TV VIEW:IT WASN'T, it has to be conceded, the most jolly of sporting weeks, Friday's mishap at Lansdowne giving a pear-shaped feel to it all. Which begs the question: why is being shaped like a pear necessarily a bad thing?
One theory, according to Wikipedia, is that “the physics package of certain compact thermonuclear weapons is pear-shaped, with a spherical secondary and an oblate primary”. Like we didn’t know already.
And it’s hard to dispute that Germany had much the same impact on our footballing morale as a thermonuclear weapon might have on, say, a pear tree if one landed on it.
“These are the best players that Ireland has. There are no others . . . do you know of any others?” Giovanni Trapattoni asked in his press conference after the game.
So, eager to help, fired by a sense of patriotic duty, there was nothing for it but to tune in to Football’s Next Star on RTÉ2 yesterday and do a bit of scouting.
Forty of Ireland’s finest young players, Nicky You raise me up Byrne told us, were competing for a place at Celtic’s youth academy, Neil Lennon insisting all he was looking for were “technically sound players who would put supporters on the edge of their seats”. Jeez, you and us both, Neil.
Footballing beauty is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, but if Giovanni was tuning in he might be tempted to put Dean Coughlan from Bruff in Limerick and Abdelrahman Baky from Kilcoole in Wicklow in the team for tomorrow night’s set-to with the Faroe Islands – Coughlan making Lionel Messi look Paul Green-ish and Baky kind of a cross between Iniesta, Xavi and Cesc Fabregas.
“I had trials in Egypt, it was good, but it’s not Celtic,” Baky smiled, while Coughlan was shown honing his skills with the aid of a wall in Bruff. It could have been George Best doing the same in Belfast 40 years ago, there was magic in them there feet.
Naturally, then, neither of them made it in to the final 10 picked to travel to Glasgow to try to win that place in Celtic’s academy, so when Baky and Coughlan are collecting their 15th Ballon d’Or combined, those Celtic scouts are going to be mad embarrassed when footage of their non-selection of the pair reaches 236 million views on YouTube, each comment ending in “Fail!!!”.
Kind of the X-Factor with football boots minus the singing, really, but with the same dollop of horribleness – like the time four little strikers were summoned by the Celtic “judges” and only three of their names were called out, the fourth little fella left broken-hearted. It’s a cruel auld game, but still, you’d prefer a little fella’s broken-heartedness not to be beamed in to your living room.
But maybe we all need to take a leaf out of Kamui Kobayashi’s book and look on the bright side of sporting setbacks.
“You called him an idiot,” the BBC’s Jennie Gow said to Jenson Button after his spin around the Korean Formula One track was, like Nico Rosberg’s, ended in the first lap after Kobayashi, well, wiped them out.
“You missed out on a word,” said Button, who wore the look of a man who wanted to insert a thermonuclear weapon up Kobayashi’s rear end.
“Okay,” said Gow, not wanting Button to add what the missing word might have been, live on telly.
How many of you forgot Korea and Ireland aren’t actually in the same time zone and gasped when you heard the Red Bull people warn Sebastian Vettel on his radio thingie that he was suffering from “unpredictable underbracing” – and which of us hasn’t? – then happened to click on the BBC website where the headline read “VETTEL TAKES TITLE LEAD WITH WIN” when he and his unpredictable underbracing still had a few laps to go on the telly?
Anyway, soon after her chat with Button, Gow told Kobayashi that he had called him a blankety blank idiot, prompting the delayed-coverage viewers to hold their collective breaths. No need. Kobayashi beamed: “I hit everybody!”
See, that’s the way to handle sporting triumph and disaster, giggle just the same at both and, like, get over it. And sure, more often than not, there are brighter days ahead.
“There’ll be some partying tonight for the Irish fans,” said Sarah Stirk on Sky Sports yesterday, so if you tuned in late and thought it was continuing post-match coverage of Friday’s Lansdowne to-do, you might have said “huh?”
Not so. It was Shane Lowry’s first European Tour triumph as a professional, at the Portugal Masters. “You could hear the Irish crowd all day, they were spurring him on,” said Tim Barter, “it was like playing in Ireland, it was crazy,” said Lowry.
See? We get knocked down, but we get up again. A decidedly nice end to the week, then, Lowry thermonuclearising his opposition, leaving them pear-shaped. You don’t always beat the Irish, you know.
