Print journalists were a lot more scathing of the second half performance, to be fair. There's very little somebody like Horgan or Quinlan can say that would be too harsh, especially Horgan since he still has to play with half the team.
In today's Irish Times - the GAA once again stealing a march by putting its money where its mouth is:
GAA to build hurling and camogie centre at WIT
GAA president Christy Cooney has unveiled plans for a GAA national hurling and camogie development centre at Waterford Institute of Technology, saying it will prove a major benefit in helping the expansion and promotion of hurling and camogie.
The centre will be located at the WIT sports campus at Carriganore. It will include elite fitness suites and laboratories as well as indoor and outdoor pitches when it is completed at the end of the year on foot of an investment of over €18 million....
(http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...312851941.html)
Hello, hello? What's going on? What's all this shouting, we'll have no trouble here!
- E Tattsyrup.
Originally Posted by Eminence Grise
As a hurling man foremost this was a stupid place to put this centre.
It should have been further up the country. Waterford already border Cork, Tipp, KK, none of whom need this kind of centre as they already have it in place with CIT, Dr Morris Park and Nowlan Park respectively.
Admittedly it's also near Wexford, who have fallen back a lot, and Carlow, who are making great strides, but it should have been placed near Laois/Kildare where it could help development of the game in those two counties along with Meath/Westmeath/Wicklow/Carlow. Counties with far more need of development than the big three and all with realistic potential of playing a much higher standard.
My two cents, on the wrong forum.
Noted - but you're selling yourself awfully cheap!My two cents, on the wrong forum
I agree that it probably needed to be elsewhere to help hurling spread, but the fact that WIT has a Department of Health, Sport and Exercise Science might have been a more important factor in its location.
Hello, hello? What's going on? What's all this shouting, we'll have no trouble here!
- E Tattsyrup.
Ya, they already had the infrastructure in place alright.Noted - but you're selling yourself awfully cheap!
I agree that it probably needed to be elsewhere to help hurling spread, but the fact that WIT has a Department of Health, Sport and Exercise Science might have been a more important factor in its location.
On the wider debate. Many county boards have facilities that the FAI can only dream of.
Has anyone seen the development in Tyrone? Funding from both the GAA and the NI Sports Dept:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_bJ_...eature=related
Pretty incredible really.
We can but dream alright...
Hello, hello? What's going on? What's all this shouting, we'll have no trouble here!
- E Tattsyrup.
Thats no great surprise. Unfortunately (a) the gaa has traditionally been run far better and (b) it receives greater levels of funding both at government and local level to enable these developments.
On the WIT academy, surely it this works it would benefit not just Waterford people but all those who attend the college, which Im sure have a much wider spread than just waterford. Perhaps its the pessism in me but I find it hard to accept that any unestablished county will make a breakthrough in hurling in the next 20 years. For one, it does not have the tradition and the only county that has suggested it may do so are Dublin and looks at the amount of money and resources thrown at them - yet a certain number of its senior players arent even from Dublin.
A certain number may not be Dublin natives but sure what of it? If we had a whole team made up of KK and Tipp rejects then I would be concerned but the likes of Maurice O'Brien and Niall Corcoran playing for the team surrounded by natives hardly makes it something that is worth getting knickers in a twist over.
DID YOU NOTICE A SIGN OUTSIDE MY HOUSE...?
The Indo's Eamon Sweeney having a pop at rugby's recent uppetyness here in an article titled "A better class of arrogance".
It fits my world view stated here before about rugby being a bit too pleased with itself over its rise in popularity and prominence. What do others think?
It's a bit of a huge straw man, to be honest, based entirely around a few lines in an IRFU report. Those things are designed to be self-aggrandising. If he wanted to make a coherent argument there are plenty of public comments from ex-players, coaches etc. to make it for him.
i think rugby and the IRFU should be proud of its accomplishments. They were a laughing stock 15 years ago and the game was in a rapid decline. If the footie and GAA equivalents carried themselves with the same level of professionalism, had a more solid vision and operated with more transparency over the years, they would be in a better state than they are currently and far more respected by the general public.
I think it's unfair to throw the GAA in there. The FAI are the laughing stock of sport in this country.
DID YOU NOTICE A SIGN OUTSIDE MY HOUSE...?
they are the epitomy of parochialism though Bonnie. They deserve a mention. Though i agree the FAI are worthy winners in the incompetence stakes.
Parochialism is not in question. It's professionalism. The GAA do a lot well. A lot ham-fisted but they in fairness are an incredible organisation.
DID YOU NOTICE A SIGN OUTSIDE MY HOUSE...?
I'd agree with you and I think the IRFU do an amazing job too. The FAI have certainly improved on many of the incompetencies of the past, but there is still room for improvement. Living in Australia the success of our rugby team and international rules teams certainly make you feel proud. Aussies find it hard to accept that the GAA players are amateurs such is their fitnesss levels and that we can produce such successful teams in different codes given our small population.
Seriously?!? That barely registers in Oz. The only ones who give a fcuk about the international rules are the Irish. Plus in large parts of Oz, it is rugby league that matters most to them rather than union.
I am proud to see all Irish team and sportspeople do well but the one sport in which I want to see our teams do well most of all is football. I think that is because it is truly a global game, global tournaments. Very few sports, with the exception of olympics have such a vast global appeal and audience.
Last edited by elroy; 02/04/2012 at 10:57 PM.
He didn't say everybody watches it. He said the people who watch it are amazed by the amateur players' fitness levels.
Im not denying that, I suppose my point is that I find it hard to be proud of such a 'game' that barely registers in the mindset of the general public of our opposition.
In a gaa sense, personally would be more proud when foreigners come to gaa games here and admire the games that are our own, rather than any results our compromise rules teams may achieve.
Of course the IRFU deserves credit and the FAI needs to be more transparent, but that's a given that anyone would have granted right at the start of this thread.
It'd be interesting to know what the FAI would have done faced with the opportunity of entering a franchise team (or beefed up existing club) with into new cross border league and automatic entry a fledgling European wide competition with only a handful of countries participating though. There were no Bayern Munichs, AC Milans, Barcelonas or existing structures for the IRFU to contend with - so to a certain extent you can't cite the provincial teams' success in Europe as evidence that the IRFU is better organised hands down than the FAI. There is no shortage of volunteers in football for example, and all the good work that the IRFU does in the community is at least matched by the other codes. The flipside to the provincial franchise success is that - so I'm told but have no evidence to back it up - that the AIL clubs have been disadvantaged by quite a large degree.
And what success has this rugby team actually had? I believe the Golden Generation has woefully underdelivered in green - not at club level obviously.
But none of this is really the point. Sweeney is supporting my view that there is a degree of hypocrisy around the "values" aspect of how rugby promotes itself, and how rugby is quick to look down its noses at other sports' weaknesses as if it's free of the same issues. My view has been that this has been propogated by some of the fans (including my friends) and parts of the media. In fact Sweeney says he'd have dismissed my view as being either paranoid or that it's only a few in the rugby community. Sweeney was also quick to point out that the rugby team themselves are well rounded and appreciative of other codes. However, Sweeney's point is that on this occasion it's the IRFU itself that is promoting this guff in its annual report.
Now, in fairness, I've long given up on annual reports. Half of them are written by PR firms saying how wonderful, for example, an arms exporter is with promoting minorities in the workplace with a picture of a kid from a minority background walking through a field of sunflowers, while the accompanying numbers are incomprehensible due to modern accounting rules. But guff it is from the IRFU nonetheless, and it's out there, which is why I've been less enthusiastic about the team than I was up, to say, 2009. After this I've been annoyed by the constant drip feed of sly digs at football from many quarters as if one is good and the other is bad. There's good and bad in both.
Last edited by Stuttgart88; 03/04/2012 at 9:28 AM.
This is true, which is the reason why some people in Ireland still have an awkward relationship with "foreign sports" like cricket and rugby (obviously much less so now). My father is a GAA man first and foremost and, growing up, I'd have played more GAA than football under his influence, but it is the truly international dimension of football that appeals to me. Parochial rivalries don't really do it for me, especially as I'm not sure I do have a real affinity with any solitary county "identity", as it were; I have a Tyrone-father, a Roscommon-mother and am Donegal-born myself with Derry having been the significant sphere of influence for the second decade of my life. In saying that, I've thoroughly enjoyed any Tyrone GAA games to which my father has brought me and the prospect of supporting Derry against Donegal in GAA would never cross my mind despite my latter support for Derry City in football superseding the earlier support for Finn Harps of my pre-adolescence days.
Just on rugby and cricket relative to football, briefly, the reach, popularity and centres of dominance of both these games are, by and large, limited to the confines of the Commonwealth/former British Empire (rugby; slightly less so again as the game's popularity spreads in a self-affirming manner with France, Italy and Argentina posing the most significant exceptions to the trend), whereas football can truly be viewed as universal. Despite being as much an English/British game at root as cricket or rugby, football is played in every corner of the globe and by all sectors of society, so furthermore does not carry the baggage of social class that will see some scoff at rugby as "elitist". Whether this was in spite of or because of football's more humble, working class and therefore accessible roots, I'm not so sure.
I enjoy watching rugby purely as a sport, but it just doesn't stir the emotions in me like football can. I don't really connect with the whole rugby thing on a social level either. It was never my sport growing up; perhaps for semi-cultural reasons. It was always viewed as a middle-class Protestant game in the north so I didn't really encounter it (not necessarily out of choice; I didn't encounter lacrosse or ice hockey for similar reasons, for example), unless it was being shunned in discussion by my peers. I'd be reluctant to appear to be hopping on a bandwagon and I similarly observe the self-satisfaction and smugness of supposed maturity in Irish rugby to which Stutts has alluded. Whether I'm right or wrong, or simply generalising wildly, I'm not so sure the social dynamic behind the game in Ireland has yet to shed certain traits that could be very easily perceived as elitist. Maybe it's me who is erecting sub-conscious barriers, but there is a restraint of sorts nevertheless in that I wouldn't feel entirely or wholeheartedly enthusiastic about roaring on the national rugby side to a Grand Slam. No other sport could reduce me to tears like football can (or is that the alcohol?!).
I'm sure I've recounted on here before the amusing anecdote of the lad in my class back in St. Columb's College in Derry who had his mother write a note on his behalf to our PE teacher in order to excuse him from that week's session as it had been announced we'd be doing rugby and the lad, of course, staunchly objected to playing "foreign games". The college sought to introduce the pupils to lesser-played games every now and again but, sure enough, my classmate sat out PE in protest with the pointlessness of his statement providing great amusement for the rest of the class. The contradiction of his stance was not lost on the rest either; indeed, he was back playing indoor football the very next week, just like he'd done virtually every other week prior to his protest.
Last edited by DannyInvincible; 03/04/2012 at 9:59 AM.
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