A week is a long time…
A WEEK can be as long a time in sport as in politics.
As you leafed through your Irish News last Saturday, you had no idea where Barnard Castle was and that 60-mile drives with your four-year-old in the car was the safest way to test your eyesight.
You were also probably already braced for a sportless summer.
Ze Germans had given everyone hope with their return to Bundesliga action, but it was only when the Premier League nailed down its return date earlier this week that the reality dawned – sport that we actually care about will be back soon.
Not that Dortmund-Bayern didn’t fill a hole in the tooth on Tuesday evening, though if it hadn’t been for the hole in Roman Burki’s hands that somehow allowed Joshua Kimmich’s nonetheless-artistic chip to beat him, it could have been a reminder of how big games are so often anti-climaxes.
All has accelerated rapidly even since then. The Premier League has nailed down its return date of June 17, and on top of giving FOUR live games to the BBC for the first time since Sky invented football in 1992, they’ve even talked Murdoch into giving away some of his free-to-air.
The games will all be played behind closed doors but determined not to be left behind, the GAA through both Tom Ryan and John Horan came out with a couple of moderately hopeful statements in recent days.
We won’t be looking at 82,000 in Croke Park any day soon, but even re-opening pitches to let walkers, runners and Instagram dead-ball artists in would be a start.
Who knows where we’ll be this time next week?
Kerry’s nostalgia complex grows
IT is fitting that the most successful county in Gaelic football history is involved in so many uniquely historic games, but it perplexes them that almost all of their All-Ireland Gold appearances end in defeat.
Tomorrow will be no different as TG4 rewind to 2005, when Tyrone backed up their semi-final win from two years earlier by defeating the Kingdom to win their second All-Ireland title.
They don’t like losing at the best of times, but they mortally hate losing to Tyrone.
TG4’s best attempt at buttering them up was to show the 2014 final against Donegal, which was an affront to the term ‘classic’.
But then when Kerry went around beating Mayo and Cork to a bloody pulp for decades, what did they really expect?
The quaint reality is that they just haven’t won a classic final in the television era.
Quote, unquote
“That’s the job of a corner-back – that’s why I can never understand why anybody would want to play there. You’re sent out to try and stop a man playing football; it doesn’t matter if you kick the ball, as long as you stop him kicking the ball. They obviously got a real kick out of that and I could never understand that mentality.”
Mickey Linden there, wishing defenders didn’t exist. Not that they bothered him.
If you need to get angry…
Celtic’s 2003 UEFA Cup final loss to Porto will be shown in full on UEFA’s YouTube channel at 4pm on Thursday. If you’re into that kinda thing, you can annoy yourself at Porto’s antics all over again.
