February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Perversely, for all its passion, color and incredibly seductive competitive edge, Gaelic games slid down the pecking order. A cynical view is that some of the leading footballers and hurlers weren’t necessarily punching above their weight, they were just punching.
The football season got under way with a mass brawl between Tyrone and Dublin in Omagh, and then signed off at Croke Park in the autumn with more violent scenes as Ireland and Australia squared up unedifyingly in what could be the final act of the controversial International Rules series.
The GAA got off the fence and decided to suspend hostilities for a year, and then take it from there. The concept once again drew the crowds, and made the headlines, but it appears that whereas rugby is mostly at ease with high-stakes physicality on the one hand, and sportsmanship on the other, the International Rules games are increasingly an excuse to settle scores which don’t count for much in the first place.
With the elite players agitating for compensation for the endless hours they put into their preparations, and with the GAA grappling with the indiscipline that has dogged its games, there was the usual fervor surrounding the championship, but in the end, the Dublin-Mayo All Ireland semi-final was the only contest that ticked every box.
Unfortunately for the Mayo faithful, that game had been their moment in the sun, and Kerry rumbled out of Munster to crush the Westerners in a hopelessly one-sided final. From the experience of Seamus Moynihan to the class of Colm Cooper, Kerry were ruthlessly efficient in the last stages of their journey, and on the way to yet another success, they managed to unearth a marvelous full-forward in Kieran Donaghy.
Donaghy positioned himself on the edge of the square, caught nearly everything that was lobbed in his direction, and generally created havoc with a smile on his face. Not surprisingly, he pocketed virtually every individual award that was going.
Similarly, in hurling, the Cork-Waterford clash was the only one that truly warmed the cockles of the heart. Kilkenny won’t mind if wasn’t a vintage summer as they recovered from last year’s disappointment to capture the Liam McCarthy Cup. With DJ Carey more concerned now about his golf handicap, it has been left to Henry Shefflin to carry the torch for his county.
Unlike Donaghy who flared and streaked across the sky, and who might not burn as bright again, we could only admire Shefflin’s enduring greatness. It’s a pity that hurling is as confined as it is because in Shefflin the game has an extraordinary exponent who deserves a much wider audience.
If Gaelic games were left treading water, soccer almost slipped below the surface. Not that the sport lost anything in the battle for the hearts and minds of Irish sportspeople, it was more that we realized that the spin-off from the Jack Charlton era which brought qualification for World Cup finals tournaments, and pride in the international team, might be grinding to a dismal end.
After a parting of the ways with Brian Kerr, the chief executive of the FAI, John Delaney, promised anyone who wanted to hear that the search was on for a “world class” international manager. In the end, Delaney chose Steve Staunton who was an assistant coach at a lowly English club by the name of Walsall. Staunton had been a tried and trusted player for his country, but as a manager, he wasn’t even a blip on the soccer landscape.
After an initial period of feel-good during which Staunton was given time to find his feet, things quickly began to deteriorate towards the low of a disastrous 5-2 defeat in Cyprus. Ireland now has no chance of qualifying for the European Championship finals in 2008, and the short-term future under Staunton looks bleak.
Hurdler makes her mark
Against that, Derval O’Rourke emerged from the shadows to become the individual success story of the year. Ireland has a proud tradition of producing top-class middle and long distance athletes, so a sprinter is a rare bird, and a female sprinter even rarer.
If all the planet’s leading hurdlers were not present at the World Indoor Championships in the spring, try telling O’Rourke her gold medal is somehow devoid of value. The Cork native made her mark, and then proved conclusively that the achievement was no fluke with a silver medal run at the European Championships.
There was a time when we were na