HOLD THE BACK PAGE:AS WE engaged this week with the inescapable reality that we have a national soccer cohort of modest talent, and a gaffer who will always be innately conservative, it's interesting to look at some of the other European qualifying groups.
With which nations might we tussle for a possible play-off slot?
In Group F, there’s Croatia and Georgia, possibly Israel and Latvia. In G, you can see hope yet for the Czechs, and just possibly Scotland or Lithuania. Group A will see a scrap between Austria, Turkey, Belgium and Azerbaijan.
In C, the Italians are bound to get three gift-wrapped points after this week’s riot-wrecked and abandoned match with Serbia: that’ll leave a scrap for the leavings between Northern Ireland, Slovenia and the Estonians.
Group D is almost certainly a top-of-table tussle between the French and Belarus, you’d hardly look beyond Holland and Hungary in E, and whatever the outcome between hapless England (population: very large) and mighty Montenegro (a lot less than one million), both will fill their boots with points. In H, the Danes or a resurgent Portugal could chase the Norwegians home.
That’s the class of company the Republic of Ireland might need to beat. (BTW: Why can’t the pub experts, who lament Robbie Keane’s lack of sharpness and whinge about his lack of game time in England, see that he’s palpably not good enough to get into the present Spurs side?)
Lowly Albania has mid-table respectability in Group D, ahead of Bosnia-Herzegovina and poor old Romania. But more of the Albanian heresy in a moment.
Back to the Dutch: they took comedian Tony Hawks on to their Moldova-bound plane earlier this month as a “cultural ambassador”. Hawks’s oeuvre might usefully be described as eccentric: he based a successful book on a bet he struck with another comedian, Arthur Smith, that he could and would beat every member of the Moldovan soccer team at tennis.
His previous bestseller, Round Ireland with a Fridge, is coming to cinemas in the not-too-distant future.
Albania, too, has a thing about a Brit comedian. Indeed, the country is still mourning the death earlier this month of Norman Wisdom, a cult figure in that country all the way back to the days of its loopy Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha.
In Cold War times, Hoxha severed connections with the outside world, but weirdly promoted Wisdom’s comedy films on the grounds that the comic epitomised the struggle of the proletarian underdog in the class war against capitalism. And thus generations of Albanians grew up loving Wisdom’s pratfall shtick.
In fact, in 2001 when England travelled to Tirana, players and fans faced a viciously partisan crowd and a barrage of missiles until half-time when Norman Wisdom trotted onto to the pitch to do a penalty routine.
Of course, he made sure to trip over himself and take a pantomime fall en route to the penalty spot. Cue gales of crowd laughter, an ovation as the shrewd old fella slotted the peno with some felicity – and a transformed second-half atmosphere.
Venter unafraid to think outside the box
THAT atypical rugby manager, Brendan Venter, told Guardianand Irish Timesreaders this week that his Saracens players write essays and pursue further education as an essential complement to their mere sporting advancement.
Venter is an exemplar: he’ll go back to his Cape Town GP practice when the Saracens project has passed critical mass; he has already dovetailed that continuing medical engagement with a rugby-playing career that included a 1995 World Cup medal.
And he’s by no stretch a touch-feely guru or soft touch. Venter is an in-yer-face ballsy South African who has had plenty of runs-in with authority figures.
His player-development philosophy seems neither quixotic nor meretricious; the guy is sincerity on legs. He may not act in loco parentis with his sweaty Saracens; but a good coach certainly does at least trip the Constructively Avuncular fantastic, however lightly.
Andre Agassi’s father was an egregious monster. The tennis player’s autobiography is as uncompromising as such books get, not least in his descriptions of a crystal meth habit, and is selling well; details of ‘family life’ are harrowing. Perhaps some will empathise with the Armenian born in Iran/Persia who arrived in the US without a word of English, and then drove his small boy like a dog to be terrific at tennis, but also to become a louche and labile adult? Agassi Senior is now 80, and unrepentant.
Last week in Shanghai, Spain’s Rafael Nadal made a persuasive case for a slimmed-down tennis calendar to prevent player burn-out. He did it in English, with which he still wrestles but will of course soon master. He was graceful, intelligent, measured. An adornment to his profession, a credit to his family.
When the Spanish tennis federation wanted the gifted young Rafa to leave Mallorca for a Barcelona academy, his family refused. His uncle and mentor Toni, an ex-pro, felt he should stay on the island, work on his game, surrounded and grounded by loving family while continuing his education. He’s now a mature and balanced 24-year-old and the world’s leading player.
Roving thieves thrive on demand for ash
THOSE who watch such things reckon demand for farm land has markedly picked up. Certainly, there’s more of it advertised, and the volume of private sales and auctions indicate a once moribund market has been energised.
Two things are clear and obvious: it’s largely farmer-to-farmer purchasing this year, and only the most optimistic of agents are devoting any sales spiel to the development potential of lots, even those with road frontage and proximity to towns and villages.
Quite bitty sorts of land are been guided at €6,000-€7,000 an acre, good stuff at €8,000-€10,000 and prime quality tillage and fattening is offered as high as €12k or even €13k/acre. Heady stuff, given even a year ago the market for agricultural land was flat-lining.
Another agricultural observation: farmer interest in forestry and woodland is burgeoning. Demonstrations, Teagasc seminars and information days are often oversubscribed, and it’s easy to see why. Timber prices are at an all-time high, many existing plantations are at thinning stage and even firewood has become a sexy (because profitable) crop.
In the midst of this, demand for ash for hurley-making remains hot and heavy. In fact, good-quality ash-butts for the manufacture of hurleys is the most valuable timber in Ireland, and legal ash is among the most valuable crops in the world. And here, even the smaller butts serve a market for juvenile hurleys.
Guess what? The free-market economy has been at work. Chainsaw gangs have for decades travelled the country to find unsupervised and, ideally, isolated ash-woods from which to thieve. They’re even busier in recent years, as demand exceeds supply.
Talk of this country being self-sufficient in ash within a decade may be fanciful, especially if demand stays hot; and that’s despite the fact that we’ve grant-aided the planting of more than 13,000 official hectares the past 20 years, and well-tended and skilfully thinned ash plantations mature at around the 15 to 20-year mark.
But we still import 70 or even 80 per cent of our ash needs: it’d be fascinating to know how many of our hurley-makers demand certified rather than illegally-logged timber – and how many of the hurley-buying clubs demand proof of certified provenance.
Thirsty Mossie a creature of habit
TWO rugby quotes took my fancy this past week, both relating to a much-mourned but fondly eulogised Moss Keane. They were sourced by Peter O’Reilly in the Sunday Times from former Leicester, England and Lions hooker Peter Wheeler.
Like most of the men who gladly shared valedictory recollections, Wheeler’s memories smacked of joyous engagement with Mossie’s sharp wit and deadpan drollery.
Wheeler, still one of the moving forces at Leicester, remembered waking up early one morning in a New Zealand hotel room he was sharing with Mossie, after the Lions touring party had spent in the region of 36 hours travelling from London.
The Kerryman was lighting a fag and opening a beer, and Wheeler pointed out that it was dawn, for Christ’s sake. The response was: “Yeah, but it’s 5.30 in the evening at home, and I always stop off for a beer on the way home.”
He also recalled seeking Keane’s assessment of an extraordinarily muddy game against the Junior All Blacks – the match that yielded a famous photo of prop Fran Cotton resembling the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
“The first half was even,” quoth Moss, gravely. “And the second half was even worse.”
Rooney now reduced to brute bison
SO, after almost a dozen works of fiction and at the age of 68, Howard Jacobson is finally shortlisted for, and then actually goes and wins the Man Booker Prize, for his novel The Finkler Question.
For aficionados of newspaper columnry, the self-described “Jewish Jane Austen” has long been among the most stylish purveyors of the exquisite and the recondite in English newspapers. Last June he percipiently cited film director Werner Herzog’s encomium to Wayne Rooney as “half bison, half viper”.
But if team-mates are insufficiently skilled to pass the ball to Rooney, Jacobson noted, there is nothing to be viperish about, and he is reduced to brute bison. And so it has come to pass.
