Compiled by NIALL KIELY
Lomu's backing has basis
IN TERMS of historical prognostication, it’s hard to think which was least likely.
Mauerfall, and the collapse of Ronnie Reagan’s “Evil Empire”? The end of apartheid and the creation of a functioning multiracial South African state? Or a Fine Gael Taoiseach being both masterful and statesmanlike? In the circumstances, it’s hardly fanciful to dream of Irish success at the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand, now less than two months hence.
We got a double endorsement of sorts recently. Jonah Lomu, who speaks as scorer of a record 15 world cup tries, singled Ireland out as “a team to be wary about”. And The Sunday Times’ Stephen Jones, no Paddy-lover on the evidence of many match reports, ranked us third in his ratings – even if there was an inevitable cavil (“somewhere in there is a team to be reckoned with”).
If every talisman stays fit, we’ll rattle any cage on our day. And this time we’ll be match-ready, given the rigour of Declan Kidney’s summer prep-match programme.
And looking at the opposition, there are some encouraging straws in the wind.
England’s administrative base could not be more shambolic, and while the cackhanded blazerati remain in the ascendant, Twickenham plotting will thicken.
Wales, after the usual Gatland/Edwards surge, have slipped alarmingly – and Manu Samoa will populate Welsh group-match nightmares even more vividly after the islanders beat Australia out the gate last week.
France have a perverse clown as coach.
Seth Efrican efforts to build a team to compensate for Peter de Villiers’ manifest coaching shortcomings just might work, but apart from High Veldt bovinity, they lack three-quarter panache. The Aussies knew their pack-pool was shallow; the Samoans horsing them off the Sydney paddock reinforced that: their forwards remain all fur coat and no knickers.
Whither mine hosts? The heebie-jeebies that have throttled the Kiwis in every cup since 1987 are already mushrooming. Last weekend’s defeat of the Canterbury Crusaders by the Queensland Reds in the Super 15 final hasn’t assuaged nerves. And even more than Brian O’Driscoll and Paul O’Connell for us, NZ’s cup chances pivot on Dan Carter and Richie McCaw staying healthy.
That’s fierce thin ice, as an earthquake-traumatised nation expects.
Fallout from Murdoch's mounting troubles is incalculable in England
SOME TIME ago playing golf with an amiable Northerner of a non-Catholic persuasion, I tut-tutted sympathetically (okay, with po-faced glee!) when one of his putts did an agonised tour of the lip but failed to find consummation at the desired destination.
“A Monica,” sez I, only to discover he’d not come across that particular piece of golfing argot. By way of reciprocation, a few holes later, when I’d essayed an ineffectual stab at a putt that came up well short of the hole, he remarked: “Ah, a Molyneaux.” (A timid wee Prod, it transpired.)
Monica Lewinsky’s most persistent legacy may remain golfing slang, but the memory reminded me of Kenneth Starr, the guy who pursued Bill Clinton with positively evangelical zeal over the Lewinsky affair.
Hell hath few furies like the righteous American Neocon in pursuit of a sinner, a truism that may yet come to haunt one Rupert Murdoch.
Forget ritual minor humiliations at Westminster: his real commercial travail could yet break surface in the USA, if near-puritanical disapproval of his “fit and proper” status leads to a leaching of advertiser support from his lucrative television interests.
Already, jackals are circling the big dingo, and Ole Rupe cannot even predict whose snapping jaws might lock onto his bits.
Last month, for instance, Qatar-based Al Jazeera paid €90 million to secure part rights to French league soccer games, thus breaking a historical near monopoly by French pay-TV’s Canal Plus. And there are lots of cash rich others out there, waiting to break into sports TV.
However spurious or Mittyesque the bid from the boys in Brazil for Carlos Tevez may be, it did draw our attention to a shifting soccer market. The Brazilian currency has enjoyed a real and coruscating run against the euro and sterling; not all Lusophone states are suffering. And the market in Europe will metamorphose further as practical accounting rules bite in the west, and eastern oligarchs’ wealth prove cash-in-hand is king.
In England, the fallout from Murdoch’s burgeoning troubles is incalculable. It’s Sky’s money that has distorted the local market to comical proportions. If Rupert Murdoch goes under, the Premier League could be financially bombed back to the Dark Ages (aka the 1980s).
'Watching' cricket on the radio
FINALLY, THIS week we’ve some Test cricket, as England host India at Lord’s, bringing the twin delights of vicarious engagement (our own Eoin Morgan) and the return of Test Match Special on BBC Radio 4.
“Watching” the game on the radio brings anticipation of the Beeb’s schoolboyish, nay, Wodehousian commentators fielding a full frisson of malapropisms, spoonerisms and the occasional double entendre.
Former England captain Michael Vaughan set things up nicely this summer with helpless on-air giggles when – as Kevin Pietersen replaced a bat-grip – Vaughan was asked faux-naively by fellow commentator Jonathan Agnew: “It’s not easy putting on a rubber, is it?”
Sobering tale of box-office TV star
PARDON AN opening understatement, but golfer Graeme McDowell does not seem an inconsiderate man. So when to explain his missing the cut at last week’s British Open, he opined “I’m a bit of mental case right now”, we can assume his infelicitous words were simply not well considered.
Which he underlined when he added: “I wouldn’t call it traumatic, it’s just sport.”
The unfortunate phrase “mental case” came to mind later as I watched former golfer David Feherty perform on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. As a golfer and as a human being, Feherty has always been interesting.
He seemed too clever and intellectually inquiring to plod through a lengthy, humdrum pro career, but long before his playing wheels began to lose traction, a wisecracking originality had winnowed him from the field. His depiction of taciturn, sour-faced Colin Montgomerie as “looking like a bulldog who’d just licked piss off a nettle” was acute. Monty was even less gruntled when aggressive US galleries loudly echoed Feherty’s cruel soubriquet for the Scotsman of Mrs Doubtfire.
He made merited progress from humorous interviewee to innovative commentator, and his eschewing of clichéd and hackneyed American one-liners minted a fresh, original voice. It helped, of course, that he knew his golf – and that he had the guts-cum-nous to be his own man.
En route he found, by his own always frank admission, that he was “not quite right in the head”. He’s just started his own show on the Golf Channel, and he’s been plugging it anywhere he can (and en passant has been making a broadcasting virtue of mental-illness necessity).
On Leno he both entertained and brilliantly illuminated – in a way that must’ve gladdened the hearts of public health professionals – his bipolar life, depression and drunken times.
Feherty is box-office TV, with the unpredictable watchability of an Eamon Dunphy or Pat Spillane. The Mephistophelean mien helps: he’s skinny now, the cheeks pared down, but well shy of etiolated or spectral. A goatee frames a vividness somewhere between that Russian meerkat and Paul Galvin on speed.
Until a fateful interview with Tom Watson, Feherty told Leno, he grazed on a daily two to three bottles of Bushmills. Watson had already slain his own addictive dragons, and radared onto those dead alky-eyes. Jack Nicklaus, no less, private-jetted him to rehab in Florida, Watson became his AA sponsor, and Feherty’s been sober for five years now.
The Bushmilled broadcaster was also on 40 Vicodin a day, and he had the rapt attention of Leno’s studio audience when he added: “It’s not funny. You take 40 Vicodin a day, you go to the toilet once a month. Then you give birth to a concrete Christmas tree.”
He described another seminal moment, lying on his La-Z-Boy recliner beside an almost empty bottle of Bush one day when his six-year-old daughter lay on top of him and with her forehead on his, said gravely and solicitously: “Daddy, you need another bottle.”
Clarke, McIlroy, McDowell? Feherty’s my favoured golf gem from our fourth green field.
Decorum ditched - blue suit with brown shoes
IN THESE pages recently Keith Duggan, an aficionado of the GAA fracas, pointed up a palette of difference-of-opinion gradations, starting with the delicate red-mist pastel of “melee”, segueing through carmine “schemozzle” and culminating in the raw chiaroscuro of “unacceptable scenes”.
This week, soccer gave us a full-scale outbreak of on-field violence at the upper end of the Duggan Scale as Paraguay and Venezuela players and officials had a mass brawl in Argentina. In rugby, Wales has re-calibrated public misbehaviour norms: we had Andy Powell’s golf-buggy jaunt on a motorway; serial low-jinks juvenility by the show-pony Gavin Henson, and last month the CCTV footage of Mike Phillips wrestled to the ground by a Cardiff bouncer.
The Daily Telegraphcan barely contain itself, giddily schussing on schadenfreude at Rupert Murdoch's discomfort. (Although one's loath to fault a paper that headlined the closure of the News of the World: "Goodbye, cruel World.") Still, it may have pinpointed a novel parameter. This summer's brawl among guests at Royal Ascot prompted one Lovat Timbrell to write to the paper. "I noticed one offender wearing a blue suit with brown shoes. Is it any wonder there was so little sense of decorum?"
