1. “My dad picked me up at the airport and said Kenny Dalglish is after resigning,” he reflects. “That was the first I knew of it.”
His young compatriots were all caught up in a fallout from the drama that was laced in gallows humour. Alan Hansen, the senior player of the group, had rounded the players up and told them the news that the boss had departed – with the caveat that he would be taking over.
“He was saying, ‘I’m taking over’, and pointing to lads saying I know where you drink and where you drink,” says Collins, admitting that the room was stunned by the development. They were sworn to silence and told not to leak the news. But most of them had the same idea.
“The only landline was in the players’ lounge and there was a queue of fellas there all ringing people trying to get them to put money on Hansen getting the job,” says Carroll.
“Everybody put hundreds of pounds on him,” continues Kenny. “All the young lads, the YTS guys earning £80 a week, they were trying to scrape money off everyone. But it was all a big wind-up.”
Collins was caught in the act. “I phoned the local pub in Inchicore where my dad was, and told him to get across the road and get his money. I turned around and who is standing there only ‘Jocky’ (Hansen). I had to call them back and say, ‘Don’t back it.’”
Dan McDonnell speaks to the Irish quartet who witnessed the end of an era at Liverpool in 1990. (€)
2. A moment outside the players’ parking lot at Gillette Stadium, on Christmas Eve 2018, sums up what was appreciated as much as anything. It was quiet that Monday, in the wake of a 24-12 win over the Buffalo Bills the day before, and two visitors had joined me — my then 9-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son. They were on school vacation and would be my filming assistants for a few hours.
The family van was parked, and as we walked to the entrance, a car with tinted windows was turning in that direction. It had the shiniest door handles. It ran so quietly you could hardly hear it coming. I had caught it out of the corner of my eye, told the kids to move out of the middle, before it stopped to our left. The tinted window rolled down to reveal the identity of the driver.
“Hey, guys. Are you ready for Christmas?” Tom Brady asked.
What unfolded from there was something I was quite familiar with in Brady’s presence — a wide-ranging interview. But this one was different. He was asking the questions. To my kids.
For ESPN, Mike Reiss goes behind the lines on Tom Brady’s 20-year reign at the Patriots.
The planet stopped playing not because sport is expendable but because it is vital. Only something as routine and ingrained and key to the DNA of the human race could make such a difference by taking a collective step back.
In the coming weeks and months, you’ll hear plenty about how this has put sport in perspective. Damn right it has. Too much f**king perspective, as the Spinal Tap lads would say. By the time everything starts up again, the role sport plays in families, in society, in the general running of the whole show will never have been made more obvious.
In the meantime, it does rather leave the sports departments of your beloved media institutions a little content-deficient. Whatever about the rest of us, spare a thought today for the poor folk on Sky Sports News. It’s sport by Beckett just now, where nothing happens, twice every 15 minutes.
During a brief check-in on Saturday evening, they were to be found devoting time to a row in the National League (the Vauxhall Conference in old money) with Ben Strevens, the manager of lowly Eastleigh, raging that their game against Notts County had gone ahead “because the board of the National League only care about money”. They dealt with it in detail too, pointing out that the 4,942 attendance was the biggest football crowd in England on the day and giving the big yellow Breaking News tag to a quote from Strevens himself.
Malachy Clerkin on why the suspension of sport will only highlight its importance to our lives.
4. “She said this isn’t great for people who are high risk which I fall into and if I was to get the virus it would be very bad.”
So before it became common place, Egan was in the gym doing what he could, wearing surgical gloves and covering his mouth. But as the crisis has escalated, he has binned the gym and almost every other excursion beyond the confines of the his house.
The virus affects him another way too. Egan’s kidney functionality now sits at around 11 to 12 per cent. The threshold for starting the process to put a patient on the transplant list is usually 15 per cent. He has started the raft of tests required to be cleared for the operation but, understandably, they have been shelved as the health service struggles under the weight of the crisis. It means the intricacies of how and when he’ll get his new kidney is not today’s battle.
“It generally takes about five or six months to get on the list anyway. I was due in Tullamore this week for an echo exam on my heart but that has been postponed for a few weeks due to the coronavirus.
“It’s setting everything back already and I’m only at the start of the process. It looks like it will be August or September before I’m on the list now and I’d say the way the kidneys are going, I’ll be on dialysis by then anyway.
Donnchadh Boyle speaks to ex-Westmeath star John Egan, a sportsperson affected by the COVID-19 virus for very different reasons.
5.Setting aside for one moment the crassness of engaging in sporting politics at a time when people are dying by the thousand, you had to marvel at the simple and transparent ineptitude at work here. As a star of The Apprentice, Brady must know the first rule of negotiation: never show your full hand. And yet, if sporting administration were composed entirely of galaxy brains like Brady’s, we could probably rest easy. Alas, when it comes to Machiavellian chicanery, it’s highly likely the ham-fisted manoeuvrings of east London’s dildo siblings are just the tip of the iceberg.
Already there are the first rumblings that the imminent financial turmoil faced by many sports may force them into those famously euphemistic “tough choices”. Perhaps it was purely coincidence, for instance, that this week on Monday an extremely well-sourced report in the Daily Mail suggested coronavirus may force several professional rugby union clubs into bankruptcy.
Further down, the article suggests one proposed remedy: selling the Six Nations television rights to a subscription channel, a prospect that over recent weeks has met with fierce resistance. But that was under the old rules. If you’re CVC, the private equity firm on the verge of buying a stake in the tournament and which has long been keen to maximise its broadcast revenues, it would be only natural to wonder if the fear of insolvency may – as they say – sharpen a few minds.
Jonathan Liew warns of the disaster capitalism that is set to manifest itself in sport whenever it emerges from the coronavirus pandemic.
