Back in the old routine

Shankly Gates has risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes. For anyone who chooses to pop over there based on my recommendation, apologies in advance for 4squares.

Something of the night about them

Tuesday night’s match against Shelbourne represented the first real obstacle in my attempts to connect with Waterford United. When living in Liverpool, going to night time matches was a chore. You’d get home, have maybe an hour to wolf down your dinner and perform the multitude of daily tasks that have accrued to any 21st century home owning man – sometimes you’d even have to do the food prep yourself, Goddammit! – before engaging in a madcap charge up to the ground a good ninety minutes before kickoff so you could be sure of getting a decent parking space. Getting away was an exercise in torment as 44,000 people tried to squeeze through the bottlenecks around Anfield. It was always enjoyable when you were in the ground, but there were many times when but for having already laid down £35 for a ticket I’d have stayed at home and played Pro Evolution Soccer.

So forgive me Father for I have sinned – the relief that flooded through me when the match was called off was dangerously close to a mortal one. Admittedly parking and quick getaways are not a problem at the RSC but finishing work at half five, getting back to Tramore, eating without chewing then getting back to Waterford leaves about, ooh, half an hour for me time. How diehards not only do this but actually seem to revel in it . . . perhaps I’m getting old.

It makes you grateful for the more intense nature of the hurling championship, where even the nature of local rivalries means even a devalued-by-the-back-door Munster championship retains its charge. Bundling all the excitement into a few matches allows you to get a ferocious hit and time to enjoy the more tranquil pace of real life. League soccer is often called a marathon, not a sprint. At times it feels more like thirty-something marathons.

Then to put the tin hat on proceedings, I only noticed the Monaghan match was on last night five minutes before kick-off. Like the Blues, I must try harder.

Never gonna give you up

Michael Owen’s later-than-late winner against City in yesterday’s Manchester derby was a blow on so many levels to Liverpool fans. I’m firmly convinced Alex Ferguson would never have signed Owen had he started his career out with Everton, and delight at the dismay felt by Reds, while secondary to that he would have felt on snatching the three points, would have vindicated the signing in Ferguson’s mind.

So while it’s stating the obvious, it bears repetition: we don’t have to put up with this kind of trauma in the GAA. Sure, there have been a handful of players like Larry Tompkins and Shay Fahy who have gone on to success that must have galled the supporters of their original counties. Indeed, I’ve seen it suggested that no less a person than the legendary Mick Roche is from Waterford. But these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Imagine John Mullane donning the black-and-amber. Then, once you’ve mopped up the puke, be grateful for the amateur ethos of the GAA.

Cards on the table II

Last time online before the Clash of the Titan and Waterford, so what are we to expect from the game? Back in 2001, Liverpool were playing what felt like a cup final most midweeks and every weekend – in some cases they really were cup finals – and a character called scousertommy on the Shankly Gates message board would post up “I fear an almighty banana skin today / tonight (nt)” before the match. This made sense before playing Bradford – now that would be an unexpected slip – but it was hardly revelatory before playing Arsenal. Either way, as Liverpool kept on racking up victories people became almost obsessed at the possibility that he might not post his message. This was surely what was keeping up the run of success.

So having personally mitigated against disaster on Munster final day, my on-the-record attitude is that I fear an almighty banana skin tomorrow. Here endeth the lesson.

Update: in the course of writing this post, I have found that rivals.net is no more, and presumably ShanklyGates.co.uk with it. The owner of Shankly Gates has gone on to bigger and better things and presumably won’t be reviving it elsewhere. Just as well I archived everything here. I’m watching you, WordPress . . .

Update II 14/11/09: it’s back. And there was me deleting all the links in each Shankly Gates post. Now I’ll have to edit them all to reflect the new URL. Good to have ya back.

A classic slice of Oirish whimsy

While the GAA is intimately bound up with my sense of what it is to be Irish, that doesn’t mean you have to like the GAA to be Irish. In truth, there is a critical mass of people out there who are Irish and despise the GAA and all its works and all its deeds that it could be convincingly argue that disliking the GAA is a perfectly Irish trait. And that’s even before you factor in the one million-odd Irish men and women of a Unionist bent . . .

For all of that, next weekend sees two relations of my wife coming over to stay. Naturally I’d like to go to the match but I don’t want to neglect my guests. How to square this circle? Simple. Dress the match up as being the quintessentially Irish experience. As each visitor is a veteran of Anfield and Goodison Park respectively (the friendly derby, la!), they know what it is to follow English sports. When it comes to seeing how we do things on this side of an Mhuir Éireann, there’s only one show in town.

The Obligatory Sami Hyypia Hagiography

Several years ago, I read an aside in an article in Through the Wind And Rain where the writer wryly noted that the departure of John Barnes from Anfield merited as much comment in the fanzine as did the death of Bob Paisley – still the only manager to win the European Cup three times, folks! The writer wasn’t having a moan or chastising the global Kop for caring more for Digger than for Sir Bob, just highlighting how there are a number of Liverpool fans in recent years with a different subset of memories from those who followed the Reds before the club underwent a popularity supernova. Back in the day, the only way to have an authoritative view of the likes of Bob Paisley was to be regularly at the ground. The ubiquity of televised football and the internet means that everyone has the opportunity to have an informed opinion on the merits of John Barnes.

Whether that will lead to an informed opinion is another matter. So prepare for a potentially-informed-but-probably-not piece on the departure of a player of Barnes-esque proporions, one Sami Hyypia.

Anyone who has only been supporting Liverpool for the last decade, and is therefore lucky enough to only have mostly grey in their still partially hairy head, would probably be surprised to learn that there was a time when Liverpool had a reputation for having all the defensive skills of a slug on an army training ground. It is not an exaggeration to say that Liverpool’s reputation for clownish defending could be traced to the calamitous FA Cup semi-final defeat to Crystal Palace in 1990, a match where Palace seemed to score every time they chucked the ball into the box above waist height. Alan Hansen retired the following year, snuffing out forever that most elegant of double acts he had performed with Mark Lawrenson for seven glorious years in the 80’s.

From now on, Liverpool would become a byword for buffoonery in the box. Nothing we did and nobody we tried could solve the problem. You see Newcastle United now? That was us, that was. Mark Wright was the first of a succession of players signed generally to solve the defensive problems and specifically to be able to do such mundane things as defend corners. Players would be arrive, be touted as the new Hansen / Lawrenson after a few decent performances, then crumble as every gaffe was magnified tenfold under the increasingly relentless gaze of the media.

That’s not to blame the hacks. Everyone who signed up knew what they were letting themselves in for. It was up to them to have broad enough shoulders to cope. But cope they did not. Wright would soon be flapping around like a newly-caught trout and stinking up the place like an oldly-caught trout. Nicky Tanner, Torben Piechnik, Neil Ruddock, John Scales, Phil Babb, Rigobert Song, Bjorn Tore Kvarme . . . they all went through the revolving door of the Anfield central defence only to be spat out at the other side. The only period of stability in that time was when Roy Evans played three central defenders, which is akin to solving someone’s blindness by sticking another eyeball in the middle of their forehead.

Into this maelstrom in the summer of 1999 walked Sami Hyypia. Long of limb and square of jaw, he certainly looked the part and wails of despair followed in his wake from Tilburg where he had been the rock as Willem II secured their best league position in 50 years. Still, that gnawing sense of defensive inadequacy clung to the club and the initial signs were not promising as Hyypia’s Anfield debut saw him bamboozled by Tommy Mooney in 1-0 defeat to Watford. The team stumbled from one mediocre result to another for the next few weeks, and when Steve Staunton was the victim of a preposterous sending off (mistake identity for the first yellow then got a second one for breaking early from the wall when the free kick had already been taken) early at Villa Park, the razor blades were out.

Then a curious thing happened. Liverpool put in a magnificent rearguard performance, one where at the end the travelling Kop was singing YNWA. This may sound ludicrous for a 0-0 draw, but the fans were acknowledging that Villa could have been there all weekend and still wouldn’t have pierced the defence so splendidly marshalled by Hyypia. The sense that a corner had been turned was proven in the following months as Liverpool became a model of defensive solidity. There’s no doubt the moving of Stephane Henchoz in to the middle with Hyypia was a factor but anyone with eyes could see who was pulling the strings. He even weighed in with a few goals. The Reds imploded spectacularly at the end of the season and missed out on the Champions League, but the season had been an overall improvement on the previous one and qualifying for the Uefa Cup would have its fringe benefits. Best of all, the sense that the Liverpool defence was an rolling audition for the Keystone Cops was gone. And all it had taken was one man with broad enough shoulders to shrug off the burden.

There were wobbles along the way. He was a natural choice as captain in the old-school mould of Liverpool skippers, but a loss of form in 2004 was such that he lost that role. And the last few years have seen the muttering that he was seriously short of pace for the highest level reach levels where you, well, hear them clearly.

But that’s all they were – wobbles. There was never a sense that he was doing anything other than keeping the captain’s armband elastic before the inevitable coronation of Steven Gerrard, so it didn’t take much of a dip for him to lose the captaincy. His relationship with Stephane Henchoz was marvellous but with Henchoz prone to the occasional howler, particularly in big matches – Christ, how many heart attacks were induced by those tackles against Birmingham in the League Cup final or the handball against Arsenal in the FA Cup final? – the absence of such errors in Sami’s repertoire only served to make him look better. Suggestions that he had lost a yard of pace would be swiftly slapped down by his many acolytes saying  that he barely had a yard to begin with, and inevitably his performances would come back up to the previous level. Those who had doubted would always cheerfully admit to being wrong. No amount of good performances will convince the sceptics of the qualities of, say, Dirk Kuyt. But everyone was willing to apply to Sami the notion that form was temporary and class permanent.

Then there were the goals. I think it is correct to say that he scored at least one goal in each of his ten seasons at Anfield. It’s not that unusual for defenders to score goals, but he wasn’t restricted to beanpole headers from corners. I recall a game against Man Utd back in 2003, the infamous game where Diego Forlan scored not once but twice,  where  the strikers couldn’t have hit the target had the goalposts been stretched from corner flag to corner flag – always knew that Michael Owen was useless. Up stepped Sami to show them how it was down, firing a crisp shot from the edge of the penalty area through a forest of legs. Most memorable was his effort against Juventus, a delightful volley with his weak foot that any striker would have been proud of. Seeing him wheel away with delight after that goal, it seemed perfectly normal to see him do something so ridiculously precocious.

It didn’t have to end this season. Numerous command performances meant it looked like he would carry on. But when Daniel Agger abruptly signed a new contract after muttering for ages that he wanted away, it quickly became apparent that the quid pro quowould be Sam’s departure. The logic is impeccable, and it appeals to the grand Liverpool tradition of Clemence-esque ruthlessness which sees a player moved on just before he begins to fade rather than just after. Going to a club where the’s not likely to do us any harm helps too. But his departure is poignant. The overload of information referenced in that RAOTL article at the top of the page has gotten worse since the days of John Barnes and when a player spends ten years at a club you feel, however much of an illusion it is, that you know the player. And what we knew, we liked a lot.

So farewell then, Sami Hyypia. We might well see your likes again. But if we do, we will have been fortuante on the double.

Counties That I Don’t Hate – Dublin

(No 1 in a series of 2)

Jerry Seinfeld once made the observation that when it comes to sport, we are ‘rooting for laundry‘. When Michael Owen was playing for Liverpool he was a hero to the Kop – his outside-the-outfit-y-fronts were slightly skid-marked for effectively displacing uberhero Robbie Fowler, but he was still an object of veneration. Yet three years ago he was roundly jeered and even booed by most of Anfield. His crime? Wearing a Newcastle United shirt. Wearing different laundry.

We’re meant to hate. Nick Hancock – yep, my vision of the world is informed by the bon mots of comedians – put it well when he denounced the habit of having a ’soft spot’ for a team. Hancock denounced such talk, saying that “football is not like religion, football is religion, and you don’t hear the Pope saying he has a soft spot for Islamic fundamentalism”. His addition to this quotable quote, that he was disappointed every weekend of the season that the optimum set of results – Stoke City winning and everyone else losing – didn’t come to pass, struck a chord with me back in the mid 90’s.

Now though, I’m not so sure. Even Nick Hancock would admit that Port Vale are singled out for special doses of venom – he must be having a right old time at the moment as Stoke sit comfortably in the Premier League while Vale languish in the depths of League Two. And once you admit that all teams are equally hateworthy but some are more equal than others, then there’s got to be someone you hate least. It might be due to geographical distance, or lack of competition, or lying down like a whipped cur whenever they meet your team – take a bow, Newcastle United. And my recent affection for the England soccer team has shown me that is possible to change your tune as you grow old(er) and mellow(er). So with all those caveats in mind, I’d like to record the existence of two counties that I like to see win, even feeling some disappointment when they fail.

The first of those is Dublin. I can imagine the splutters of outrage that would greet such a sentiment expressed anywhere else online or in the real world. The Jackeens! How could you like the soccer hooligans masquerading as GAA fans? And it would be fair to say that in the real world there is a divide between them and culchies. Many’s the time in my time in college in Dublin where I encountered situations where they looked down on everyone and everything from the provinces, as if the only difference between their home town and New York was that only one of them was still a capital city.

But in GAA terms, that sense of difference is something to be celebrated, not scorned. Noel Purcell was once asked when he would be heading up to Croke Park to watch the Dubs. Why, he replied, would he be bothered with a team of culchies? At the time I thought he was making some Hot Press-style cut at bogball and stickball. Now a little older and a little wiser, I can see that he meant that ‘Dublin’ GAA teams were stuffed to the gills with people up from the country who only played for the Metropolitans because it was impossible to haul themselves back home of a weekend to play for their real county. It would be hard for the native Dubs to get excited about a team like that.

Which is what made Heffo’s Army so exciting. The weight attached to this team in GAA history far outweighs their achievements. Four All-Ireland’s in ten years was a decent return, but Offaly won three All-Ireland’s between 1970 and 1983 and their legend is almost entirely based on one kick by Seamus Darby. The Dubs were different because of that soccer-style sense of razzmatazz and the townie ways of Tony Hanahoe, Brian Mullins et al. But they were the same too because, well, they loved Gaelic games (or one form of it, and how many of us genuinely devote equal time to both football and hurling?)

The Dublin GAA fraternity are our allies, not our enemies. When the rugger buggers were swooning because 20,000+ attended the decisive match in the 1993 All-Ireland League between St Mary’s and Young Munster, such hubris was slapped down by Robbie Kelleher who scornfully noted that the Dubs could get attendances like that at League matches. Whether this  is true or not – seems unlikely – it doesn’t change that fact that having the likes of Kelleher, a D4-type stockbroker, on our side against those who despise the GAA and everything it stands for, is something to be celebrated.

The charges laid against the Dubs are usually puddle-shallow. Supposedly they are all bandwagon jumpers because 70,000+ go to Championship matches while you’d be doing well (whatever Robbie Kelleher says) to get 7,000 at Parnell Park in the spring. This means they have an awful lot in common with the rest of us beyond the Pale. There were only 14,000 people at Waterford’s opening Championship match last year against Clare and a lot fewer than half of them were from Waterford (full disclosure: I wasn’t one of those present). Yet there must have been 50,000 people in Croke Park in September wearing white and blue. By that measure, it is the Déise ‘faithful’ who are the bandwagon jumpers, not the Dubs. These metrics – modest crowds far below the capacity of the venue in May / June, hysterical bleating that the diehards can’t get tickets in September – can be applied to every county in Ireland. Except Dublin.

Then there’s the whole soccer thing. It’s been a long time since liking soccer was considered an insult even among diehard GAA types. Almost everyone I know who is involved in the GAA, even those who are active in their clubs, has some interest in soccer, particularly (and ironically) English teams. Yet when the Dubs are involved their olé-oléing is instantly bracketed as some manner of crime against the memory of Michael Hogan. So what if the way the Hill supports its team is different to the rest of the country? Would people rather they were down in Dalymount Park?

So those are some defences against the Dubs. But there are reasons other than numbers and a shared sense of tribalism to like Dublin. In football, they are truly a bunch of the most lovable losers. Mayo are often cited (not least here) as a county whose inability to close the deal makes them attractive. Yet in 2006 Dublin managed to out-Mayo Mayo, throwing away a seven point lead against supposedly the most brittle county in the land. How could you hate someone who could implode in a manner that would make a British tennis player blush?

In hurling, sympathy for Dublin comes from another direction. Hurling is a sport constantly having to prove itself. With Laois completely gone out of the picture, Offaly and Wexford heading that way, and Clare, Galway, Limerick and Waterford continually flattering to deceive, the sport is desperately in need of some new blood.  It’s not a question of someone challenging Kilkenny. At the moment, we need Kilkenny to dip their standards for that o happen. But once that happens – and it will; it must – Dublin, with a lot of success and minor and Under-21 level, could be waiting in the long grass.

All this might change were Dublin to become any good. A team striding through the world would get old pretty fast, and there might be some justification to concerns that Dublin’s population advantage would make it invincible were they ever to get their act together. The thing about sleeping giants though is that they invariably tend to go comatose rather than wake up. Look at Newcastle United. Why have a down on a team for something that might, but probably won’t, happen? When the facts change, I change my mind. If Dublin become successful, I’ll reassess my attitude to them in that light. Until then, it’s hard to hate.

As I wrote this, it dawned on me that a success for Dublin could have immediate dire consequences for Waterford. If Dublin win Leinster and we win Munster then one of our rewards would be put in the same half of the All-Ireland series as Kilkenny. But you know what? I’ll take that chance. Winning Munster is an end in itself, and the odds are that we’re going to have to meet Kilkenny at some point if we want to win the ultimate prize – avoiding them until the final didn’t do us any good in 2007. So bring on a Dublin win in Leinster, a fitting reward for the efforts of those faceless drones that have dragged Dublin hurling up from the mire over the last decade. And when the capital joins the rest of us in embracing the joys of Gaelic games, you will all be grateful for what they did.

S*** ground, no fans

One of the significant events of my recent holidays was a trip to the Venue of Bellends . . . sorry, Legends that is Wembley Stadium. I’ve been to a few sporting arenas in my time now – the Nou Camp, Stamford Bridge, Goodison Park, the Millennium Stadium (photos sadly lost to the mists of time and a dodgy hard drive), the Reebok Stadium (?), Pride Park (!), and obviously Anfield and Croke Park.

Going to Wembley has reinforced a long held opinion of mine about sports stadiums. There is nothing inherently special about any of them. It was a splendid occasion, going to Wembley, but this was almost entirely because of the delight felt by my wife at finally seeing England play where they had won the World Cup all those centuries ago. Ultimately it was a big box with seats in it, albeit a state-of-the-art one in the case of Wembley.

Yes, they’ve all got a special charge to the people who frequent them regularly, and I always get a thrill of anticipation when arriving on Walton Breck or Jones’ Road. But that comes from the heart, not from anything that is bound up in the bricks and mortar. When I pointed out to a tour guide at Anfield that with all the times the turf at the ground has been replaced the ashes of those who had been scattered there were long gone, he sagely observed that people who had been buried at sea hardly expected to go to the exact location to locate the remains (wonder whether he is so candid with the loved ones who ask the same question).

Some people seem to collect sports grounds like stamps or fine wines, which is fine in so far as any hobby has an element of obsessive compulsiveness to it (bit like writing a blog that no one reads). But they seem to miss the point of these venues. They are special to the fans because of the history. To the occasional / once-off visitor, it’s just some place to watch the match.

That Was The Season That Was 2008/9

It’s been the best of the seasons and the worst of seasons and back to the best again. Twice we embarked on runs where we looked invincible, the first showing a doughty never-say-die spirit in just about every game and the second saw us not even giving chances to teams as they were swept away by an avalanche of goals. In between, we had a run where you began to wonder would we ever win a game. Happy were the days when I thought schizophrenia was a condition of having a split personality as I could have described the Reds as being schizophrenic. As it is, we’ll have to settle for the much less pithy observation that it was like the Reds had a split personality.

The most remarkable thing about the Reds’ season was the grin smeared across Ray Houghton’s features on RTÉ mere moments after Benayoun’s last gasp winner against Fulham. Almost as remarkable is the way Robbie Keane has faded from the collective memory. Loath and all as I am to say ‘I told you so’, I did say we had “picked up a player past his peak, and paid top dollar for the privilege“. Keane hasn’t pulled up any trees since returning to White Hart Lane, where despite taking penalties he hasn’t managed many more goals per game than he did at Anfield. It’s nothing to be happy about, but it’s an immense relief. Having bragged about knowing he was a dud, now is the time to shamefacedly admit that I would have clung on to him, pathetically hoping that he would ‘come good’  in much the same manner I had hoped that Dean Saunders and Nigel Clough might come good (ask your grandparents). This would have been the easy way out for Rafa, so it is to his tremendous credit that he took the £3.5 million hit then rather than the £10-15 million one we’d be taking if we were trying to offload him now.

(Going off on a tangent, am I the only one irked by the self-conscious way in which players won’t celebrate when they score against their former club? I remember Gary Mac refused to do it when he scored the goal in 2001 that effectively relegated Coventry. You’re a professional, man. Either celebrate them all or celebrate none of them, these attempts at empathy with your former fans don’t wash. Okay, I’m the only one.)

Before choking on my own gloating, it should be noted that I got the other transfer saga of the summer of 2008 mostly wrong. Although you wouldn’t be able to tell from that link, any ruminations on the status of Gareth Barry were coloured by the notion that the time had come to move Xabi Alonso along. He’d gotten stale, and the £10 million figures being bandied around at a time when the football transfer market looked like it was about to tank with everything else in the global economy seemed like good business. With that, Alonso puts in what is probably his best season at Anfield and now figures of £20 million are being bandied around which looks like a terrible deal. Things could be worse: we might be linked with Barry again . . .

So it was the best / worst / best of seasons. Despite the lurking horror that was the Keane saga, and a flirtation with disaster in the Champions League that we will be mercifully spared in 2009/10, we really flew out of the blocks. Of all the cliches that people can point to about success, usually after the fact, two stand out: the notion that you can play badly and win, and putting together a championship winning run at a crucial stage of the season. We had both this year as the season started off with some tremendous comebacks in matches we probably should have lost – Middlesbrough, Wigan and most stirringly Man City, a game you never felt we were out of even when we were 2-0 down. Then there was the end to the season, which we finished like a train. Winning ten and drawing one of our last eleven games should have been enough to win the league. Certainly had you been told after the Middlesbrough defeat that we would only drop two points, including that astonishing win at Old Trafford, you’d have glanced at the league table and booked the title party in advance.

Galling as it is to admit, you have to congratulate the Mancs for matching us stride for stride. On several occasions we played ahead of them on the weekend and each time they held their nerve, most notably when finding themselves losing to Villa and Spurs. In the end, we gave ourselves too much of a mountain to climb and for that we must look to that shambolic mid-season funk when points were dropped like so much confetti. If you were looking for a single neat modernist reason for that bad run either side of Christmas, which included the depressing FA Cup exit at the Pit, it would be easy to look at Rafa’s rant at Demento. There’s no doubt it looked bad and got worse as time went on. But personally I prefer to look at the itch that we couldn’t scratch that was Robbie Keane.

I’m really labouring the point now, but when has that ever stopped me? It needs to be emphasised that this is nothing personal, that Keane conducted himself with tremendous dignity when his dream move – for that is what it was – went so spectacularly sour. It must have been utterly humiliating, and his refusal to bitch about his treatment was in stark contrast to the likes of Jermaine Pennant and only made you fret all the more as to whether we were doing the right thing in letting him go. But he was meant to be the final piece in the jigsaw, the 20-goal-a-season striker who was going to partner Torres and make us invincible. Instead his repeated failures to score heaped pressure not only on the player but on the club for failing to make that that swoop count. Man Utd could afford to pay big bucks for a relative mediocrity like Berbatov. Liverpool could not, and it hung around the club’s neck like an anchor.

Even now, it makes no sense that having sold a striker with a proven record Liverpool should start banging them in for fun. Yet Liverpool would soon be flattening teams with ruthless abandon. It helped that Kuyt started doing his share, and Benayoun – the most astonishingly improved player of the season – decided to make a habit of scoring goals at critical junctures. It was as if everyone felt liberated from having to justify the existence of Robbie Keane, not least the manager.

Rafa, Rafa, Rafa. On occasion in the past I have called for your head or given you less-than-fulsome support. I’m still not convinced it is all going to end in tears of joy, something that is really important should happen in 2010 now that Man Utd have drawn level with us in terms of titles won. Three years without a trophy and an unwanted record of being the only team to only lose two games and now in the Premier League. It’s not much of a CV. Yet once again, you’ve done just enough to earn a shot at redemption. Having masterminded the art of European football – failure to win the European Cup every year does not mean you don’t know what you are doing; it is, after all, a cup competition with all the vagaries inherent in that- there is tantalising evidence that you may have gotten English football licked at last. And most importantly, you’ve gotten under Alex Ferguson’s skin. Observe Demento’s recent best-of-friends act with Arsene Wenger and you’ll see a man who only likes you when he thinks he has you whipped. It may not be a sufficient condition for ultimate success but it’s a necessary one, and that represents progress from the season. Just no more Robbie Keanes – please.

And we would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those pesky Dubs

Just about every assumption re the League has changed this weekend. Dublin were never going to be a pushover but it’s not unreasonable to expect a team with Waterford’s lofty aspirations to, uh, push them over. 1-11 is a puny total, and with most of it coming from Eoin Kelly you’ve got to wonder what the rest of them were up to. John Mullane’s return can’t come soon enough. There’s  consolation in the performance (or at least what I heard from the few snippets I nervously tuned in to on WLR) of Adrian Power. Oh, and we can keep telling ourselves that Dublin are a genuinely decent outfit. Really.

The bigger problem seems to be that Kilkenny and Tipperary might stride away as everyone else takes points off each other. With the top two going straight into the League final, it’s already out of our hands. Then there’s the wild card that is Cork. Objectively speaking Cork weren’t that great against Clare today. Subjectively (and I say this as someone who was hoping Clare would smack them upside the head; oh, how times change) they were awesome. Not only was any win today impressive in the context of coming at it cold after their self-imposed exile but once again they gave a team a decent lead then reeled them in (see: Galway and Clare in last year’s Championship). With Clare looking adrift at the bottom, it looks like there’s going to be a lot of phony skirmishes in the peleton.

Still, the footballers bounced back well after last week’s shock, and today was never entirely about Waterford. Not a bad weekend overall.