The amazing thing was that it took until now. May 2025. When a county manager lost the head with a member of the press corps to the point of intimidation. Yes, there are certain individuals who drove buses over some very thin ice on the same road previously, but never left a crater commensurate to the one blown open by Clare football manager Peter Keane in the wake of his side’s defeat to Down in the first round of the All Ireland SFC.
The Kerry native took serious exception to a question by Clare Echo journalist Padraic MacMahon as to whether the Banner County footballers had in fact regressed since he succeeded the affable and very popular Colm Collins.
Now, managers being irked by questions is nothing new. See above re the bus and thin ice. More than that though, you had Kevin Keegan saying he would “Love it” if his Newcastle United beat their Manchester counterparts to the title in 1996. They didn’t of course.
Then there was big Ron Atkinson blowing a fuse that “It’s alright for you there playing with your silly machines” to the original and best television football dynamic duo, Richard Keys and Andy Gray as BFR’s Coventry City hurtled towards a footballing abyss from which they still haven’t fully emerged. Although in fairness Frank Lampard has at least got them going in the right direction again.
Of greater relevance to what you will read hereafter, mind, was Marty Morrissey getting the Chuck Norris stare from Brian Cody after the Quilty legend – stupidly in fairness – asked the baseball capped one whether he thought a penalty awarded to Henry Shefflin in the dying embers of one of the firecracker All Ireland Final between themselves and Tipperary.
In all the the above cases, mind you, to my mind, the questions posed were entirely legitimate, even if, personally speaking, I wouldn’t have gone straight for the jugular in the immediate aftermath of the event, but that’s just me. For that reason, I would to a certain extent understand managers’ fuse boxes getting shorter by the minute.
But here’s the thing. There’s a way to handle that too. And it is absolutely not via the route chosen by Peter Keane in his interaction with MacMahon last weekend. After being sideswiped by the question, the supermarket manager first abruptly walked out of the interview spluttering expletives before storming back into where the press were congregated and blasting at the aforementioned journalist – “Do you know what you are, you’re a f*****g c**t”
Notwithstanding the fact that it is said there’s no such thing as bad publicity, one could scarcely blame the reporter in this case if he refused to engage with the individual again. From a certain viewpoint, though, that’s letting such ignorance go unchecked which in turn means that as far as the complainer is concerned they’ve won. What’s more, managers can be short enough with the press as it is – though not to the point of arrogant ignorance he who has hunted out of the Kerry job not all that long ago stooped most recently.
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However, having said all of the above, there are occasions when the media brethren could do with being a modicum softer in their approach than what can be the case. For example, if I were in any way involved with or connected to the Cork senior hurling setup, serious reservations would be held about some of the language used in the analysis of their heavy defeat by Limerick in the latest phase of the Round Robin stages of the Munster SHC.
Use of words like ‘Humiliation’ and ’embarrassment’ is, in my view, an over zealous assessment of what are, as far as the Brains Trust want us to believe are amateur players.
Analysis and criticism are part and parcel of being involved in many facets of life. But the tone of some of the parlance used left certain entities open to accusations of making liars out of themselves.
You can’t continually prattle on about amateurism and how the alternative to it is the menu in the devil’s diner and then use terminology like some of that which was dispensed in the wake of the match last Sunday.
If you truly believe players at county level are still absolute amateurs, doing what they do on a voluntary basis as a pass time, then you can’t use similar calculation metrics as, say, Ireland failing to win a Grand Slam in rugby or Rory McIlroy failing to follow up on his recent US Masters success at the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow last weekend. Though in fairness, in that case, anybody thinking such an outcome was likely must have had prior knowledge of the winning Lotto numbers as well.
Furthermore, anyone who thinks Cork are a beaten docket having come up short against the best team the game has seen is very foolhardy indeed.
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