‘THE rules of Piggy in the Middle: Two players pass a ball to each other, while a third player tries to intercept the pass. The third player is called the Piggy in the Middle. After each successful pass, the players on the outside chant ‘Piggy in the Middle.’ Little did the creator of Piggy in […]
YOU probably haven’t heard of little Tommy Loughran, the coal man’s son. He is 13 years old, two footed and fast. Last weekend, his tiny club Lissan met Glen, the giants of Derry club football, in the Derry U-14 championship final. The Wattys’ management assigned two of their children to mark Tommy. So, the two […]
NOW that the exhibition football is over, it is back to the real stuff. The stuff of the heart’s core. Last weekend, we were up at Ballaghadereen to watch Knockmore against Ballagh (as the locals call it) in the first round of the Mayo Senior Championship. It was a very poignant day, the first Ballagh […]
WHEN Colm McCusker died last week, a piece of Ireland died with him. He was 91 years old and lived a life that will never be seen again. His first job was as a gardener in Upperlands with Clarkes, the big house protestants. Later, he became a weaver working in their linen mill. He saw […]
LAST Saturday, after they had just beaten Clara in a wonderful game of hurling, I walked into the O’Loughlin Gaels buoyant changing room. When the noise subsided, their manager and legendary Kilkenny hurler Brian Hogan said, “Joe, what can be done with the football?”. The room went silent. “Ban it,” I said. The place erupted. […]
THE vast roar that greeted the throw-in merely symbolised the triumph of hope over reality that grips the viewer. Immediately, the game settled into the familiar pattern, the endlessly rehearsed formula where nothing is unpredictable. So, both teams began the ‘you score a point, we score a point routine’, which has almost become a gentleman’s […]
ARMAGH must be Clare, not Donegal. Gaelic football has become two dull defensive formulas competing soullessly, with all the emotion of a game played on X box. The resemblance to modern soccer is uncanny. Everyone looks the same, plays the same, sounds the same. Great sport, in the end, is about courage, imagination, intuition, self-expression, science […]
NOTHING happened in the Donegal Galway game. Just two dull defensive formulas competing soullessly, with all the emotion of a game played on X-Box. In this type of game, a mistake or a fluke decides things. Galway got the fluke, a weird goal that gave them three points out of thin air that they didn’t […]
After Galway had beaten Sligo in this year’s Connacht semi-final with a last-minute goal, Padraic Joyce was asked why his team had been so listless. He said, “It’s very hard to motivate these players to play on a Saturday evening.” The good news for Padraic is that Galway don’t have to play Donegal in Croke Park […]
CIARAN Foran, Dave’s brother from the great Dublin team of the ‘90s, taxied me to Croke Park on Saturday. “Where is your wife from?” he said. “Mayo,” I replied. “I was the first man that ever wore white shoes in Mayo,” he said. “I wore white loafers with a tassle on them at a dance […]
