www.uibhfhaili.com

Taken from the kilkenny gaa website
(Discussion in fairness where most people complained about Ballyhale managers poor sportsmanship with aftermatch comments):

Padjoe has plenty form in post match crowing.
When Birr beat Gowran a few years ago in a match that took place in probably the worst conditions I have ever seen for a top class fixture, he let himself down very badly.
Shouting at journalists that "I know how to bate Kilkenny teams Boy".

The magic formula obviously being a club team with perhaps a dozen county panellists taking on one with two on a Paddy Field in December.

There is an Offaly trait that I have always disliked. It is their love of trying to make their wins out to be more than they were.
Every win is elevated to some sort of "miracle result".
Even their magical team of the mid 90's traded heavily on this.
I have an Offaly friend who swears he backed them at 5/1 to beat us in 1995.
FFS 5/1 reigning All Ireland Champions, gimme a **** break.
They themselves have largely been responsible for retroactively painting the 1998 final to have been a "huge upset". It was nothing of the sort, it wasn't even a mild one. So fearful was I of defeat I decided to back them to ease the pain of defeat but couldnt get an odds against quote the morning of the match.

Vincent Hogan was aiding and abetting this nonsense again at the weekend.
The tone of his artcle was more of the above.
Great little Birr defy the odds once more.
Of the three preview I read on the match, Martin Breheny tipped Birr, while Enda and Damian Lawlor gave the shakiest of nods to Ballyhale.

The great Vincenzo of course couldn't let it go without the favourite Offaly hobby horse of all, the betting coup (that is always only revealed after the event of course).
Apparently shrewd Offaly lads headed to kilkenny and backed Birr off "kilkenny bookies at 4/1). You see Kilkenny bookies are obviously thick as shite offerring wildly different prices to anyone else!!
This is of course garbage.
No one offered Birr at anything like 4/1, this is just more Johnny Pilkington type crowing (you know, not only did we bate ye but I backed us at 10/1 and had 12 pints the night before the match as well, jaysus what would we do to them if we actually trained. Cue guffaws from Vincenzo et al...).

Birr and Padjoe would be better advised to keep their heads down.
This is a seriously good Shamrocks team and the chances must be very high that these two will meet again very soon.

For context:
http://www.kilkennycats.com/phpBB2/view ... 82&start=0

I agree with all he had to say except

Birr and Padjoe would be better advised to keep their heads down.
This is a seriously good Shamrocks team and the chances must be very high that these two will meet again very soon.

Without Shefflin and Fitzpatrick this is not a seiously good Shamrocks team.

It's all probably true and merited, but it can be applied to any sport or to any counties.
Gloating, sourpussing, over-exaggerating, it's all typical Irish bullshit. It's who we are, it's what we do....and we all do it.

I thought this was hilarious!

blondeambition

PostPosted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 3:23 pm Post subject: Reply with quote
I wouldn't say he wasn't involved espcially with the family connections the Whelehans have on the Birr team. Eitherway it didn't keep him from talking. According to his good self, Birr would've beaten Shamrocks if he had been in charge last year! Now theres a man not afraid of a bit of blowing his own trumpet!!

big mick
Well he was in charge this year...and they did beat them.

Padjoe would be a loose cannon at the best of times and I generally dread what he'll come out with when a mike is put in front of him. Offaly hurlers probably put too much emphasis on going to great lengths to be the underdog and then announcing that "no one gave us a chance" afterwards.
It is a very GAA trait though and Offaly are hardly unique in this regard.

This particular poster is a good pal of Enda McEvoy and would be fed a lot of the more insider-esque material and angles. On McEvoy's part there would always be a bit of snideness towards Offaly hurling bubbling under the surface, which he generally keeps airbrushed in his articles.

I don't think we are unique, but sometimes I would like to see Padjoe called up on some of the stuff he goes on with. You'd swear it was Brosna Gaels or Ballinamere he was leading into battle sometimes rather than Birr, if you were to take anything he says remotely seriously. Likewise when eejits start crowing about being the underdog (not just Padjoe here) I'd love to see someone pick them up on it, or use it against them the next time. Like with Padjoe, it would have been great if after he talked about All Ireland champions, if MacDara MacDonncha came back and said something along the lines of "but Padjoe, nearly all the national papers said that ye're the favourites to win this game, where exactly are you getting this idea from?", or maybe "surely in a Leinster final with an experienced team ye're above worrying about what a few bookies or journalists think?"" . Or better yet, interview him in advance of the Ballyboden match and talk about how huge favourites they are for that one.


The funny thing is that I think it doesn't do him any favours at all. Because he says it before every match, opposition are almost put on their guard by his goading, while it also means that on a higher level, nobody really takes him seriously - he's like this joke character. I know for a fact if I was in charge of selecting a county hurling manager for a good team, the impression he gives is of this guy with nothing other than "they're all writin' ye off lads!!!" in his locker - when his track record suggests there must be a lot more to him. However given his potential to embarrass a county with this kind of drivel, I wouldn't let him near a team if I could at all.


On an overall level, I really hate this underdog stuff - any time a manager comes out with stuff like that, I can't help but think that it paints his own players as awful neanderthals altogether. Winning a huge championship match can't motivate them, but by God, find him some two bit journo who cobbled together a 200 word piece tentatively tipping the opposition and they'll run through walls. The very notion of it is ridiculous, and I refuse to accept that the Irish/GAA psyche is as twisted as that.

Lone Shark, you really have to let this Moorefield business go!!

Lone Shark wrote: On an overall level, I really hate this underdog stuff - any time a manager comes out with stuff like that, I can't help but think that it paints his own players as awful neanderthals altogether. Winning a huge championship match can't motivate them, but by God, find him some two bit journo who cobbled together a 200 word piece tentatively tipping the opposition and they'll run through walls. The very notion of it is ridiculous, and I refuse to accept that the Irish/GAA psyche is as twisted as that.

You above all people must know that there always has to be a favorite - if only to keep the likes of yourself in a job

The views of most journalists (with the exception of tight contests) are generally representative of the masses. When a person/team/group is deemed to be an underdog (and they know it), it's only human nature that this should serve to motivate people.

I'm not disagreeing that some people spew out the underdog tag at any opportunity, but using the underdog tag as a motivator is only natural - it taps directly into peoples will. It has nothing to do with being Irish or the GAA.

I can't understand how it's natural at all though. Of course it would be a motivator in the absence of anything else - but to use the Moorefield example, here was a gang of lads who had grown up together, who were playing for a club that has vied for supremacy in the county with their neighbours down the road for as long as I can remember, who had trained like dogs all year and were within sight of the biggest prize the club had ever won in their 100-odd years of existence.

Yet none of this was motivation enough (supposedly) - it took a nobody throwing a few thoughts together into a local paper to concentrate the mind.

It is an extreme example, but likewise the whole Birr/Ballyhale thing - here are two clubs with legitimate claims to be the greatest hurling club in Ireland, and this match would go a long way towards cementing that accolade towards one or the other. Birr had been filleted by the same lads this time last year. Again, they had been on the go for eleven months more or less, and yet according to Padjoe the motivation was some slip from Micháel Ó Muircheartaigh. I cannot get my head around such a perverse sense of priority.

As for it being the same the rest of the world over - I honestly don't think it is. It's not like the Greeks or the Danes when they won the European championships were all about being written off, instead it was a glorious day for their homeland - national games being the only half-real parallel in soccer to GAA. I've never once heard an olympic gold medallist in any discipline talk about his motivation being his dismissal from the calculations of the pundits, or indeed a boxer where it would be slightly more apt.

I'll say it again - it makes no sense. It's like a weird twist of the psyche where you're not being able to appreciate your own achievement unless somebody else was wrong, unless you can belittle someone in the process. I don't like it, and for whatever reason I consider it a very ugly and definitely peculiarly Irish trait.

Incidentally, Kerry never get written off in football matches - does that mean that the All Irelands mean less to them? I would argue that because they don't need this kind of cheap trickery, they keep their eyes on the big picture and as a result are the most successful county by a huge margin.

If that Kilkennyman's short attention span had allowed, he would have heard the rest of the quote which was something like (I'm paraphrasing) - I showed how to beat Kilkenny - hit them hard and keep the ball moving . . ."
Earlier that week 'The Clareman' was appointed Offaly manager which was going down like a lead balloon throughout the county.

corner back wrote:Taken from the kilkenny gaa website
(Discussion in fairness where most people complained about Ballyhale managers poor sportsmanship with aftermatch comments):

Padjoe has plenty form in post match crowing.
When Birr beat Gowran a few years ago in a match that took place in probably the worst conditions I have ever seen for a top class fixture, he let himself down very badly.
Shouting at journalists that "I know how to bate Kilkenny teams Boy".

The magic formula obviously being a club team with perhaps a dozen county panellists taking on one with two on a Paddy Field in December.