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Content Zone
Wed 19-May-2010 14:31
More from this writer..
Emmet Moloney
Wonderful cross pollination
Emmet Moloney writes for the
'The Irish Farmers Journal'
and is a former sports columnist with 'The Kerryman'.
Disciplines like rugby, soccer and GAA are mixing with each other with excellent results, writes Emmet Moloney...
Cross pollination is a wonderful thing. I watched a perfect example of it in Cusack Park in Ennis on Saturday night. Killaloe were playing Tulla in the Clare senior hurling championships, and who was that prowling the line for Killaloe only Keith Wood – he of Munster, Ireland and Lions fame.
Keith is helping out his native parish for this year’s championship, and you could tell. Killaloe beat Tulla by three points in what could be considered a mini-shock, as Tulla won the Clare title a few years back. Killaloe wouldn’t be considered a hurling stronghold. But Wood was the star of the show.
Every time anything of an aggro nature developed on the pitch, Wood was on the ball. Barking instructions, all of them related to discipline, he ensured none of this team got overly involved. On occasion, he even assigned players to remove others from harm’s way when the hand-bagging started.
This will stand to Killaloe, and it would stand to any team. Referees are human. People have spent centuries giving out about them, at them and to them, but how many have actually tried to respect them? Get your team to try it sometime.
Don’t quibble with any decision, put the ball down and retreat; don’t eff and blind on the field or from the sideline. Guess what? After the match, you will all be saying that the ref wasn’t half bad. You’ll even find that you got the odd 50-50 decision.
Now why is that? It’s simple, really: referees are human. Of course, if one team is on your case all the time – questioning everything, abusing you, showing you zero respect – subconsciously you will not give them the benefit of the doubt.
Say their full forward breaks through with a goal on the cards: was that four or five steps he took? As a referee, you probably can’t help yourself. The whistle nearly blows itself.
After all, that’s the little so-and-so that swore at you ten minutes ago. He’s not getting any breaks. It was five steps. Referees will probably deny that, but respecting referees is the highest form of flattery. It will get you somewhere. Keith Wood knows that.
He knows that proper discipline will pay off countless times throughout the year, both on and off the field. It probably played a very important part in his career, so he knows the value of it. I wish a few more did.
But back to cross pollination. Our three main field sports – GAA, rugby and soccer – are littered with it. Martin O’Neill played for his county in Croke Park, as did Mick Galwey, Niall Quinn and Kevin Doyle. Dick Spring played rugby for Ireland, and hurling and football for Kerry. Tomás O’Leary’s dad is Seanie O’Leary, famed Cork goal poacher. GAA managers like Jimmy Barry Murphy and John Meyler also have sons playing professional soccer in England.
This struck me as I listened to Liam Brady’s interview with Marian Finucane on Radio 1 last Saturday. Liam is a thoughtful, intelligent and well spoken ex-footballer who was obviously a very talented youngster. That meant he played Gaelic football as well as soccer. Yet in his school, in the late 1960s, the ban was still legal and in operation. He relayed the story of why he left St Aidan’s CBS in Dublin. After being selected to captain the Irish Under-15 soccer side for a game in Wales, he discovered that it clashed with a schools Gaelic football match. A friendly Gaelic football match! Liam was told he would be suspended if he played for Ireland, and that was the end of his time at St Aidan’s.
Of course, today this would never happen. Any school would be immensely proud to have an Irish captain, at any sport, as a student. But this country had a fiercely parochial outlook in Brady’s time.
Today, the battle isn’t being fought over the ban; it’s being fought over time. Talented 14-year-olds are being made to choose. Once upon a time, that choice was provoked by the ban. Today, it is provoked by the organisations themselves. Teenagers are being given stark choices by their clubs.
The GAA is not immune to this internally. The sheer dearth of dual players speaks for itself. In this day and age, there is no consideration made for a player good enough to represent his county at two codes. Naturally gifted sportsmen like Teddy McCarthy, Liam Currams and Stephen Lucey can’t get away with it anymore.
But back to the kids. Times have changed, and that’s what times do; we recognise that.
But youth hasn’t. Teenagers can play three games a day if they have to. They can train seven nights a week if they have to. On their nights off, they are probably hitting a ball against a wall or in the garden anyway.
It’s what kids do. Burnout is a word for adults. Kids should be encouraged to play when they want and what they want. They’re kids.
Plenty of people reading this will recall personal experiences of the local soccer/rugby/GAA club mistreating some young lad because of his prowess in the other code. This happens every week, though not because of any directive from Croke Park/FAI/IRFU. No, it is caused by sheer bloody-mindedness. Human error and parental error – someone, somewhere, drunk with power.
And, as a result, a young lad, and a talented one at that, is turned off one of those codes for life. He develops a bitterness for that code, and will steer his own children away from it. It’s still going on.
What if Keith Wood was told it was rugby and never, ever anything else? Would he, in retirement, have come back to help hurling in his native Killaloe? Would he be making referees’ lives a little easier in Clare?
Keep this in mind when your young lad wants a lift on Monday night to soccer, Tuesday night to GAA, Wednesday night to rugby, Thursday night to GAA again, Friday night to the disco, and Saturday and Sunday to the matches.
They’re only young once. Let them enjoy it. A bit of cross pollination never hurt anyone.
To catch Emmet's latest column, get
'The Irish Farmers' Journal'
every Thursday...
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