In our latest Hospital Pass, we take a look at this week’s crossover between the GAA and professionalism, from press conferences to play-acting.
GAA people are never happy unless they’re preaching about the amateur ethos, while at the same time playing a game of anything you can do, we can do better with all those pesky professionals from England or Australia.
If it’s not taking on the ripped man-mountains of Aussie Rules in the occasionally annual punchathons known as “International Rules”, it’s urban legends about heading over to England for a soccer trial and running those soft pro athletes into the ground. Graham Geraghty at Arsenal, apparently.
The latest development is the press conference. Gone are the sideline sound bites about taking “each game as it comes” or “sure it’s 15 against 15, we’ll give it a lash”. No, now we have fully-fledged press conferences, complete with top table, microphones and the like.
Dublin set the tone with their 8am gigs, which (a) allow lads to get things done and dusted in time for work, and (b) injudiciously dismisses the sleep requirements of your average GAA journalist. And Kildare followed suit this week, with Kieran McGeeney engaging in some breakfast philoshophy.
Darragh and the divers
Speaking of philosophising, between the jigs and the reels, as they say in certain committee rooms from Ardrahan to Skeheenarinky, Darragh O Sé had a right cut at the play-acters in the GAA today.
You wouldn’t see Paul Galvin or the Gooch lying down when they get a dunt in the chest. The talk around Dingle is that Darragh himself has never even laid down to sleep, preferring to prop himself against a beam – of solid oak, naturally – in case any folk from over the Cork border might happen to wander past his bedroom window and glance in to see a famed Kerryman prostrate.
But lying down is becoming all too prevalent in the GAA these days, says Darragh. Writing in his Irish Times column this morning, after 43 mentions of how hard it can be to find parking around county grounds these days, now that he, y’know, doesn’t have the Garda escort to the games any more, he put the metaphorical boot into those fellas who can’t take their medicine.
Cavan defender Damien O’Reilly was the man at the end of Darragh’s finger, for his over the top reaction to a bit of good-natured jostling from big Michael Murphy during the Ulster Championship game at Breffni Park on Sunday.
“The amount of diving and rolling around on the ground we saw was desperate,” says Darragh.
“It’s the way the game has gone, sadly. The Cavan player who was on the receiving end of Murphy’s shoulder would need to look at himself. It was he who threw the first shoulder and to go diving on the ground like that when Murphy came back at him was only a bit of play-acting to try and get his man sent off. A referee’s job is twice as hard when he’s faced with that sort of carry-on.”
Ouch.
