoon appeared of him on the internet in his Tyrone kit, wearing a snorkel and flippers.

The lowest point came in the final, when Philip Jordan ran into Diarmuid Marsden off the ball then went down rolling in anguish on the ground, cradling his jaw. The referee was conned and Marsden was red carded. When Central Council reviewed the video footage a few weeks later they revoked the red card and cleared the Armagh man.

In his autobiography Joe Kernan’s outrage was still palpable. He wrote of being, “Disgusted by the actions of at least one Tyrone player who mockingly clapped Diarmaid off the pitch.” The video is still on YouTube. Afterwards, Marsden – a man of integrity – was particularly distraught that his daughter when she grew up would find out her father had been sent off in an All Ireland final. As Kernan put it in his book, “Thankfully, at least a good man’s name was cleared.”

Colm Cavanagh did for Derry’s James Conway in this year’s McKenna Cup final. There was no contact between them at all. Big Colm, all six foot three and 15 stone of him, went down in agony. James was red carded. A somewhat sheepish CHC rescinded it when they watched the video and realised the referee had been taken for a ride. It has become commonplace.

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Joe “Tyrone Bastards” Brolly

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The familiar sound.

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You dont have to respond to every comment mate, we’re just logging these incidents. Save yourself for the big showdown on Clonliffe.

Its an awful shame that the Canavan video has been removed from youtube. There’s no lengths they won’t go to.