1. I didn’t know Anthony Foley but I was in the room for one of the sweetest moments of his life. The press conference in Cardiff after Munster won the 2006 Heineken Cup hadn’t started yet, for the simple reason Foley, Declan Kidney and Peter Stringer all looked completely spent once they took their seats at the top table. Foley was in his socks and just sat there looking at us, as if to say, “What, you want me to come up with words now, on top of everything else?”
The silence was broken by a roar from the back of the room. “Hon Foley!” shouted Mick Galwey, there in jeans and a jacket and working as a co-commentator for Radio Kerry. Foley’s face cracked. “Hon Gaillimh!” he roared back before beckoning his old friend forward. And the two of them shared a hug of such pure and genuine oblivious love that it rendered the press conference moot. If you can’t make good copy out of that, a few post-match clichés aren’t going to help your cause.
There were so many beautiful tributes to Anthony Foley this week, none more so than Malachy Clerkin’s in The Irish Times.
2. The news strikes like a hammer to the face. So first there is shock. Then disbelief. And yesterday, anger.
Anger that this good man has been taken away not just from us but, more importantly, from his family – from Olive his wife, Dan and Tony, his sons, Brendan and Sheila, his parents, and Orla and Rosie, his sisters.
To the outside world, Anthony Foley was the ultimate rugby man. But to those who were lucky enough to know him, he was that and so much more. A brilliant dad. A loving husband. The most loyal of friends. The kindest of brothers. A special son.
Similarly, Alan Quinlan, one of Foley’s former team-mates with Munster and Ireland, wrote this piece in The Irish Independent, remembering a brilliant father, son, brother, husband and friend.
3. Football has a problem with women. It was there every day, in every training ground, every stadium and every press box I entered. The five years I spent working as a football journalist were so steadily and fiercely degrading, they very nearly destroyed me.
A good day meant being belittled, having my knowledge questioned, or my attire, or being complimented on the quality of the pastries at half-time because I stood too close to the catering table. A bad day meant being harassed, phoning a player for an interview to be told he was naked and intending to discuss a very different kind of performance.
In The Guardian, Gemma Clarke wrote that the Ched Evans case shed a light on football’s dark corners.
4. The flag carriers are causing Martin Connolly a problem. It is just one of hundreds of problems he has encountered as he tries to prepare Dundalk’s temporary home, the 6,000-capacity Tallaght Stadium, for the visit of Zenit St Petersburg in the Europa League. But for the moment, it is the 27 young flag carriers – the kids who stand on the pitch before the game holding up Uefa’s anti-racism banner – who are proving particularly pressing at the moment.
Ahead of Dundalk’s Europa League clash with Zenit, Jonathan Liew of the Telegraph spoke to the club’s general manager, Martin Connolly.
5. In 2004, I was in a French prison cell, arrested by a Paris drug squad on the order of an examining magistrate, a powerful official in the French criminal justice system. It was right that I should have been there: I had broken the law — as it turned out, not French law, but sporting law. I had taken performance-enhancing drugs and I had won some of the biggest races in the sport of cycling, including a World Championship title. I had cheated.
Former cyclist David Millar this week wrote in The New York Times, ‘How to Get Away with Doping.’
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