1. One of the reasons you don’t see or hear from the victims of Qatar’s cruelty is that it’s almost impossible to get to them. In March last year, a UN delegation visited Qatar to check on progress, investigate working conditions and generally have a little mosey around.
They spoke to a Nepalese construction worker, who had the temerity to answer their questions truthfully. The worker was summarily fired, and ordered to get on the first plane back to Nepal. Along the way, someone realised that because the worker no longer had a work sponsor, he could be thrown in jail. So he was thrown in jail.
Jonathan Liew brings our attention back to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, saying we have been anaesthetised to the depressing nature of news coming out of the Middle East, but reaffirming that we can’t be allowed to forget what is happening.
2. Ivan Duffin and David Browne were both killed in a car accident. The tragedy hit the club hard. It took them years to recover, as it would any tight-knit rural area.
Duffin and Browne both played from underage to senior for the club. “They actually played a senior game a week before they died,” tells Michael Hennessy, who managed the club in Saturday’s victory against Halfway House Bunclody.
In 2004, the families of the two players donated the cup which is now named in their memory. Four years on, Gusserane requested that the club be allowed drop down from the top grade of junior football to the Junior A level. Winning the cup and honouring their former clubmates became a crusade.
PJ Browne takes a closer look at the inspirational motivation behind Gusserane O’Rahillys’ Junior A Football Championship title win in Wexford last month.
3. Jerry Rice does not mean to do it. After all, it’s not about him.
“I just want to go up to the bride and the groom and congratulate them,” Rice said. “Tell them, ‘Today is your day.’
Those intentions are great and all, but when Jerry Rice crashes a wedding, the story of that wedding becomes, “Uh, Jerry Rice crashed our wedding.”
Rice is the NFL’s all-time leader in receptions, receiving yards, and touchdowns. Many would say that the former San Francisco 49er and Oakland Raider is the greatest player to ever put on football pads and a helmet.
He also happens to be a hall-of-fame wedding crasher.
Kevin Clark details the strange tendency of NFL Hall of Famer Jerry Rice to hilariously crash weddings for The Ringer.
4. There are those who would argue that the Ireland squad of the early 1980s was even better than the team Jack Charlton took to the World Cup quarterfinal in Italia 90, featuring Liam Brady, Frank Stapleton, Steve Heighway, Mark Lawrenson, David O’Leary, Michael Robinson, Chris Hughton and Tony Grealish.
It was also hugely unlucky. It had had goals mysteriously disallowed in the 1978 qualification campaign in France and Bulgaria and was again undone by a disallowed goal in France four years later.
But the biggest disgrace came in Belgium. This was a time at which, it was later proven, Anderlecht, the leading Belgian side, systematically bought off referees in UEFA competition.
Sports Illustrated count down 11 of the best football team’s not to qualify for a World Cup, featuring sides like Ireland in 1982, England in 1974, France in 1994 and Egypt in 2010.
5. Recent literature has provided us with numerous examples of how threadbare the notion of GAA amateurism really is, most vividly explained in Michael Moynihan’s ‘GAAconomics.’
Going as far back as the 1947 All-Ireland final, played in the Polo Grounds in New York, Paul Fitzpatrick’s brilliant ‘Fairytale in New York’ recounts how the victorious Cavan players arrived home to be feted with the Sam Maguire Cup, players having bulging wallets thrust into their hands.
More recently, Owen Mulligan’s autobiography, ‘Mugsy’, told of the time he and an east Tyrone delegation were chauffeur-driven to the house of Barney Eastwood a few weeks after a Tyrone All-Ireland final win to be lavished with generosity by the Cookstown businessman. On their way out the door, the men were handed envelopes stuffed with cash.
Declan Bogue argues the case that Colm Cooper has fully earned the right to dine at the top table, just like those critics who chastise him for it.
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