James McClean has been banned from Twitter by Sunderland again. He was tweeting about his love for The Wolfe Tones and Broad Black Brimmer in particular and Gregory Campbell got involved, as usual, and one thing led to another. And so on and so on.
Seems harsh this time but James appears to be thick as shit.
Irish folk group The Wolfe Tones have invited DUP MP Gregory Campbell to a show after he criticised footballer James McClean for saying his favourite song is one the band sings about the IRAâŠ
McClean is a king WUM. 
Iâd have gone for Rock On Rockall though. A magnificent track.
Anyone following Gerry Adams and his tales about his gay teddy bears Ted and Tom?
were these the ones his brother used to teach the kids in west belfast the facts of life?
I still canât believe this isnt a parody account. Its quite mental.
right, gonna give this a go, have had an account for a couple of years but havent even tweeted
questions arising:
- is it any good
- who is worth following
- are any of you cunts worth following
thanks in advance
[quote=âartfoley, post: 796276, member: 179â]right, gonna give this a go, have had an account for a couple of years but havent even tweeted
questions arising:
- is it any good
- who is worth following
- are any of you cunts worth following
thanks in advance[/quote]
Bandage is a disgrace on Twitter. Picking fights with anyone whoâll engage.
[quote=âartfoley, post: 796276, member: 179â]right, gonna give this a go, have had an account for a couple of years but havent even tweeted
questions arising:
- is it any good
- who is worth following
- are any of you cunts worth following
thanks in advance[/quote]
I find it outstanding. It has arguably opened up some future job opportunities for me. I attended a course last night involving some guys who work at a professional club here in WA and got a weeks prac work out of it. I only heard about them and the course cos of twitter.
I get an amazing amount of relative information from the type of people I want to be hearing from. Itâs very specific.
[quote=âcaoimhaoin, post: 796303, member: 273â]I find it outstanding. It has arguably opened up some future job opportunities for me. I attended a course last night involving some guys who work at a professional club here in WA and got a weeks prac work out of it. I only heard about them and the course cos of twitter.
I get an amazing amount of relative information from the type of people I want to be hearing from. Itâs very specific.[/quote]
cheers kev, and how would you go about using it as a professional tool? and is youre using it as such. does this mean you cant act the gom like you would on FB
Basically ya. Although Iâm still afraid to call out the odd idiot, in fact I called a Indo reporter an idiot last week for her pointless attack on Kenny Egan.
But what I do is follow people if interest. This mostly is people I S&C world, sports psychologists, physiologists etc. they post article etc as they go, I read if interested. I get a load of Sports Science studies.
You called forum favourite Niamh Horan an idiot :o
It should have said ânot afraidâ, cos I did. But anyway, I didnât even know who she was. But the article was retarded, and if you know her in case she didnât see it by some strange reason, tell her sheâs an idiot.
Have you never read this thread? http://www.thefreekick.com/board/index.php?threads/sunday-indo-are-cunts-thread.11019/page-17#post-436340
She is a prize cunt mind you and a simple one at that, way off on that article and was rightly called out by another forum favourite and friend of Mac
[quote=âmyboyblue, post: 796352, member: 180â]Have you never read this thread? http://www.thefreekick.com/board/index.php?threads/sunday-indo-are-cunts-thread.11019/page-17#post-436340
She is a prize cunt mind you and a simple one at that, way off on that article and was rightly called out by another forum favourite and friend of Mac[/quote]
It was Irish Boxing alerted me to it and Paddy Barnes. There is simply no logic to it.
[quote=âmyboyblue, post: 796352, member: 180â]Have you never read this thread? http://www.thefreekick.com/board/index.php?threads/sunday-indo-are-cunts-thread.11019/page-17#post-436340
She is a prize cunt mind you and a simple one at that, way off on that article and was rightly called out by another forum favourite and friend of Mac[/quote]
Ewan?
None other. But then the writer of his book would have to stand up for him, regardless.
Itâs made the transfer window season even fucking shitter yet I canât stop myself from checking my feed every few hours to see if Arsenal have finally signed the next Joel Campbell or Ryo Myachi.
You may enjoy this caoimhaoin[/USER] You may not [USER=109]Mac
[SIZE=6]Ewan MacKenna column: The silver standard[/SIZE]
08:46, 03 Jul 2013 http://eircomsports.eircom.net/Images/news/exclusive-lrg.jpg
Ewan MacKenna, Sports Journalist of the Year 2012
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There was a time when sports stars here were the gold standard. What they did on the pitch was what mattered most and if they were the best in their chosen discipline, then they were the best we had in society.
You adored their victories, admired their dedication, wanted to be just like them and if they made your club or your county or our country proud, then that was enough. They asked for relatively little, they gave so much back and the acceptable trade-off was the leeway to live their personal lives in some semblance of normality and to be given the benefit of the doubt and chance to make mistakes just like everyone else.
What PĂĄidi Ă SĂ©, Dinny Allen or Jimmy Keaveney, what Moss Keane or Willie Anderson, what Niall Quinn did when the final whistle blew might not have been all that savoury at times, but they never hurt anyone and their stories were quite amusing so there was never a reason to turn on them. In fact their human traits, in contrast to their otherworldly sporting skills, helped us relate to them and made them seem all the more remarkable. How could they be just like us yet be so different? That was a question to treasure, not a cue to take them down several notches. Things then were just as they should be but, if anything, this week yet again proved those days are sadly gone.
Sport is now the silver standard. One rung up is the cheap and shallow and spiteful world of celebrity that handpicks who it wants and eats them up and chews on them until itâs good and ready to spit them back out. Even those sports stars that donât want or arenât ready to be a part of one of the most grotesque features of modern Irish society are hoovered up to the extent we think they are somehow public property. Not only should we get to enjoy their achievements and admire their talent, we think we should get to indulge in their human flaws as if itâs some scene from Ed TV. We didnât invent this - we never had to accept it either - but we saw globalisation as the signal to take not just the best, but also the worst, traits from the rest of the western world.
Now, we lap up the Kardashians. Rather than asking what theyâre famous for, we see their attention-seeking and, more importantly, attention-getting, as a good enough reason to make them role models. We think the likes of Georgia Salpa and Rosanna Davidson and Andrea Roche are great for Ireland because we now have our home-grown heroes to worship. However this world has grown beyond the needy and its icy claws have slowly wriggled their way into sport. In doing that, it devours people that have done nothing but entertain us yet we sit back and lap it up as if thereâs nothing wrong.
Itâs why Paul McGrathâs demise was played out in the tabloids and people this week were gossiping about what happened him because we think him doing us all proud for years somehow gives us the right to analyse his troubles whenever we feel like it, and all because heâs a celebrity. Itâs why an amateur like Paul Galvin throwing a duster at a student made the front page of a national broadsheet - without the courage of a byline - when no other teacher would be subjected to that, and all because heâs a celebrity. Itâs why last week, in a Sunday newspaper, journalist Niamh Horan wrote a story thatâs been in the public domain for two years, about Kenneth Egan trying drugs as a kid, and all because heâs a celebrity.
Indeed Eganâs life is the perfect example of how a sick society lacking the confidence to live out their own lives engages in voyeurism. Journalists like Horan are merely a symptom of this and itâs why she and others are given a remit to build up and break down people as if itâs a game, purely because theyâve been classed as famous and have been made that new gold standard.
First off, I know Kenneth Egan better than any journalist, even those involved in sport. Writing his autobiography, I spent hundreds of hours with both him and his family and his teammates, but I donât say that to suggest there is bias here, rather to say Iâm better placed to comment on him and his flaws than any other. Egan can be cocky. He can be naĂŻve. He can take the wrong advice and do and say some stupid things. But just like sports stars from a bygone era like Ă SĂ© and Anderson and Quinn, none of it has ever been meant out of badness. Instead, he went from a boxer no one cared about to having the celebrity world drag him into their realm before he knew what had happened to him.
Consider this. Back in 2008, when he won silver at the Beijing Olympics, newspapers couldnât get enough of him. Journalists, not belonging to the sporting pages, would show up in his motherâs kitchen each morning looking for some cheeky line to splash across their columns so we could all get a cheap laugh and say, âThatâs our Kennyâ. His family had never seen anything like this so they just did what they did with any strangers before their son ever became a hero. They invited them in, and cooked them breakfast and talked away, openly and honestly and decently. As a society we had no problem exploiting that. Indeed by then, we already prided ourselves on it.
That lasted a little while, until stage two came along and Kenneth being an athlete, not some socialite, didnât know what was happening him. He ran away to New York but upon his return, there was no escaping people peering into every facet of his life. In March 2009, Horan wrote in her column: Nevertheless, itâs easy to see the catalyst of his downfall: Egan is an incredibly good looking guy⊠If the Dublin man had Chris Eubankâs flattened nose and Mike Tysonâs toothless grin, he would never have gotten himself into this mess. But from the moment he lifted that silver medal above his perfectly chiselled visage at last yearâs Beijing Olympics, every red-blooded woman in Ireland wanted a piece of the prize⊠Last December, the boxer went along to the Sunday Independentâs legendary celebrity Christmas party where he lived up to his playboy reputation. Cheekily kissing Camille OâSullivan, having a flirty tĂȘte-Ă -tĂȘte with Twink, repeatedly asking her if she was âavailableâ and gushing about how he âcouldnât believeâ he was surrounded by so many beauties, Egan was lapping up his new-found fame.
It was vacuous pap synonymous with this gossip-craving society we all allow to flourish, and all because Egan was classed as more important than a brilliant boxer. He had been invited to the new penthouse of society which was made up of celebrity and not sport. It reached a pinnacle I saw first-hand at his book launch. Another Sunday journalist, Barry Egan, at one stage pushed me out of the way in order to get in a photo with some other celebrities along with celebrity Kenny. Even Niamh Horan herself got a picture. It was a crass celebration of hollow glamour and that night, as Rosanna Davison and Andrea Roche and others strutted about, I felt awkward. But I felt worse for Kenneth as this was a world he never belonged to. He was an athlete, and that should have been as good as it could possibly get. There should have been nowhere else to go.
The problem now is, Kenneth turned his back on that world. He stopped drinking, got rid of those that used him and got back to doing what he does best. He boxed his way to national finals, his retirement was a moving and graceful moment and he recently joined up as an Irish representative of the World Anti-Doping Association (Wada) where the work he does has been described by those in the know as impressive. Little wonder, as who better for the role? Egan was Irish captain for an age, never failed a drug test, had a reputation within the sport for being the ultimate professional, commanded respect, was a leader who reached heady heights and his tough background made him aware of the dangers and temptations that are out there for athletes.
Not good enough for Horan though who has never properly covered him doing what actually made him well-known in the first place. She picked up an autobiography she would have gotten at that book launch way back in 2011, saw him honestly admit that as a kid in a tough area of Dublin, long before he was a successful boxer that was carded by the sports council, he dabbled in ecstasy and cocaine on a couple of occasions. She used a tone that questioned why he was working with Wada and suggested he was living it up at a conference in Singapore when he never should have been there in the first place. She didnât even mention David Millar as someone who had tested positive but now represented Wada. It was all indicative of someone who doesnât know sport but, then again, what does that matter anymore?
As Egan now knows, and many more sports stars here will in the future, regardless of what heights our athletes reach and what joy and hope they bring us, they can only ever get to second place on the podium. Itâs from there they will see the celebrity world stare down on them from the very top and choose whether they can take the next step.