In today’s Hospital Pass, we make a plea on behalf of yet another jobless GAA star and offer our condolences on a particularly bad morning for Mossy Quinn.
Just for today’s Hospital Pass – well, for the first part of it at least – we’re going to break with a two-month-old tradition and avoid any unnecessary tongue-in-cheek asides.
It’s hard to be really tongue-in-cheek when you’re talking about joblessness, unless you’re referring to a newly redundant dentist. And if a dentist is newly redundant, then he won’t be doing anything to make anybody put their tongue in their cheek in the first place.
Anyway, we’ve taken that one about as far as it can go. Back to the task in hand: GAA joblessness.
Lar Corbett and Michael Shields were last year’s high-profile GAA stars to find themselves in the dole queues, and Kilkenny’s JJ Delaney has become the latest addition to the list with the news that he will be made redundant from his position as a sales rep with building products company Tegral today.
JJ told the Irish Independent, “It doesn’t matter what you have achieved. One stroke of a pen, boy, and you’re gone. It’s my first time out of work. You’ll always want to be working and it would play on your mind a bit. But I wouldn’t be making excuses out of it either. You just have to get on with it.
“You could look on it as a complete disaster or an opportunity, and I’m looking on it as an opportunity. I might go back to college. Who knows?”
I wonder if we’re doing all we can to help our GAA stars, and hurlers in particular? As part of a collective which has been heralded by many as the greatest GAA side of all time, and as one the most exceptional practitioners of defensive play the game has ever seen, JJ Delaney is someone who has the ability to attract tens of thousands of paying punters through the turnstiles every year.
And yet, if you’re not a hardened Kilkenny hurling supporter, and he walked past you on the street, would you know him?
It’s one possible side-effect of the mandatory use of helmets, which at a stroke makes virtually every hurling star unrecognisable. And if they’re unrecognisable, how can they hope to use that profile to get themselves the jobs – the sales jobs in particular – that have long been the speciality of GAA stars?
Poor ol’ Mossy
Moving to the capital, and Dublin’s preparations for Saturday evening’s big All-Ireland quarter-final against Tyrone at Croke Park.
Manager Pat Gilroy announced his team early this morning, with Cian O’Sullivan coming into the side in place of Paul Conlon at corner back.
Mossy Quinn is a very tidy corner forward but it’s probably fair to say he doesn’t fit Gilroy’s preference for sculpted-musculature, run-all-day athletes, so he has had to satisfy himself with a few run-outs from the bench this summer.
When he failed to make the team again this morning, he clearly decided to console himself by going online to pick up a few tickets for Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds gig at the Olympia in October.
But for poor ol’ Mossy, it was to be a morning of double disappointment as he was shown once again to be just not quick enough, completely missing out as the tickets flew out the door and into the paws of predatory eBay touts.
One of his tweets read, “Noel Gallagher tickets sell out in less than 2 mins?! That was with limit of 2 per person…” before he added, somewhat desperately, “Should be a great gig.”
None of his tweets read, “Well, f*** Gilroy and f*** Ticketmaster. This has been the worst Friday morning ever.”
[Main picture via Chrissy Polcino/Flickr Creative Commons]
