Compiled by NIALL KIELY
Cork footballers just don't seem to understand game management
WHEN THE Sports Editor in vindictive fashion mentioned during the week he looked forward to a valedictory on Cork's barren championship summer, now that the footballers have gone the way of the hurlers, it was clear that a penitential corner of this page was being shrouded in sackcloth.
So. What to make of a game that few even in Mayo truly believed was winnable?
Perhaps the only consolation for Cork folk, during one of those dispiriting Croke Park afternoons when 20,000-odd supporters failed to create anything like a headquarters ambience, was that at least it was only Mayo – to whom it was genuinely easier to lose, such was their palpable pleasure at the end – and not a semi-final drubbing by the Kerry bogeymen.
And RTÉ analyst Joe Brolly was as near as dammit utterly correct because his caustic comments – about Cork’s one-dimensional play and inability to put away inferior teams – always smacked of truth.
Sunday proved the Derry man right, in spades; good for him for having the guts to nail it in unvarnished fashion.
“Primitive approach?” That’s accurate about a group of players who seem to accept as a given that their fitness, athleticism and strong-arm relentlessness would allow them to steamroll any other team. A packed Mayo defence and an enthused full-court-press tactic confounded that canard.
“Dumb football?” Yea, verily, if we take Sunday’s on-pitch evidence of an inflexible game plan that was found wanting well before half-time, yet was not changed in any fundamental or original manner, thus that charge also sticks.
Comparisons with the neighbours show Kerry have not sat still; Cork as a squad seem set in tactical aspic.
An interesting cross-sports comparison was suggested in a Sunday Times rugby World Cup scene-setter in which outhalf Ralph Keyes recalled bitterly the quarter-final defeat to Australia in Lansdowne Road when Ireland managed to blow a 76th-minute lead and lose 18-19.
“D’you know, Ralphy,” a supporter later remarked. “Shannon would’ve won the game from that position.”
In any sport, it’s called game management.
This Cork squad doesn’t get it.
'The world of doping always sits on quicksand' - L'Equipe
AS THE angel dust settles, and we look in hope at this summer’s Tour de France, there are some evidence-based straws in the wind that suggest cycling’s anti-doping measures may finally be getting some traction.
And yet . . . we’ve been disillusioned so many times before by the cyclists, and sundry track athletes, whose chemical and technical wizards repeatedly proved a step or two ahead of the laboratory posse.
It still defies belief for those of us of unremarkable aerobic capacity that skinny lumps of gristle-and-bone can propel their bikes across 2,100 miles of countryside in barely three weeks, including climbs in the Alps and Pyrenees that make even the television viewer empathetically breathless, without the benison of serious stimulants.
The French, with five riders in the top 15 and the unfamiliar national frisson of following Thomas Voeckler defending the Maillot Jaune for an unlikely 10 days, are understandably ready to acclaim a cleaner Tour; to frank the volition of desiring to believe once more.
The sports daily L'Equipehas been burned too many times to become bound up in unwonted over-optimism about doping, but it did headline the figure 36.794 after the race.
That stat, the average kmh speed for 2011, was only the 11th fastest in history, and has been seized on as a solid and reassuring metric.
As has the fact that in three of the four final climbs this year, including Alpe d’Huez, the leading riders were a full three minutes slower than their ’90s and noughties counterparts.
Lest we forget: Russian rider Alexandr Kolobnev was forced out of this year’s contest after his blood tested positive for a banned steroid, and fifth-placed Alberto Contador raced only because the Court of Arbitration for Sport has still not resolved the Spaniard’s appeal on his 2010 Tour positive for clenbuterol.
Key to any guarded optimism lies with the “biological passports” in use since 2008 and against which are tested deviations against predicted individual performance patterns. It may be the cyclists are doping less, rather than not at all, of course.
As L'Equipenoted: "The world of doping always sits on quicksand."
Tufnell plays the game
FINALLY . . . the second cricket Test against India was as engrossing as anyone could’ve hoped in advance, and its daily fascinations underlined again what a catastrophe for the game it will be if the five-day version becomes a victim of the smash-and-grab limited-overs variations.
There were other reassurances also. Our boy Eoin Morgan finally got some runs, with his 70 in England’s final Trent Bridge innings, and BBC Radio 4’s Test Match Special crew of pantomime artistes did not disappoint either.
Jonathan Agnew (Straight-faced Provocateur): “There’s a very pregnant woman sitting in the Tavern Stand.”
Phil Tufnell (aka Loveable Essex Rascal): “Nuffink to do wiv me.”
Nothing cliched about Twomey
BRISEANN AN dúchas trí shúile an chait.
Nothing seemed truer than that sentiment this week in the usually unspectacular world of quotidian showjumping, a sport that may carry our best prospects of London Olympics medals, especially if the boxers run out of luck and happenstance throws up inclement ringside arbiters.
Sometimes the persuading truth of an aphorism looms from a photograph, glanced briefly.
This time, it was an unbylined picture of Billy Twomey, the Cork-born and England-domiciled rider who took inspiration from watching as a child while the Eddie Mackens and Gerry Mullinses did their derring-do at the RDS summer show.
Sports coverage can sometimes be clichéd, but Twomey’s likeness shone with a particular resonance because it complemented an excellent Louise Parkes piece on the showjumper.
His background, particularly on the maternal side, made virtually certain Billy’s sporting choices, all the way from the pony circuit through a long, hard grind to his present hard-won eminence.
When his late father and namesake married Jill Hitchmough, young Billy was fated to grow up in a thoroughly horsey home, with Dad running commentary at point-to-points and Mother sharing a riding school and breeding-for-sale outfit in Monkstown with her sister Avril.
Peripatetic apprenticeships followed, starting with Sydney medallist Albert Voorn in the Netherlands, and trainer Jason Moore in England, before reaching what was his holy grail: to work for the legendary Whitaker brothers. That melding of Twomey’s native gentleness and Hitchmough toughness must’ve annealed a core cuteness: Billy survived six years with the Whitakers.
Talking to Parkes, he was perhaps circumspect in his recollection of the brothers, or he may even have grown to like their gruffness.
They’re known in the business for being bluntly hard-nosed to an extent that would make their fellow Yorkshireman Harvey Smith resemble an Oxbridge sophisticate.
I was thus less than flummoxed to learn that the abrasive younger Whitaker, Michael (51), had been arrested after a bar fracas at a hotel near Gatwick and held overnight before being released without charge last Saturday morning.
He went straight home to Nottinghamshire, abandoning the rest of Hickstead, and leaving the British Equestrian Federation to solicit services of one of the three PR companies the BEF has hired to smooth the path to London.
After the figleaf of an apology, and the panacea of an unspecified contribution by Michael Whitaker to charity, the BEF waved him off to Dublin and his vital role in tomorrow’s Grand Prix at the RDS.
Any such contretemps is unlikely to figure in headlines about Billy Twomey.
He told Louise Parkes of a formative experience with Auntie Avril when, aged 10, he’d been jocked off a pony at a combination fence and lay on the ground, feigning injury.
That was until she roared: “Get up, you little fecker, there’s nothing wrong with you!”
Utterly believable, although I’d give long odds against Avril Hitchmough settling for “fecker”.
Links to an economic decline
FORGET THE business and finance pages. If you want the surest proof of how deep, steep and creepy a hole our ramshackle economy is in, all you needed to read this week was Philip Reid’s interview with Cecil Whelan, of the Links Golfing Society, a charitable fundraising institution that’ll go belly up this month after 45 stellar years. The money’s simply no longer out there.
From humble beginnings – a sum of £13 and 10 shillings from the first outing in 1966 – they totalled some £350 the initial year, a figure Reid put in useful mid-60s perspective when he pointed out that a family home in Dublin then cost around a grand.
The pattern of their totals thereafter provided as good a set of prosperity indices as any quantum of economic data. Of the €15 million raised in a decade and a half, it came in €600,000 to €700,000 annual sums during the 1990s, rising to well over a million in a couple of years during the bubble boom of the 2000s.
“You can’t do that now, with the best will in the world,” Whelan said sadly. “Reality hit this year.”
He added: “If it’s not there, you can’t do it (fundraise well).”
