By the Short and Curlies
Talking Balls Comments
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We hear the usual buzzwords round county squads at this time of year, healthy competition for places, high intensity training, good team spirit – the usual guff. We look forward to hearing the chat from the Derry squad after James Kielt had his jaw busted in a club match, allegedly by a county teammate from the Ballinderry Shamrocks club. Aside from the fact it rules Kielt out of the match against Tyrone, it raises a few questions about the mentality of some club players and indeed the camaraderie in the Derry squad.
We went down to the Derry press evening the other night to check it out but the alleged offender wasn’t present to answer any questions.
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Kerry’s prodigal son Tadgh Kenneally has revealed that he hankers after a return to Aussies Rules and him only back a couple of days. Sez Kenneally “I am focused on my goal of playing with Kerry, [I will] do everything I can to do that successfully, but in the back of my mind there is an opportunity to go back and play (in Sydney) for a couple of years.”
Meanwhile Setanta (the one and only) has revealed he has hankerings in the other direction saying that he wishes to come back and player for Cork hurlers again, particularly since Aisake has joined Sean Óg as a fully fledged Rebel.
Now talking of Setanta, there’s a fella that really knows the meaning of camaraderie within a squad, having hit the headlines as well as a teammate in a well publicized in-house match earlier in the season. Which brings us neatly back to James Kielt and his jaw.
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Which brings us to that other Setanta, the television station, which has got its knickers in a twist for over extending itself, primarily by targeting the English soccer watching public as a key market. Setanta of course rose to fame having begin life showing football and hurling matches in bars to the Irish diaspora.
Talking Balls has memories of standing in desultory Irish bars in London, drinking flat warm beer and terrible Guinness watching matches on Setanta with a posse of McAlpine Fusilier-type fellas. Sadly it now seems to be going from boom to bust with an unrealistic subscription target a real problem. It will be a serious loss from the Talking Balls flatscreen if it does bite the dust. By the way, speaking of exPats, did you hear the one about the Irish Boomerang? It goes away and talks about coming back.
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Talking Balls found the experience of watching Dublin and Meath last Sunday so bad that we snapped our excruciate ligament. The pain was akin, we would imagine, to having delicate parts of your anatomy slowly squeezed by Ricey till they pop. Imagine our relief then, that we survived further trauma, when it emerged that Sligo referee Marty Duffy played a minute and a half short injury time at the end of the game. Although equipped with two watches, one of them stopped.
According to National Referees Committee chairman Mick Curley the situation would encourage him to consider taking time keeping out of the hands of the referee. How that would scale up across the entire GAA in club matches would be interesting.
The country is littered with anecdotes of referees who, for reasons of personal security, and the thought of being locked in the boot of their own car, will play on that few extra moments, until the home team gets the vital score to level or win the game. Before the last peep of the whistle has sounded the ref will already be in the driver seat and away to feck up the road to safety.
As one experienced whistler put it, ‘I’s so fast off the pitch, when I turn off the light at night, I’s in bed before I get dark.’
[Ed's note: The grammatical structure, used heretofore in parts of the foregoing section, will be familiar, suffice it to say, to regular readers of Mickey Harte's column].
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