A round-up of today's other stories in brief, with NIALL KIELY
No fond farewell for free-to-air Minister
A SERIES of five-day rolling orgasms slithered into sporting action late on Thursday night and will run from this weekend into early January. Everything that's engrossing about three-dimensional greensward chess games will feature: there is no more engrossing contest than England versus Australia for the Ashes. And this year it's a Down Under coupling.
Be still, my pulsing heart.
Only a game? There’s politics, culture and sociology: and that’s before you even scratch the technical, mental and strategic aspects.
It’s got history, from the earliest steamboat trips that took months to complete, to the slick TV package now on offer (and cricket’s been a salutary pioneer in its use of technology), but the visceral nature of the games remains raw to the moment.
It’s arrogant colonial Poms against bolshie convict spawn. For both nations, it’s gripping, and there’s scarcely a Brit cricket fan over a certain age who doesn’t delight at the memory of listening to the magic thud and flicker of radio chat in middle of-the-night commentary from Ashes games in Oz – often, and especially, under a duvet.
The Guardian'sFrank Keating this week recalled a letter-writer to a 1978 Observer reminiscing about her best mate, who was climbing coital peaks of bliss with her husband in the deep of night, when the wife noticed something in yer man's ear. "What's that?" she cried. "Quiet, woman," he replied. "I'm listening to the cricket."
(Let us be thankful, en passant and despite our straitened economic travail, that no one in our shabby genteel republic would dare to “rein her in” in such cavalier fashion.)
The Ashes is not free-to-air. It’s on Sky. Hereabouts, or across the water, you pay your sub or persuade the publican to have a lockdown. Or you make sure the transistor aerial picks up a Beeb signal; or you click into internet radio.
Is that a national catastrophe? Not one bit. People get on with it, and by and large recognise that to have a properly-funded cricket structure, bargains must be struck with Murdoch/Mammon.
This week it was (I genuinely mean this) sad to hear Minister Eamon Ryan in full (if that’s the bon mot) panic-breathing falsetto on Monday’s Frontline, defending his party’s latest contortion.
The spectre of green-hued wildebeest pawing the slidy, mucky banks of a moral river they must perforce cross has not been edifying; and the next, precipitate plunge into an electoral maelstrom, populated by crocodile punters, will satisfy only sadists and schadenfreude merchants.
Yet. This Minister showed every sign he was intent on forcing much more sport free-to-air, and that would have been to the savage detriment of soccer and rugby in this state. They would have variously been sliced and diced financially if they had lost the crucial funding that TV deals with paid channels make available to keep the sports afloat.
So. Pardon my litote, but a multitude of sports supporters and apparatchiks won’t be sorry to see this free-to-air Minister for zealotry and cheap populism become political toast.
Anfield in Co Wexford
LET us give thanks for Diarmuid Ó Muirithe and his wonderful “Words We Use” column every Monday in this organ.
Merseyside enthusiasts may have missed a recent one. It told us that one Samuel Robert Graves was born and reared in the village of Rosbercon, Co Wexford, in the early 19th century, and his wealthy shipping father owned the Dunbrody, the Kennedy emigrant vessel.
Samuel emigrated himself to Liverpool where he became mayor and Member of Parliament, becoming wealthy enough to donate land to the city which he named in memory of the laneway in Rosbercon where his family home stood: Anfield.
Elephant in rugby kitchen
RELIGION and its detritus is never far from the surface of life in the glorious US of A. Sure they’re headbangers. Ya couldn’t invent it! is a Greek chorus-response to much of what we read about the wunnerful nation-state. And the fall and rise of Michael Vick has it all.
He used to be the hottest quarterback talent and had a $130 million (€98m), 10-year contract with the Atlanta Falcons.
Then he done bad. He grew up in rural south Virginia, where they love their dogs. To fight. When the police caught up with Vick three years ago, at a kennels he’d named Bad Newz, they found graphic evidence of viciously cruel training and rearing of the fighting dogs. He lost the football contract, went personally bankrupt with $20m (€15m) debts and served 18 of the 23 months he was sentenced to for running a dogfighting ring. He did federal lock-up at Leavenworth: no easy time.
The Philaldelphia Eagles took a $1.5m (€1.2m)-a-year punt on him, as a back-up quarterback. Then this season, the first-choice man got injured, Vick came in and has since played like a god. He’s always had The Arm, a rifle-like ability to find receivers, and he’s agile and slick in scrambling yards and touchdowns. En passant, and right on US script, he also found Jesus.
Vick got his chance because Kevin Kolb got concussed. In gridiron, an accumulation of research on player wear-and-tear has the authorities and teams giddy with fright. Forget the hips, knees and shoulders, for a moment. Think about the cranium and its resonating ball of brain, and the “repeated bangs” cited by recently-retired Irish rugby forward John Fogarty. He and Bernard Jackman, not incidentally another frontrower, have done immeasurable recent service to rugby by being honest about their concussions.
It’s the elephant in the rugby kitchen. What should have been done? Was enough done? They’re petrified about individual and class actions in America.
Rugby authorities everywhere should be afraid. Very afraid.
Tell-tale signs of vehicles for success
BY their wheels shall ye know them, yea verily.
A Latvian commentator remembered on RTÉ radio this week that just before their battered economy was visited by the puritans of the IMF’s Waffen SS a couple of years ago, the Lats had lost the run of themselves altogether. Everyone was swanning around in X5s, he recalled, hinting in none too subtle fashion that it was far from bullish BMW 4WDs the Baltic cygnets had been fledged.
Looking around Dublin nowadays, youll see precious few Foxrock tractors (Jazez, open yer eyes: it’s the Range Rover Sports HSE; purchased, doubtless, to take Jonathan and Zoe up Sally Gap to break fingernails on family turbary outings) with registration plates later than 2007.
I mused on the semiotics of wheels this week, recalling that at the birth of Dutch total football in 1965 coach Rinus Michels fetched up in Amsterdam in a battered ould Skoda – at a time when Skoda-slagging was more heartfelt bitter than smug sweet – and took on an Ajax squad that included a stick-insect 17-year-old named Johan Cruyff.
When Germanys Jurgen Klinsmann arrived in London to take Tottenham Hotspur by storm, his car of choice spoke for his values: he arrived in and continued to drive a second-hand, well-worn VW Beetle.
Patrick Kavanagh, great poet and 'worst goalkeeper ever' - fact
WHAT is it about goalkeepers? They’re all mad, or weird, obviously, but why?
Many believe it goes back to the playground. I read during the summer columnist Simon Hoggart's cri de couer in the Guardian. He was always last to be picked for school games, and ended up in goal, where nobody wanted to play. Many goalkeepers are cultured folk, including Albert Camus, he consoled himself, "possibly (that's) because the position offers valuable thinking time while you're ostensibly playing along with the lads".
I noticed earlier this year Páidi Ó Sé paid valedictory homage to the actor Mick Lally’s footballing acumen. He recalled Mick playing in goal for Tourmakeady against Corca Dhuibhne in the Comortas Peile na Gaeltachta. The key moment came when Mick faced Páidi’s penalty, which he saved by diving low to his left but broke bones in his hand when he whacked the post. Tourmakeady’s loss, Druid’s gain.
It gets worse. John Paul II was a goalie. Che Guevara ditto. Vladimir Nabokov.
During the summer at the world lacrosse championships in Manchester (did you blink?), the Canadian goalkeeper in the final against the USA, one Chris Sanderson, had been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour in 2008. He finished his chemotherapy just before the tourney, then got on with goalkeeping; and in lacrosse, trust me, the goalie’s involved.
Fear not. We’ve had our own loopy guardians of the onion-bag. And on the Nabokov/Camus front, I offer . . . Patrick Kavanagh, poet and native of Inniskeen, Co Monaghan.
I have it on good authority (oh, alright, I asked a fella called Frank McNally, a countyman of the stony grey soiler) that Kavanagh was “the worst goalkeeper ever” for Inniskeen. This verdict was delivered with a relish that suggested serious competition (and a canny realisation that neither Patrick nor Peter Kavanagh are around to argue the toss) for that title.
Depending on which apocryphal version you favour, during a crucial game Paddy Kavanagh wandered off to have a fag/slash/ice cream and a deciding goal was scored in his absence.
Unprofessional. But it sure puts the Premier League in parochial perspective.
