Irish Examiner Column, 20 March 2009
March 20, 2009
County Board meeting 16 March 2009
March 20, 2009
Another meeting rolls on to the agenda
MONDAY night, and another meeting of the Cork County Board. How many is that now?
It’s as if official gatherings seem to sprout wherever one or two gather in the name of transfer applications and fixture congestion.
It’s a commonplace to pay tribute to tenacity and determination in all forms of life by saying that a nuclear holocaust would not extinguish those same elements of God’s creation.
Clearly, however, the innate desire of Leeside GAA administrators to come together is so strong that the detonation of any amount of fission-based ordnance would not stop a quorum being formed.
Radioactivity be damned; if there’s an agenda, we’ll be there.
Anyway, last night. The meeting centred on proposals regarding the composition of the committee which will appoint the county’s next long-term senior hurling manager.
That’s exactly as much background as we’re minded to give. Take it or leave it.
Those proposals were dealt with at some length at last Thursday night’s meeting, but the executive proposal was one of the early favourites in the running.
In the event it was hardly a contest and no-one was surprised when that motion romped home, gathering 72 votes out of the 113 cast.
It means that under the initiative proposed by Central Council earlier in the dispute, three independent people will be appointed by Central Council to consider and recommend a manager to the county committee for a two-year term.
The three nominees are to be “Cork GAA people” — no member of the County Committee or current player will act on the committee.
However, questions remain regarding the original document which gave rise to the proposal.
That was proposed by Christy Cooney and Pauric Duffy in an effort to resolve the dispute some weeks ago, and it didn’t confine itself to the issue of the manager.
For instance, if the executive of the Cork County Board is content to assign Central Council the power to appoint the men who will appoint the Cork senior hurling manager, what about the other proposals in the Cooney–Duffy document, which would effectively remove power from the executive? Will those be implemented?
After all, precedent has been established in last night’s decision for bringing in some of those wide-ranging recommendations, which covered issues from fixture planning through to facilities maintenance.
Furthermore, exactly how Central Council will actually appoint those three persons is another issue, and last night’s meeting did not tease out the methodology which Croke Park will use to select three Cork GAA people.
Cork already have a short-term senior hurling manager, John Considine, who was appointed on an interim basis pretty snappily last Thursday night.
Unfortunately for conspiracy theorists everywhere – but specifically those triangulated between Adrigole, Newtownshandrum and Youghal, let’s say – Considine threw a spanner in the works when he indicated
yesterday that he wouldn’t be going forward for the job on a permanent basis.
Throw the duster across the blackboard, then, and we can chalk up the usual suspects.
However, if we could divest ourselves for a second of the robes of impartiality and express an opinion, we feel it’s a great pity that proposal number 4 wasn’t adopted, an
Imokilly suggestion that the incoming manager be appointed by a committee drawn from the Cork hurling winning captains of the last 25 years.
The proposal only garnered five votes, which was unfortunate. Given the week that’s in it, it’s only right to point out that one of those captains is Ireland scrum-half Tomás O’Leary, who captained the All-Ireland winning minor side of 2001.
It would have been some fun to make a call to the Ireland team hotel this week to ask Tomás if he could take some time out from the attempt on the Grand Slam and puzzle out a long-term manager for the Cork senior hurlers.
We heard last week about Cork democracy, but that would have been some blow for Cork ecumenism.
David Peace interview 13 March 2009
March 13, 2009
Capturing the strife of Brian
The first football game David Peace attended was Huddersfield Town v Leeds United, Brian Clough’s first game as Leeds manager. Now Peace’s book about Clough’s 44 days at Leeds — ‘The Damned United’ — has been turned into a movie. He spoke to Michael Moynihan.
THEY were going to the game anyway.
Trevor Cherry, the ex-Huddersfield player, was lining out for Leeds and he was the focus for a
seven-year-old David Peace and his father, avid Town fans both. Then the youngster spotted a distinctive figure getting off the United coach: new Leeds boss Brian Clough.
“His last game in charge after his 44 days was Leeds-Huddersfield in the League Cup, another coincidence,” says Peace.
“I didn’t go to that game — my Dad did — but it was a strange quirk of fate that Huddersfield bookended that period.
“And we always discussed that in my house, why he took the job, why they offered it to him, what happened and how it all went wrong.
“I suppose it was always there for me, from an early age.”
Peace — whose ‘Red Riding’ novels have been filmed for Channel 4 — published ‘The Damned United’ three years ago.
“What I wanted to do was an ambitious plan — probably not a very good one — which involved writing a history of Leeds United, a kind of occult history, getting into corruption early in the 20th century and so on, but things kept happening, and it kept getting longer.
“I’d always been thinking about Clough’s 44 days at Leeds, but in the original idea I wouldn’t have gone back to Derby County and Hartlepool, it would have concentrated on Leeds. “However, Clough overtook the whole book. I was very young at the time so I didn’t remember anything about Derby, or the players going on strike — I really only remembered him as boss of Nottingham Forest. The injury, his love of films like ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ — that was all new.
“I still think Revie is a complex, fascinating character. He’s a ghostly presence in the book, and while I wouldn’t do it, there’s surely a Revie novel there to be written.”
Peace prefers American writing on sport to much of what’s published on the same subject in Britain.
“I’ve thought about that a lot, and when I was researching The Damned United I read quite a lot of different books.
“’Underworld’, the opening is just fantastic, but I also read non-fiction about American football, baseball, basketball — compared to the non-fiction books about football you get in Britain, those are interesting enough but there’s no attempt to craft a great sentence, usually.
“I wondered if it was something to do with the nature of the sports — baseball and American football are almost more mythic as sports, and the pace is slower. American football is very violent and aggressive, for instance, but there are time-outs and breaks and so on.
“In Britain and Ireland, football is played at such a pace that it’s different. There’s an attitude that ‘if you didn’t play the game you can’t write about it’, which is a strange attitude.
“But it seems that American sportswriting, generally, is better than what we get in England.”
Warming to the theme, Peace agrees that American writing about sport often tries to locate those sports in a wider social context.
“I agree, and you could go deeper. Even the non-sporting British novel can appear to be in terminal decline — these are big, big generalisations — but to me, someone like Don DeLillo is streets ahead of someone like Martin Amis.
“These are difficult comparisons, but a lot of great American sportwriting isn’t just about the sport, but about the society. That’s certainly not the case in England, and I wonder if that’s the case also with novels. I think it could be a smaller mindset.
“Certainly there has been good writing about sport — Geoffrey Green, Hunter Davies — and Eamon Dunphy’s ‘Only A Game’ is fantastic. People have written very well about football without resorting to cliche, such as Nick Hornby, but there’s that exclusion I spoke about — that you can only write about it if you played, otherwise you’re only accepted if you write as a fan. Then the whole thing ends up with being quite narrow.”
Not an accusation you could level at Brian Clough. Peace confesses his affection for the larger-than-life manager.
“I didn’t have an impression one way or the other when I began the book. My memory of him would have been of him hitting fans behind the ear, that period of Clough.
“The real surprise for me was learning how outrageous a character he was, how rebellious. When I was writing it he was still alive — he died when I’d almost finished the book, and there was a huge outpouring of emotion.
“But on a Saturday night he was talking about the football, he’d be impersonated by Mike Yarwood, then he’d pop up on ‘Parkinson’. He was everywhere.
“I also realised that those were the worst 44 days of his life, very dark, but that made me like him even more. He did good things and bad things, like everyone, but when I finished the book, I’d say I admired him.”
*’The Damned United’ is published by Faber. The movie is released on March 27.
Irish Examiner Column, March 6 2009
March 6, 2009
Rugby success would be last word
L AST night some of you may have caught ‘Red Riding’ on Channel 4, a new drama based on the novels of David Peace.
‘Red Riding’ is a fictionalised
account of police corruption, the Yorkshire Ripper murders and general north-of-England grimness.
To be honest, after the last six months covering the Cork GAA
dispute, it felt like light relief.
Coincidentally, this column was talking to David Peace — clang, as the name drops on the floor — a couple of weeks ago about another new screen adaptation of one of his books ‘The Damned United’, which covers Brian Clough’s ill-fated 44 days in charge of Leeds United in 1974.
In the course of our phone conversation — he lives in Tokyo, which is a full nine hours ahead of us if you ever need to ring someone in Kabukicho — Peace casually mentioned that American writers — arty novelists and sports hacks alike — seem to have a far greater appetite than their Irish and British counterparts for relating sports events to wider social issues.
It’s a fair point. Peace mentioned well-known English writers like
Martin Amis, who wrote ‘London Fields’ about a darts player trying to break into the professional ranks, but one such book doesn’t come close to the likes of American giants like Don DeLillo and Philip Roth, who splice baseball and American football into their novels without making it look like an anthropologist’s first encounter with an interesting but backward tribe.
You can over-egg the
social relevance pudding, of course (pardon the metaphor). In Ken Burns’ ‘Baseball’ — the greatest sports documentary ever made — the writer George Will makes a telling contribution about writers reading too much significance into baseball, pointing to the profusion of authors and intellectuals living in New England in particular, who tend to weigh the Boston Red Sox down with all sorts of symbolic baggage.
“These writers were neurotic enough to begin with,” says Will, “But then it’s ‘why, baseball reminds me of life, death, the Federal Reserve, whatever.’”
Sometimes, of course, that wider socio-economic picture is something everybody is looking to detach themselves from altogether rather than a phenomenon people want to get more involved with.
At a recent press conference, Ireland rugby forward Jamie Heaslip acknowledged the fact that in an economic downturn that’s beginning to look like a black hole, people are taking a closer-than-usual interest in how the Irish rugby team is doing.
“People are focused on it to take their minds off things,” said Heaslip at the time. “It happened, looking at Ireland at the soccer World Cups; that took the focus off things at the time.
“If people want to do that, do it.”
Everyone in the country seems to be hanging onto the rugby team for a bit of good news at the moment, but we’re here to sound a sober note of warning, because if there’s one thing that international rugby success appears to herald for Ireland, it’s complete economic meltdown.
Far be it from us to pour cold water on everyone’s hopes and dreams, but our last Grand Slam came just in time to usher in the hungry fifties, when we were exporting 50,000 emigrants per year.
The next championship came in 1982, as the country plunged into a eye-watering recession so severe that Charlie Haughey told us we were living way beyond our means.
And right now we have late-capitalism teetering on the brink of extinction as an economic system just as Brian O’Driscoll rediscovers his try-scoring touch.
By contrast, when we couldn’t beat the Italians in the nineties the country was going like the clappers, with everyone’s house increasing in value by 322% per week.
Back in the early sixties, when we were winning about one game per year in the Five Nations, the rising tide was coming in that would lift everyone up out of squalor and into mohair-suited prosperity.
In that context, would defeat in Murrayfield be all that bad?
contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie