1. To this day, Earls counts himself lucky that his parents Sandra and Ger, a respected former rugby player, kept him out of harm’s way.
Then there was rugby – an outlet which provided him with a chance to escape the madness that was often going on. It was for that reason Earls had ‘Moyross’ stitched into his boots when he first broke onto the international stage.
“Moyross was constantly in the papers for bad stuff – it was to remember where I come from and the people who helped me or the stories I have from Moyross, it relaxed me a small bit,” Earls recalls.
“I had a normal upbringing like any other young lad in Limerick. There were a small group of people who did what they did.
“I have seen a lot of crazy things, but I’ll probably keep it for a book or maybe I’ll never put it out there.
“I hung around with some fellas who were my best friends, who are now in prison. I had a lot of friends who came to that fork in their life and they were either going to go one way or the other.”
Ireland international Keith Earls opened up to The Irish Independent’s Cian Tracey about growing up in Moyross, and how rugby sent him down the right road.
2. Carl wouldn’t have been long diagnosing our shortcomings. You could have just seen him at the afters on Saturday night, standing outside the pub pulling the good out of a fag and shaking his smiley head. Too old. No legs. Have to find some young lads for next year. Half-joking, half-coming up with some bit of a plan do to something about it.
He’ll be gone five years next February. Imagine. A brutal thing that feels as raw to think about now as it did then. He was 36 when he took ill playing a game of five-a-side on a Thursday night and died in St Vincent’s hospital a few hours later. He was on paternity leave that week.
A week and a half before he died, Carl played for us in the inaugural media tournament, held that year in UCD. It’s the usual way of these things that they go for a year, maybe for a few and then the general level of interest ebbs away.
Getting 16 different teams into the same place on the same day is a cat-herding job, and all it ever takes is for a couple of companies to pull out one year and just like that, it runs aground. Without Carl’s name attached it’s no big stretch to imagine that it might have faded from view by now.
Yet there we all were on Saturday, in the cool and gloom of a winter’s afternoon, running around like halfwits who frankly should know better.
Malachy Clerkin of The Irish Times penned a beautiful tribute to his late colleague Carl O’Malley after last Saturday’s annual five-a-side football tournament in his memory.
3. Lucy Bronze has not told this story before. Of the friend who died in a car crash when they were each 17, the funeral she missed to play for England’s Under-19s and the subsequent guilt that left her certain that a year-long injury was punishment for not being there. During her accession to two-times Champions League winner and Ballon d’Or nominee she has only previously shared her secret grief with a sports psychologist.
Bronze and Sam Gattens had been thick as thieves: he was Bronze’s best friend at Duchess Community High School, the captain of the first team she played for and the first boy to accept Bronze, and her England team-mate Lucy Staniforth, as one of their own.
“The only girl I used to be friends with was Lucy – she used to come and play, eventually, but when I was younger it was just him and the other boys around the street,” Bronze recalls. “He was the first boy that was, like: ‘Lucy’s just one of us.’ Everybody loved him, and because he liked me everybody else went: ‘Lucy’s part of the team.’ That was kind of him. I think about him a lot because he probably was the big reason why I was accepted.”
On June 14, 2009, six days after passing his driving test, Gattens was killed at 1.30am in the shadow of Alnwick Castle when the car he was driving hit a tree at a left-hand bend and flipped onto its roof. The Lion Bridge where the crash took place is a sleepy, idyllic spot straddling the River Aln and five days later he was buried at St Michael’s Church, a five-minute walk away, in a coffin draped in red and white flowers for Sunderland.
England and Lyon star Lucy Bronzes spoke to Telegraph Sport’s Katie Whyatt about something she hasn’t opened up about before.
4. We are being told of the evils of “cancel culture,” a new scourge that enforces purity, banishes dissent and squelches sober and reasoned debate. But cancel culture is not new. A brief accounting of the illustrious and venerable ranks of blocked and dragged Americans encompasses Sarah Good, Elijah Lovejoy, Ida B. Wells, Dalton Trumbo, Paul Robeson and the Dixie Chicks. What was the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction, but the cancellation of the black South? What were the detention camps during World War II but the racist muting of Japanese-Americans and their basic rights?
Thus any sober assessment of this history must conclude that the present objections to cancel culture are not so much concerned with the weapon, as the kind of people who now seek to wield it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Cancellation of Colin Kaepernick, for the New York Times
5. Chris Davies walked out of the Emirates Stadium feeling, he said, as if he was “filled with fire.” As most of his fellow Arsenal fans trudged dolorously away from last Saturday’s 2-2 draw with lowly Southampton, seeking shelter in the pubs of the Holloway Road or the sanctuary of the Tube, he strode toward the statue of Dennis Bergkamp on the perimeter of the club’s North London home.
Plenty of other fans had the same thought. When Davies arrived at the statue, a crowd of several hundred had already gathered. For many of them, this has become part of the ritual of going to the Emirates, the fabric of the matchday experience: a couple of drinks, a bite to eat, watching Arsenal play, and then waiting by the Bergkamp statue to watch the creators of the YouTube channel formerly known as Arsenal Fan TV film their postmatch interviews.
Some come for the spectacle, the circus of it all. Others treat it as a sort of impromptu town hall meeting: They listen to the speakers, debate their points, cheer the claims they like and jeer those they do not. They start chants and shout cutting one-liners. At the end, they may grab a selfie with one of the channel’s regular guests.
But on this Saturday Davies — like many others — had come to speak. He had come to observe before, but this would be his first time as a participant. He felt like he had no other choice. “This is the only outlet fans have,” he said. “Where else are we going to be heard?”
Before Unai Emery’s dismissal, Rory Smith wrote a piece about Arsenal Fan TV entitled ‘For Fans, by Fans, Against the Club, also for the New York Times.
6. The nights are drawing in. The curtains are twitching, the wind is howling. Manchester United are in Kazakhstan for one of those Thursday-night assignments, courtesy of the Europa League, when it can seem like all the real fun is being had elsewhere. And it feels like the time has come.
We need to talk about Phil Jones.
We also need to try to keep it sensible when there is such a stampede to bury and lampoon Jones these days it tends to be overlooked that no footballer gets to play more than 200 times for Manchester United, as well as winning England caps under four different managers, if he is a complete dud.
‘We need to talk about Phil Jones,’ writes The Athletic’s Daniel Taylor.
The42 is on Instagram! Tap the button below on your phone to follow us!
