The cliché is a vital component of any sporting occasion. You could even argue that it’s not actually an occasion at all until at least a few of these have been trotted out.
How, you ask, did one of The White Stripes’ singles first become an Italian football chant — and then be omnipresent in games across the globe?
THE first thing people ask Simon Hutchinson is if he’s mad.
MANY of us this week may have at last broken a self-imposed winter training ban of our own after an extended Christmas period.
ON Sunday morning, many of us will be woken by electronic bleeps and whirrs as new computer-powered gadgets and toys are plugged in, charged up and used for the first time.
THEY say necessity is the mother of invention.
SITTING in the press box in the Aviva Stadium on Tuesday night behind a laptop and under a sky filled with paper planes, it was clear that travel — if not beautiful football — is what we do best.
I HEARD the great American sports writer Jerry Izenberg blow the dust of some great tales this week on Newstalk’s Off the Ball programme.
AS THEY say in political backrooms: you campaign in poetry and govern in prose.
BE careful, there’s no panic,” Sean Baldwin says as he places the rifle in my arms and I look through the sights at a target the size of a saucer, 10m down the hall at Morton Stadium last Tuesday morning.
HOW do you get to know a nation? Taste their food? Walk their streets? Read their history? Try clicking through the nearest turnstile, follow the route on the back of your ticket to the seat. And learn.
THEY say everyone has a book in them. Paddy Coyne dragged it out kicking and screaming.
You don’t want to know the mucky process in which many engaged to get a ticket. Each one will have a tale of how they got there come Sunday.
IT’S a familiar, hackneyed old show. And one which is rerun a lot these days.
THE now-defunct News of the World used to boast, from its front page banner for many years: All human life is there.
“LEGS, arms, eyebrows, chest hair, nipples, inner thigh, everything. And I mean everything. I raised €2,500 that night but they took every bit of hair off me with the waxing,” said Ross Long as he thought back to that night in the Gaelic Bar.
THEY say you shouldn’t write anything online you wouldn’t like to see on the front page of the New York Times the next morning.
GER WOLFE jumps out of bed at 7am every morning and it isn’t long before he’s pedalling out of the driveway.
IF Fleet Street was still filled with the sound of clacking typewriter keys and the industrial whirr of print-rooms, they would have fell silent this week for a moment.
I LANDED my job in the Irish Examiner by pitching a half-baked idea — cold — to the sports editor.
TONIGHT, in Dean Swift’s shadow and behind the famous college green arch, thousands of Trinity students and graduates will fill the many squares and greens that make up the Dublin city centre university campus.
MAJIEK TARNOGRODZKI still finds himself standing on the sidelines at Tolka Park or sitting on an unfamiliar bench and it will cross his mind again.
IT’S often I look in bewilderment at an article in the sports pages with an expression similar to those which Usain Bolt’s competitors convey as the Jamaican sprinter glides past like he’s on rails.
EVER have that nightmare where you’re rowing the Indian Ocean in a 23ft-long boat, surrounded by sharks, the sun is melting the skin on your back, you’re eating out of tins, going to the toilet in a bucket... and you’re naked? No, me neither. But meet the Irishman who plans on living that dream for 150 nights.
Whatever the result in Cardiff tomorrow, expect the mobile networks to creak under the weight of online messages in its wake.
I was aware of the programme, like everyone who travels abroad. It’s a magazine show really and like anyone I’d think ‘how did your man get that job’?
MORE INNOCENT times. On the day Fianna Fáil launched its 2002 election campaign, PJ Mara walked into the party’s press conference in the Shelbourne Hotel and announced: “It’s showtime.”
LIKE A LOT of the best ideas, it is first talked about over the load music and a couple of drinks.
TOMMY WALSH’S debut in the AFL next week is a story that will be framed by the sports pages, distilled by short-sleeved press men and is, undeniably, about Aussie Rules.
IN 1992 my father fired myself, my brother and two cousins into a car as a long, wet Sunday yawned in front of us.
THE grandly-named Herbert Warren Wind touched down in Dublin for the first time in 1967.
WHEN I was 15-years-old or so I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go on a school trip to Barcelona.
I WOULD HAVE guessed that green fees at Druid Glen were expensive. But €35 billion? Those fairways must be like snooker-table felt.
1 THE Mary Byrne award for best female performance this year, happily, has been marked by our girls representing on the world stage.
“I WAS known as Piddlers for a long time in certain circles, you know.”
IT WAS said by Napoleon — Bonaparte, not Dynamite — that one should never watch a sausage or a law being made if “you want to keep your stomach about you”.
I was at the Arcade Fire gig in Dublin the night before the budget was unleashed.... songs and snowballs filled the air.
HUGH McILVANNEY, the great Scottish sportswriter, sketched a scene for his readers of a Saturday afternoon in an Old Trafford press box which coughed out cigarette smoke.
JOHN GILES scrambled down his staircase in his Yorkshire home one morning to bafflingly find a pair of match caps had dropped in the letterbox from Dublin.
IT feels, this week and in this country, like someone should gently place a Sinatra record under a record player stylus as we bob downstream together towards oblivion.
Tuesday night: I’m locked in a bathroom, behind a door with a faulty lock. Forty-five minutes into the ordeal I’m eating toothpaste and have promoted a rubber ducky to head of communications.
BELIEVE it or not, I was once the feckless type of young man who’d only wear a suit when I reached the cup final in Championship Manager 97-98 on the Amiga 1200.
IS there a silver lining in the economic storms at our doorstep? Now that we’re poorer, will we produce better teams?
WHILE you sit there on the train or in the canteen or outside the school gate, ponder this one: what’s the connection between hurling in north Kerry and Hollywood superstar Brad Pitt?
LET’s think back a moment, before we look forward. You’ve just had your dinner. A warm mug of milky tea is perched on the arm of the sofa as you sit back in short trousers on another yawning summer evening.
WHAT’s the difference between ignorance and apathy? I don’t know and I don’t care.
MONTY is cleaning his spikes in anticipation of next month’s action at Celtic Manor while the Americans are checking their passports are valid and changing their money to Euros.
THE great world spins towards another All-Ireland Sunday. Around the world – for an hour or two at least – Irish feet will not make footprints on the fine sands of southeast Asia’s beaches.
AT the turn of the last century, as the hem of American society was dampened by wave after wave of European immigrants, the Irish stretched out their legs beneath the table, threw a cap onto the coat hook behind the closing door and made themselves at home.
REMEMBER the bit in the old baseball movie ‘The Natural’ when the eponymous Robert Redford is lamenting his sorry past (he was shot by Barbara Hershey), beating himself up to Glenn Close?
WHEN the thin red line of Shelbourne players file out of the Dalymount Park tunnel before they face neighbours Bohemians in an FAI Cup tie this evening, it will evoke a time when cash slushed around domestic football.
THE long, sticky days hang on two tent-pole training sessions at the moment. One in the morning. One in the evening.
MIND your heads while I throw in the first cliché, if I may; in sport, there’s no gain without pain.
READER, I want you to close your eyes. Go on, shut them tight.
WITH the smell of drying paint in my nostrils and freshly-laid grass under my feet, I giddily surveyed the new Lansdowne Road stadium when it swung open its just-hung doors recently.
They say on the Semple Stadium turf you’re never a boy. Always a giant. So too perhaps in Thomond Park.
AS our little country feels the bony fingers of the IMF on our shoulder and the cold winds of financial oblivion against our grubby face, we are often lectured – throughout the media – by so-called ‘self-made men’.
After the trigger word ‘Saipan’ was alluded to, Keane quickly and clinically rattled through the shortcomings of half of Capello’s squad.
THIS is going to be about a hurling man – but let’s start with some baseball.
HUMAN slingshot Rory Delap strides into the room, a new World Cup football loaded in his oxter.
AN Irishman, an Englishman and a master brewer from a Dutch-owned beer company walk into a bar. And as Con Houlihan used to say: now read on.
THANK you students, please sit down. It’s an honour to address the class of 2010. I know you guys are busy cramming ahead of the Leaving Cert’s commencement in a few short days.
PLEASE mind your toes, reader; there’s quite a big name about to be dropped in a second or two.
IF YOU were shaken from your slumber early last Friday morning by the walls rattling and the sound of a distant crash, it was probably just a giant falling to earth in a land far, far away.
The hurley snaps. (It reminds me of tent poles I’ve seen halved by falling fat guys, late at night, after the music has long ended at a festival). But the special spine holds it together safely.
WAYNE GRETZKY, I’m sure, could well swing a hurley if you pressed one into his hand. But I don’t know if ice hockey’s Ringy has any interest in Gaelic Games.
“‘CHAPTER ONE. He adored New York City. He idolised it all out of proportion... no, make that: he – he romanticised it all out of proportion. Yes. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.’ No, no, corny, too corny for a man of my taste. Can we... can we try and make it more profound?” – Woody Allen, Manhattan.
YOU climb out of bed in the morning to survey the trail of destruction already zig-zagging to the half-open front door. You summon the courage to slowly peel open another credit card bill.
GO TO your local bookstore. Beat the familiar path past the graphic novels, travel guides and cooking manuals to the sports section. Trace your finger along the shelf’s edge until you alight at the Js. There, with a bit of luck, you’ll find BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates.
ISN’T it funny how often, a seemingly innocuous trigger like the distinctive scent of drying paint will, without warning, jerk you back to a certain time and place.
IN my three weeks travelling throughout Germany for this newspaper during the World Cup almost four years ago, I met a kaleidoscope of interesting characters.
I nurse a clandestine habit that has driven me to the coldest and darkest corners of society.
Tonight the Airtricity League kicks off after a 12-round close-season that left even Roddy ‘Queensbury Rules’ Collins punch-drunk. After all the off-field attrition – though the battle scars are yet to heal – a football match will break out.
God knows our little-stitious rugby stars may need every bit of luck we can rub together, deep behind enemy lines
WHAT do you ask the man who has won everything? Phil Taylor, a middle-aged darts player from the middle of England might not look it — and he doesn’t — but after 13 world titles, he walks with sporting giants.
THE great American novelist John Updike, though not a sportswriter, did at times indulge his nation’s favourite pasttime. And when he did, he hit a home run.
IT’S not quite Lock, Stock but a new crime movie set in Limerick certainly has two Smoking Barrels.
THE same way you know it’s a general election night when Brian Farrell wears a carnation in his lapel, so too the rich sound of the Artane Band heralds a landmark day in Croke Park for many of us.
DAMIEN DUFF will this morning unpack a suitcase in his London pad after leaving the Ireland camp, on the back of a 10-day stint away from home, to rejoin his new team-mates at Fulham.
AT THIS time of year, American football teams are tasting the white heat of intense pre-season training. Gridiron giants take part in a violent annual ballet as a hulking, heaving mass of athletic hardware crashes into each other in a frantic bid to forge a team ready for the NFL season.
It was with a very real sense of journalistic integrity then, reader, that I too undertook my task, shackled to a very sick head
Eurosport commentary, Milan San Remo, 1992: “And it’s Kelly in there as well! A previous winner of the race; what a finish we’re going to have. The firemen are behind pumping in the coals to try to catch Argentin, anybody with anything left in their legs is trying to get in position before the descent of the Poggio.”
FROM high in the south terrace or Curva Sud of the Stadio San Paulo, Napoli’s ultras hang a bespoke banner at every game. Stitched carefully into the sky-blue fabric is the poetic epithet: “I have seen him, now I can die”. The tifosi need not say who they mean.
HELLO, sports fans! Do you feel unrefreshed while attending a big match? Want to party like it’s 1999, but not pay Celtic Tiger prices for a pint?
THE neglected, rabbit-eared television set flickers high on the wall in the corner of the bar. Though ignored, Galway’s Joe Canning nervelessly taps over another free on a night in Semple Stadium that would ultimately see Cork slip quietly from the All-Ireland hurling championship.
A FORMER rider in standard-issue team colours with neat red hair pinned down under designer shades, Kurt Bogaerts doesn’t really look it – but he drives like Evel Knievel late for Mass.
Sports apparel giants carefully planning what elite golf stars wear at the Open this week is par for the course, writes Adrian Russell, as Turnberry acts as catwalk for a €6 billion business.
© Examiner Publications (Cork) Limited, City Quarter, Lapps Quay, Cork. Registered in Ireland: 73385.