“Trial by media is never right, but trial by social media is not by jury, but by a crazed lynch mob where the only smarts are limited to the technology in their hand.
“Which is why people need to be careful out there, even those who, like O’Leary, might believe they have the smarts and the bank account to prove it.
“He should have listened to our friend and got his disclaimer in first rather than his apology in last. Then again, there was no social media in those days.
“If there was, we are guessing our man would have stuck his phone in an envelope on a Friday night.”
Writing for Extra.ie, Michael Clifford tells a story which aims to show how the GAA can learn from Tim O’Leary’s Mayo tweet scandal.
“But in November she caused a storm in a teacup after tweeting “Has Pitts put on weight or is it just TV” in regard to the Portsmouth striker Brett Pitman, leading to Ronan imposing a two-week Twitter ban on his mum.
“I went on it when he wasn’t looking,” she says, laughing. “But I didn’t realise how far Twitter goes. I really didn’t. I put it out there and then he [Ronan] came in and said: ‘Mam, what have you done?’
“He just went: ‘That’s it, you’re not to go on Twitter any more.’ I specifically went down to the training ground to speak to him [Pitman] and I said: ‘I can only apologise, because it did make you look massive and I hadn’t seen you for a while.’ It wasn’t meant maliciously.”
Ben Fisher of The Guardian speaks to Ireland’s Ronan Curtis and his mother Marie ahead of Portsmouth’s FA Cup fifth round tie against Arsenal.
“Dr Patricios has been visited by parents who want advice after discovering cooler bags of potions and pills under their sons’ beds.
“A lot of it is pressure that builds in making an elite sports team or the first XV rugby team,” he says.
“That pressure may be internal from the boys themselves, or from their parents or peers, and certainly a significant amount of it is from the coaches. There are cases where coaches will tell players they need to pick up 10kg before the start of the season if you want to make the team.
“There is that sort of innuendo that the kid interprets as them needing to ‘bulk up’ to make the team. I honestly believe that there are coaches and headmasters who are turning a blind eye, and I think there are parents who turn a blind eye. Not all parents come to see me.”
For BBC Sport, Mike Henson writes about the widespread doping problem among players at schoolboy level in South Africa.
“We also learned that the Hall of Fame is to be “presented by Budweiser”, whatever that means, whose global vice president of marketing says: “We are passionate about football, and so are our consumers.”
“And he might be right. They certainly aren’t passionate about beer, that’s for sure.
“Anyway, that’s about the size of the plan. On the one hand, I quite enjoy the first big idea of new Premier League chief Richard Masters being a best-of-the-best initiative. As a man who was famously something like the seventh choice for his role, this marks him out as a keen ironist.”
The Guardian’s Marina Hyde gives her take on the proposal for a Premier League Hall of Fame.
These are the moments when Rooney still makes some sort of sense to us, when it is possible to glimpse him now and see the player (or more accurately, the players) that he once was: the force of nature, the serial winner, the most naturally gifted English footballer of his generation, the kid from Croxteth who just wanted the ball. This, you suspect, is why people still queue overnight to see Roger Federer at Wimbledon or go and see the Rolling Stones: for those fleeting flashes of grace, the winding forehand or the opening notes of Start Me Up, when for a split second past and present are exactly aligned.
Jonathan Liew explains why Wayne Rooney still continues to display flashes of brilliance, even at this advanced stage of his career in The Guardian.
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