NEED TO WHILE away those hours spent queuing outside hardware stores this week?
We’ve got a medium-sized skip full of great podcasts, newsletters and essays for our ever-expanding and always-lively community of supporters, which you can learn about here.
Today, members received the second essay in our new Bylines Project, in which we invite our favourite writers to focus on sport. We launched last month with Donal Ryan’s ‘Are You Any Use?’.
Tadhg Coakley is our second resident writer and in ‘Hurt’ he explores the theme of the physical in sport, balancing the general and personal in a brilliant essay. We’ve emailed the story which hangs on Tadhg getting, what might be described as, a bad dunt with the butt of a hurley, directly to the community. Others prefer to consume these stories in a bespoke Instagram format.
On Rugby Weekly Extra earlier, Murray Kinsella dialled up Racing 92 coach Mike Prendergast for an in-depth conversation about his career as well as shape, kicking, scanning, and plenty more of interest to the rugby galaxy brains amongst us.
Excitingly, tomorrow’s guest on Behind The Lines, our sportswriting podcast, is Sam Smith, renowned NBA beat writer and author of the hugely consequential book, The Jordan Rules.
Many of you will, like us, now be more familiar with Sam from his starring role in the greatest piece of art ever created, The Last Dance.
Gavin Cooney interrogates him about the Bulls in the ’90s, the nature of reporting on Jordan and writing that book while covering the team. Last week O’Mahony’s Booksellers kindly offered members 20% on their stock and the BTL members-only Whatsapp group has been hopping with great book recommendations and discussion.
Former Galway United and Wexford Youths manager Shane Keegan has been picking the biggest coaching brains around in How To Win At Dominoes, with Pádraig Harrington, Cheddar Plunkett, Gary Keegan and, last week, the brilliant Billy Walsh, sharing their wisdom.
On Wednesday, one of the most highly rated soccer coaches in the country, Ireland U-17 Women’s boss James Scott nerds out with Shane on his philosophy in a very interesting chat.
We’ll have another episode of Warriors, our Gaelic games podcast on Thursday as we try to follow up last week’s hugely well-received documentary from Kevin Brannigan on the boys of Leitrim ’94.
You can get a sense of the audio doc in this teaser which was discoverd on an old VHS tape marked, ‘Dad’s fishing videos, don’t tape over.’
Seamas O’Reilly and Gavin Cooney’s latest episode of Really Into Years, featuring Citrus Bowl veteran Emmet Kirwin and Leitrim poet laureate Seamus O’Rourke, was posted on Friday and members. of course, have access to our growing archive of shows.
As well as all that, our staff of writers will send Insider newsletters throughout the week to football, rugby and GAA fans, as always.
