Forty-eight matches played across 51 days? “Whatever about it being the best it was certainly a marathon,” writes Gerry Thornley in his summing up of the rugby World Cup, the length of the tournament resulting in public and media interest ebbing and waning, rather than flowing. The quarter-final exit of the hosts didn’t help either, he says, but still, “there was a curious disconnect to France 2023″, the organisers doing nothing to promote its final. “There wasn’t the slightest sign of the sport’s showpiece game every four years taking place last week in Paris. Not a billboard. Rien.” Whatever about off-the-field matters, Gerry salutes what the winners achieved on it, “no team was more resilient, resourceful and so sheer, cussedly bloody-minded” he says of South Africa, five of their players making his team of the tournament. Gerry also picks his best try, the highs and lows and the most memorable quotes from those 51 days. Owen Doyle also doffs his cap to South Africa in his Whistleblower column, if not their brand of rugby. “Brutal physicality won the day,” he writes, and if “that’s what seeps down into amateur and schools rugby, the future will be grim”. On the refereeing front, he doesn’t quite give Wayne Barnes 10 out of 10 for his performance in the final, but reckons that he “came out of it well” - even if that isn’t the view from New Zealand where “Barnes is unlikely to consider a holiday any time soon”.
In soccer, Gavin Cummiskey previews the Republic of Ireland’s Nations League game away to Albania this afternoon, a handful of days after they beat the same opposition 5-1 in Tallaght - Katie McCabe’s left foot working its familiar wonders. “She is on a level other players aspire to,” said interim manager Eileen Gleeson of the Irish captain who is hellbent on leading the team to promotion to the top tier of the competition. If Ireland win today and Hungary fail to beat Northern Ireland in Belfast, then it will be mission accomplished - with two games to spare.
In Gaelic games, Seán Moran talks to Paddy Deegan two days after he scored the point in injury time of the Kilkenny hurling final that gave O’Loughlin Gaels victory over the six-in-a-row-seeking Ballyhale Shamrocks. And Stephen Barry hears from Kiladangan’s Alan Flynn after he led the club to success in the Tipperary final, the team partly motivated by county manager Liam Cahill naming just two of them in his 40-man squad last year. “We got thrown under the bus,” says Flynn.
Ian O’Riordan, meanwhile, tells us that around 6,000 of the entries to last Sunday’s Dublin Marathon went unused, over 25 per cent of the number who applied to run the race. This, he writes, was “due to a variety of understandable reasons; illness, injury, doubts, fears, second thoughts, reality checks, etc”. Us couch folk would add: good sense.
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TV Watch: Having beaten Albania 5-1 on home turf last Friday, the Republic of Ireland’s women are back in action against the same opposition this afternoon (RTÉ 2, kick-off 5.0), Shkoder the venue this time around for the Nations League game.
