Donal Og writes article and pwns the rugger fanboys and the Cork hurling is purer than driven snow crowd. Cue rattlement from Joe Brolly & quackers for good measure.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/columnists/donal-og-cusack/donal-og-cusack-pundits-must-delve-much-deeper-to-provide-real-insight-into-our-games-265810.html
http://balls.ie/gaa/joe-brolly-serious-issue-donal-og-cusack/
Amazing scenes.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/columnists/donal-og-cusack/donal-og-cusack-pundits-must-delve-much-deeper-to-provide-real-insight-into-our-games-265810.html
Donal Óg Cusack
Last week in Newcestown, the forward caught me with a decent enough belt, to be fair to him.
He was young though. So next time there was action, he came in again and we connected, and when the ball was gone, it turned out that he was laid out like a corpse. Still, the corpse got up and hit me a good shot to the head. Helmet and all, he made my brain rattle. "Hey," said the umpire from behind me, "you got away with that one really."
He was bang on. Even at intermediate, everybody is a pundit. The forward, who bore no grudges, gave a little laugh.
"Do ya think," said the umpire, "that you will go to work for Sky?" My head was still settling down. The game was thundering on.
"I don’t know," I said over my shoulder, "what would you do?" It’s pundit season again. For the winter we migrate to Africa and we wade on the shores of great lakes with Marty Morrissey. Then in the spring we fly back and make nests in television studios. I’ve done one summer of this. It’s no substitute for hurling. A few years ago I went to visit an old legend of the game in Tipperary. A defender.
We swapped stories about making corpses out of big forwards who were full of sauce. He told me one story that stuck in my mind about a game many years ago, back in the days "when there was never a dirty blow". He’d had to cross to the other wing on a hot afternoon to take care of a fella who was giving bother. He still couldn’t get over the fact that the man who was marking the troublemaker couldn’t take care of it himself.
That’s the way teams are. All serious teams. That’s the way we talk and live inside the dressing rooms. In my day I’ve been involved in the laying out of a few corpses.
No point saying otherwise. I’ve put dud sliotars into play. I’ve jumped on Paul Shelley’s back in an attempt to slow him down. I’ve broken a hurley clean across the body of Eddie Brennan. He reminds me of that sometimes in our pundits’ nest. I’ve laid a Limerick man flat out in front of a full house and nobody figured out how it happened. I’ve stood on Michael Webster’s stick as it lay in the grass and pulled it up so I broke it in half and then I held it up as if it had been broken all along and I’d just found it lying there.
You’d never know I’d done any of those things if you ever saw me being a pundit though. The first rule of being a pundit is to forgive and forget. You forgive yourself everything. And then forget about it completely. Then you’re ready. I find that bit hard, blowing the whistle for things I did a million times. Sometimes I don’t blow. I noticed a different ball materialise during one of the biggest games of the season last year. Hey presto! I watched on the tapes in RTÉ and eyed the rest of the room as no one commented. I played it back to myself after to make sure. No one else raised it. I didn’t. You know who you are!
The real problem is trends like the spare hand in hurling or the fouls in football that the black card has taken care of. We need more analysis and less tut tutting.
Just over a week ago, Damien Duff broke the rules and put the bar up to a new level. You’re probably talking to the wrong man, he said, when a production of Swan Lake broke out on a soccer field, I like a little dive myself. Things won’t ever be the same again. Aidan O’Shea of Mayo made a lot of good points this week when he was talking about the GAA, our future as an Association and the way TV covers the games. He pointed out that most Gaelic football punditry is more negative than most hurling punditry. I’d say he is right. And almost all of it is more negative than soccer or rugby punditry.
Each sport has its own style of comment. In rugby, if a fella sidesteps some 23 stone hulk with a head on him the size of a cow, that’s witchcraft. A couple of years ago Simon Zebo flicked the rugby ball up with the side of foot and into his hand and several rugby pundits died in ecstasy there and then. Those who lived are still talking about it and drooling. I like to watch Zebo play rugby, he has that X factor but knows well that if he was hurling minor for Blackrock, the equivalent piece of skill wouldn’t cause a murmur on the sidelines. The rugby pundits know that it is better for the game to let them down than it is for them to let down the game.
RTÉ does soccer well but the pundit game has been taken to a new level since Sky have teamed Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher together. I watched Jamie Carragher talking about Steven Gerrard a few days ago. Obviously they played together for a long time so you might have expected Carragher to be bland but he pointed out how these days Brendan Rogers has Gerrard lying back deeper, closer to his own defence. Typically now he collects the ball in situations where everybody around him is rushing back to the other side of the pitch and he has a split second or two more time. The striking ability that brought him so many long-range goals in his heyday is being used to hit really good passes over distance, setting up counter attacks. Carragher pointed out that Man City who were playing Liverpool that afternoon would have to start putting pressure on Gerrard much quicker.
It was a great piece of analysis. It showcased the way Rogers has innovated. It displayed Gerrard’s talents. It also showed his difficulty when crowded out. Gerrard is gifted but that gift doesn’t include the fastest feet in the world. And it explained one reason why Liverpool win games.
Last Sunday, I watched Kevin McManamon of Dublin make a play. He did something so remarkable that myself and the father had to press rewind a few times to check that it had happened. Now in our house, we’d normally fast forward through football, so that will tell you something. He was being tightly marked, he needed to bounce the ball or solo it so he wouldn’t be blown up. He needed to get around a defender and then take the right option. Pass or shoot or drive on for a goal.
At speed, he transferred his body weight from one foot to the other and changed direction in a split-second while at the same time adjusting his centre of gravity so he bounced the ball on the ground, so low that it hardly left his hand. The ball was never unguarded. He never slowed down. He completely changed direction. He had his head up the whole time. He went through all the options and then delivered. It was a beautiful piece of skill and it never caused a comment. Never to be shown again. The cliché about McManamon is that he is big and hard to stop. He’s super sub. I would have loved to have seen what Jamie Carragher or Gary Neville would have made of it all.
It has improved in the last few seasons but mostly football punditry never really gets past the level of "Your jumper is gas Pat but that’s a desperate game of football isn’t it?"
There are some good reasons for that. Tradition for one. Even though so many people were doubled over in pain at the thought of some live games going to pay per view recently, the whole business of so many live GAA matches being shown is fairly new to Irish television.
With fairly limited resources we expect RTÉ to cover a huge breadth of GAA games (as well as soccer and rugby). The breadth of coverage comes at the expense of depth. I’ve seen at first hand the complexity involved. Upon arriving in Montrose one Sunday last year, I was told that The Sunday Game was going to cover 16 games later that night. Not much room for in-depth analysis there. TV is always rushing to the next thing.
"Would you go work for Sky?" asked the man in the white coat. I’ve tweeted my number to Rupert a few hundred times and no word back but there is an umpire I met over down in Newcestown who calls it like he sees it. He might turn out to be the Duffer our games need
http://balls.ie/gaa/joe-brolly-serious-issue-donal-og-cusack/
The fall out from Sky’s foray into the GAA world continued today as former Cork hurling captain and current RTE analyst Donal Og Cusack wrote in his Irish Examiner column that he agrees with Aidan O’Shea’s assertion that football pundits do little to help improve the image of the game. One line is particular stands out (Though we urge you to read the whole thing here)
It has improved in the last few seasons but mostly football punditry never really gets past the level of “Your jumper is gas Pat but that’s a desperate game of football isn’t it?”
Joe Brolly, as you’d have to expect had a serious problem with the piece:
As ever both sides can have compelling arguments and we are in a sense, lucky to have such passionate and articulate people arguing the points but it’s fair to say, the only way this can be settled is some sort of charity boxing match.
Amazing scenes.
Last edited:
