Fingers crossed for Fingal

HOLD THE BACK PAGE:SOME SEASONAL sport restores and reassures. County champion clubs head into a madcap winter rush of games and the heartland of the GAA pulses to a strong local rhythm.

Even as the Gaelic Players Association gains traction with headquarters, even the biggest inter-county players are willing disciples to the core values and local importance of playing for parish, townland, family, friends.

In soccer’s Champions League, there was comfort this week in seeing elites discomfited. Liverpool, of the rapacious and fissiparous American owners, struggled into the Europa competition.

Real Madrid look more spancelled than settled by their splurge of spondulicks. Bayern Munich, Bundesliga seventh and poor in Europe. Bordeaux, Lyon, Rubin Kazan (!), upstarts all.

Domestically, the FAI Cup final’s pairing in Tallaght felt like a comforting, even romantic “throwback” of sorts – it was easy to find common cause with the hardy survivors of Sligo Rovers, or enthuse about the community project that is represented by north Co Dublin’s rising star, Sporting Fingal.

Poor old Sligo. I’ve had a soft spot for them since being engrossed by Eamonn Sweeney’s panegyric to his beloved Reds on a particularly tedious transatlantic flight some years ago.

But I can’t be alone, with the debacle of Derry City fresh in the memory, in feeling fearful for the winners. By my count, they’ve 10 full-timers on their books, several of whom can’t have come in cheaply, plus three on DCU sports scholarships.

Even with the support of Fingal County Council which, imaginatively and a la the French municipal model, sees the soccer project as a viable way to create a local identity, to jump-start Fingallian esprit de corps, the Lusk sports centre and stadium has been purse-stringed.

And Santry’s Morton Stadium is not the most enticing temptation for punters.

In the meantime, Sporting Fingal depend on the continuing support of local employer Keelings. And the backing of its sugardaddy, Gerry Gannon, a property developer.

Barcelona, even the Green Bay Packers, had their modest beginnings before they became the models for the type of binding communal entity that Fingal longs for.

We can but keep our fingers crossed for the folk who live on the R132.

FINAL STRAW

A clever Letter to the Editor included in The Irish Timeslast Saturday deserves wider currency. In it, a correspondent pointed out that in light of the Thierry Henry handball furore, he was looking to viewing on television next summer’s World Cup in South Africa. In particular, the letter-writer is gleefully anticipating his personal enjoyment of the England vs France game – in an entirely silenced Irish pub.

In last week’s deliberate error (do pay attention at the back) I described British television and nosh critic AA Gill as English.

If readers had known his verdicts on other nationalities, they’d realise he has little of the Anglo-Saxon dissembler about him. He once remarked of an over-fussy French waiter that it wouldn’t have surprised him (Gill) if the fawning poseur had said “the salt was shaved from the pudendum of Lot’s wife”.

He has also described the Albanians as “short and ferret-faced, with the unisex stumpy, slightly bowed legs of Shetland ponies”.

And Gill’s verdict on his Celtic cousins? “We all know the Welsh are loquacious dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly pugnacious trolls.”

As you’ll know by a process of reduction, the estimable Gill is a Scot.

England's rugby lumbers on, the paucity of managerial imagination evident in last weekend's selection at centre of one Ayoola Erinle, who apart from his inability to catch, pass or kick, makes a threequarter of sorts.

Behind the scenes, internecine strife intensifies deliciously; this week Martin Johnson got that most worrying of pats on the back: his chairman's full support.

But it's in the corporate boxes and on those 70-quid a throw seats the English discomfiture should now focus.

Ever been to Twickers?

Whatever the limitations of Lansdowne in terms of its capacity vis-a-vis Croker, it's a gloriously city-centre stadium, an enjoyable pub-crawl or stroll from all points.

Crowded trains to suburban Twickenham would test Job.

The roads bottleneck early on matchday. There are many fair-weather Jeremiahs in England's glottal-stop support, and they ain't been getting no satisfaction.

In the car parks, the cold lobster and sauvignon brigade have been kicking the picnic tailgates of the Cayennes and Rovers.

Beware Barbour-shop rebellions.

Even by the murky standards of International Olympic Committee (IOC) shenanigans, this week’s allegations about Juan Antonio Samaranch bate Banagher.

The authors of a book called ‘The KGB Plays Chess’ allege that the 89-year-old former IOC head (and still its honorary president) was ‘turned’, so to speak, when the KGB nailed him for breaking local rules and sending antiques home during his 1977-’80 stint as Spanish ambassador to the USSR (he was the staunchest of Franco backers).

Thereafter, the book says, he cooperated with the Soviets and they in turn ensured a unified Eastern bloc vote to help put him into the top IOC job in 1980.

Samaranch, recovering from a heart attack, is saying nothing. “Pure speculation,” quoth the IOC.

All bets off if Fifa ignore match-fixing

LAST WEEK, Fifa’s egregious and self-serving president Sepp Blatter must have thought it was safe to go outside again.

The World Cup qualifiers had gone more or less to plan, the Egyptians had stopped rioting, the Irish were back in their box.

Then along came a scandal that won’t readily go away.

There have been straws in the wind, but both Fifa and Uefa have traditionally shown the world their favoured cheeks with an instinctive, default stance that strategically combines the words sand, head and ostrich.

The two organisations also shared a Eurocentric conviction that Asian match-fixing by gamblers simply would not become a real threat in this part of the world.

Four years ago, five members of a Croatian betting syndicate were convicted of bribing a German referee to rig the results of matches in 2005. And last year in Newcastle, England, a Chinese man went silently to jail for life, convicted of the extremely nasty murders of two Chinese students – who had been paid by a betting ring to report on the form of players in lower-division English clubs.

And of course there was the Italian pre-World Cup fiasco. Since then, all quietish on the western front.

Last week, Berlin's Morgenpostreported that another match-fixing scandal was about to break in Europe.

German police confirmed that 17 people were under arrest, including two in Switzerland. Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported in Zurich that the FC Thun players were paid a total of €15,000 to fix a four-goal loss in an April game.

The thick plottened. Coaches, referees and other officials as well as gamblers are now being questioned in an investigation of games in Austria, Hungary, Belgium, Turkey, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. In Italy, a separate match-fixing inquiry has starter.

At the heart of the matter, of course, is the proliferation of sports betting, especially online.

The sponsorship tentacles of internet gambling organisations are everywhere in European sport, unlike the situation in the USA where citizens are not even allowed to bet online and the authorities can see clearly the connection between the huge sums to be won and the likelihood of sporting corruption.

Benevolent Pocock and Bellamy real men

SOME TIME ago trainer Peter Chapple-Hyam spoke admiringly about Irish horse Sea The Stars as one of the best ever, possibly the best colt ever. Predictable enough, perhaps, given that the animal was about to complete six Group One wins in successive months from May through October.

What struck me, though, was his pithy kicker: “And he’s trained by a proper man.”

No greater accolade than that, from the down-to-earth English gent that is Chapple-Hyam. Thus it was no surprise when John Oxx got an ovation and unanimous approval at this week’s Cartier/Daily Telegraph shindig when he was given the Award of Merit.

He followed the likes of Queen Elizabeth, Henry Cecil, Lord Oaksey, the Aga Khan, John Magnier and Peter O’Sullevan. John Oxx is mature, intelligent, balanced, considerate man and a consummate trainer: he hasn’t a rational enemy.

A rusty Irish rugby outfit was poxed to scrape a draw against the Australians a fortnight ago, and one of the reasons Ireland saw so little of the ball for long stretches was 21 year-old David Pocock: he has the mullacking strength of a Stephen Ferris, a robust engine and adroit jackalling skills at the breakdown – not quite the full McCaw, yet, but he’s not all that far off.

In Australia, much has been made of Pocock sleeping with a gun under his pillow as an 11-year-old in his native Zimbabwe, a country from which his family eventually fled in 2002 after their farm was seized in Mad Bob Mugabe’s land-grabbing campaign. John Mitchell, his coach at Western Force, took a wrist-slap and fine for playing him in Super 14 aged 17, and now can see the mature-beyond-his-years Pocock as a probable Aussie captain.

After this tour of Europe, he heads back to Zimbabwe to oversee a community project for orphans and other disadvantaged. Pocock has helped fund it with his own money, supported by other donors (www.eightytwentyvision.org), and does it due to the contrast between deprivation in his African homeland and the relative affluence of his adoptive Brisbane.

Craig Bellamy’s been variously described as spiky, aggressive, feisty, robust, temperamental and difficult to manage – euphemisms for having proved to be in his career a right, royal hot-tempered brat. Even his best mates say he could start a row in an empty room, and his assault on John Arne Riise with a golf club after a karaoke row is soccer folklore.

Bobby Robson described him as “the gobbiest footballer I’ve ever met”, but the same Robson rated him the technical superior of Michael Owen. He’s now a very well-paid Manchester City footballer.

He has already invested more than €440,000 of his own money, and pledged a further €935,000 to his foundation in the West African country of Sierra Leone (craigbellamyfoundation.org).

It’s “blood diamonds” territory, Unicef gives it the worst child mortality figures in the world and it’s bottom of the Human Development Index, which measures life expectancy, literacy, education and standard of living. Sierra Leone is Third World because there isn’t relegation.

Bellamy’s foundation is already helping more than 1,600 local kids between 11 and 14, who play in Bellamy’s leagues (the only ones in the country) and attend his 60 academies.

The key is education: the kids’ teams build up points not just through match results, but by school attendance (mitch and you’re out of the team) and compulsory participation in community development projects (skive and you’re ditto) such as fixing wells, clearing sewers and cutting back vegetation.

The response has been overwhelming, the social impact startling. What a living legacy.

Pocock and Bellamy.

Proper men.