Good morning,
Would you believe it, the Rugby World Cup is just over a month away. Time’s flying. And Andy Farrell will hope that his players will be too during Ireland’s build-up which starts on Saturday against Italy in Dublin.
After that, there will be games against England and Samoa before Ireland open their World Cup campaign against Romania on September 9th in Bordeaux. These warm-ups offer “an opportunity to maintain momentum and fine tune cohesion without unveiling too much,” writes Gerry Thornley, the aim to extend a 10-game winning run to 13 before the team gets down to business in France.
Meanwhile, another Farrell, of the Dessie variety, is saluted for his work this year with Dublin’s All-Ireland winning team, his former team-mate Paul Bealin telling Gordon Manning that he and his staff “managed the season brilliantly, they got their timing spot on, the big players hit form when the stakes were highest, that’s brilliant management”.
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Borrowing a Jurgen Klopp-ism, Ciarán Murphy describes the Dubs as “an extraordinary group of mentality monsters”, while reflecting on what was a very rare off-day for David Clifford. “Whatever postgame criticism he received,” he writes, “and the subsequent criticism of that criticism, is just indicative of his outsized place in the game’s firmament.”
Tudor City has been a bit of a Galway Races mentality monster himself, Brian O’Connor previewing his attempt today at becoming the first horse to win the Galway Hurdle three times.
In his America at Large column, Dave Hannigan writes about Tori Bowie, the former athlete who died in childbirth last April at the age of just thirty-two.
Remarkably, two of her team-mates from the 4x100m relay team that won gold for the United States at the 2016 Olympics nearly died in childbirth too, these ordeals highlighting “the disproportionately high risks faced by African American women in the American maternal healthcare system”.
Telly watch: It’s D-Day in group H at the World Cup, Colombia v Morocco and Germany v South Korea kicking off at 11.0am (RTÉ2 and BBC2) – Colombia need just a point to advance, while Germany will join them in the last 16 if they can match Morocco’s result. RTÉ2 has further coverage from the Galway Races (2.30-5.30), while BBC 2 (5.30-7.0) and Eurosport (5.40-9.30) bring us the first day of cycling’s World Championships in Glasgow where there will be no shortage of Irish interest.
