IRISH EXAMINER sportswriters and commentators sat down this week to chew over and digest the sporting year and the issues that will continue to affect all sports fans in 2010. Between tender slices of filet mignon, Michael Moynihan took notes
Tony Leen: “Donal, how worried should the GAA and soccer be about the advances rugby is making on the Irish sporting consciousness after an incredible 2009?”
Donal Lenihan: “It’s incredible. If you look at the survey recently about the popularity of sports in Ireland, Brian O’Driscoll was top of the pile. It’s difficult for non-rugby people to appreciate what’s happened to the sport in the last 10 years. When you have a situation where a Heineken Cup semi-final between two Irish teams can attract that. So there’s a sea change in the sport which those outside it couldn’t comprehend.”
Tony Leen: “But how much of it is a bandwagon that’ll disappear when Munster go through a valley period?”
Donal Lenihan: “That’s the six-million-dollar question, but obviously adidas don’t think so, they’ve invested another couple of million for the next four years. I think there’s a hard core there now, and it’s a fashionable sport, but for me the key is that kids of seven or eight can go out to Musgrave Park, sit on the wall and touch Ronan O’Gara or Paul O’Connell, the Lions captain. They’re part of the fabric of rugby, you can meet your heroes walking down the street in Limerick and Cork. Part of the reason they’ve achieved what they have is that they’re very grounded individuals. There’s also an honesty of purpose there which you wouldn’t have with other teams — not just Munster, but Ireland as well. I thought that came out very strongly in this year’s Six Nations. During every game there was a period in which Ireland could have lost, and they won most games by one score. Two years ago they would have lost some of them.”
Tony Leen: “Roy Keane said recently that the rugby team have now shed the ‘we’re small little Ireland’ mentality. Why can’t our national soccer team do likewise, Liam?”
Liam Mackey: “They’re closer than they’ve been for a while. The problem is that they plunged incredibly under Steve Staunton and had to climb steeply just to get some credibility back. One of the things that continues to benefit rugby as a glamour sport is the fact that Ireland haven’t qualified for next year’s (soccer) World Cup. No question about it. If we’d qualified for that, you could nearly forget about any other sport next year. The World Cup literally has global appeal that would extend beyond its base. ”
Ruby Walsh: “The point about what Keane says is that the rugby team has outstanding international players and the soccer team doesn’t. Of the Irish team that played in Croke Park, Shay Given would get in the French team. Who else?”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “Richard Dunne, maybe.”
Ruby Walsh: “It’s all very well having the mentality to win, but you must also have the ability.”
Liam Mackey: “The Irish soccer team’s self-belief was at an all-time low after the Staunton era, no question. They have come a distance.”
Tony Leen: “So Trapattoni has overachieved?”
Liam Mackey: “For a first campaign I think he got as much out of them as he could. The challenge now is to see if they can build on the performance in Paris. The trouble is some of the leaders on the team are near the end of the road.”
Tony Leen: “But the goodwill won’t be long running out if we don’t make the Euro 2012 finals?”
Liam Mackey: “Well, it’s huge for the FAI financially. Not qualifying for the World Cup is a huge blow for the FAI given the financial commitments to the new Aviva stadium. What happened in 1988 and 1990 also inspired the players we have now, particularly lads from outside the traditional soccer areas like Kevin Doyle from Wexford. For the long-term good of the game they have to make it and they’re good enough to make the 2012 championships; if they don’t then Trapattoni will definitely have under-achieved.”
Donal O’Grady: “Young people respond to big names. In rugby, they see world-class players like O’Connell and O’Driscoll. Twelve months ago, I’d have been hard pressed to name the Irish soccer team’s first XI. With Jack Charlton you could name the team off.”
Charlie Mulqueen: “I’d love your view as to whether the FAI can afford to pay for its share of Lansdowne (the new Avia Stadium)?
Liam Mackey: “They’re keeping the figures close to their chest and I think it’s because the figures aren’t good. The gamble on selling the 10-year tickets was obviously a completely different strategy to the IRFU’s and appears to have been a complete disaster.”
Donal Lenihan: “They say they can meet their commitments, but they’ll meet them out of borrowings.”
Liam Mackey: “Originally the plan was they wouldn’t have to borrow, that the tickets would have turned into a banklink producing money. They had money in the bank last year, cash reserves, but they’re in the red this year and have huge borrowings. Look, I’d be as quick to criticise the FAI as anyone else, but they’ve done well in the last couple of years. The game at grass-roots level — not the League of Ireland, which is a different problem — is doing well in terms of participation, but the problems were that the senior team went into a nosedive and the League of Ireland going into chaos.”
Tony Leen: “Horse racing, rugby and golf are for me the sports in which we overachieve internationally — why is that the case in golf?
Charlie Mulqueen: “The structure of golf in this country is outstanding. The GUI and the ILGU keep their end of the bargain up very well. From the earliest age kids are coached meticulously — if they have potential they’re brought to the next level of coaching, and so on and so on if they’re progressing. Rory McIlroy is an exception, but Shane Lowry isn’t. He’s typical of good kids coming through the ranks.”
Donal Lenihan: “Who pays for that?”
Charlie Mulqueen: “You do if you’re a member of a club through the poll tax and the GUI spends it very well — on coaching kids and even, when they turn professional, to ensure there’s a few quid there when they go out on the Challenge Tour or Qualifying School. The organisation of golf in the 32 counties is outstanding, and it is a 32-county sport. Most of the kids from the North of Ireland have benefited from the GUI system, as have kids from the South, but that’s been forgotten by the European Tour, which 15 years or so ago decided to label Darren Clarke as being from ‘Northern Ireland’. That was a disaster because it created a divide that didn’t exist. There’s no such entity as Northern Ireland in golf — people will say ‘ah those golfers were carrying British passports’ but I guarantee you nine in 10 of them didn’t care what they were called.”
Tony Leen: “Was McIlroy ill-advised, then, to say he’d play for Britain in the Olympics?”
Charlie Mulqueen: “First, he wasn’t advised. And he wouldn’t make the team anyway, because you can only have two and Paul Casey and Lee Westwood are ahead of him in the rankings. If he was advised at all he was advised by his manager, Chubby Chandler, and I would doubt very much that Chubby, who has a great relationship with Ireland, would have told him to say that. Rory said that off the top of his head and has already backtracked a bit on that.”
Tony Leen: “The Maguire twins from Fermanagh won’t be under the radar for too much longer.”
Charlie Mulqueen: “They’re exceptional. They’re only fourteen, they’ll be on the Curtis Cup team, which would make them the youngest players ever on the team. They’ll be 22, 23 in 2016, so they’ve got to represent a fantastic chance of an Olympic medal.”
Tony Leen: “How serious are the threats of government cutbacks to your sport, Ruby?
Ruby Walsh: “It’s a genuine threat. You need owners to keep racing going, and if you keep cutting back the prize money, the value of horses is lower, fewer people will get into it. Of course, the crucial problem is the betting tax. Nothing comes out of offshore betting, for instance. Racing gets a little cut out of bets at the track and with Paddy Power and so on, but not from offshore betting, and they’re all moving their head offices offshore to Gibraltar, where they pay no tax.
“Betfair is the biggest and has killed the betting ring at the races — you’re betting against other people so the bookmaker is eliminated. If you don’t fancy a horse you up its price, if you do you lower the price but Irish racing gets no cut out of it.
“I remember the betting tax being 10%, and now it’s 1%, but if most of the betting is offshore you get damn-all. Betfair is here to stay, so the way to solve it is to pull the (tv) pictures. People won’t bet on what they can’t see and racing must bite the bullet and stop selling viewing rights to Attheraces and so on.
“It would kill racing for 12 but it’s the only way to get money off Betfair and so on, to then offer the pictures at a reasonable price; right now each racecourse gets between 30,000 and 35,000 per race meeting from the bookmakers. But the racecourse gets it, nobody else.”
Michael Moynihan: “And what do they do with that money?”
Ruby Walsh: “That’s a good question. Irish racecourses aren’t particularly well managed. They get 35,000 to open the gates in Cork Racecourse today (Tuesday) and they’ll say it only covers their costs. I’m not sure how you could spend that 35,000 in Cork, but they’ll tell you it covers their costs. What they should do is leave the contract when it runs out and make Betfair and the offshore bookmakers pay a fair price to broadcast those races. Racing is a huge employer, there’s the guts of 20,000 but the race is only the shop window. It starts back with breeding, farriers, stable staff and so on, and the race meeting is only the shop window. But if the shop window is closed the people start losing their jobs, and it’s labour intensive. Horses must be handled individually, ridden individually and so on.”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “So if you had political change in the country and the new regime wasn’t particularly favourable towards horse racing it’d be catastrophic?”
Ruby Walsh: “It would be.”
Tony Leen: “How big a boon is a once-in-a-generation performer like Sea The Stars for the industry?”
Ruby Walsh: “It helps, but the thing is he only has one year. You can’t look forward to seeing him again next year. A flat horse appears at two (year-old), has a good year at three, and then he’s gone to stud, and Sea The Stars costs 75,000 per cover — with 5.5% tax to the government.”
Charlie Mulqueen: “But you couldn’t blame the owners for retiring him?”
Ruby Walsh: “I wouldn’t. If you were to shuttle him between the northern and southern hemisphere, he’d cover 300 mares a year at 75,000 a pop.”
Donal Lenihan: “Why not go on another year?”
Ruby Walsh: “They’d be afraid of injury. He’s won six Group Ones, he has an unbelievable pedigree — by Galileo, out of an Arc winner — and you can’t make him any better than he is now. You risk diminishing that if he races again, and you risk injury, of course.”
Liam Mackey: “There’s concern in football about online gambling and corruption — is that a concern in racing?”
Ruby Walsh: “That ties into the prize money. If you make the prize money less than what you can bet it becomes an issue. It won’t become an issue for jockeys and trainers because they’re at it every day, but if you own a racehorse it’s costing you 25 per day to keep him, plus the 10,000 you paid for him.... Keep him 18 months and it’s costing you 27,000 for a horse that’s chasing, for instance, a 7,000 prize. The opportunity is there with online betting to go online and play the bookmaker, taking all the money you can get on him. They’ve eradicated the problem in racing in Britain but because you’ve always had betting in our game, the authorities have always been aware of it, and they’re probably a long way ahead of soccer and other games. The stewards are almost up your rear end to make sure you’re doing the right thing.
Liam Mackey: “Do other sports have to catch up? You hear of organised betting on obscure sports events, and then there were the 200 games involved in gambling recently.”
Ruby Walsh: “You only hear about these things when the bookies lose money; that’s my guide. When the gamble lands they’re up in arms. We’ve very good stipendiary stewards in Ireland, the bookies all communicate, and racing in Ireland is too small for it to happen. It’s not a big enough pool. In soccer you’re talking about games in the Russian B league, all across Europe — in Ireland there’re three meetings a week and it’s the same people all the time. The pool is too small. The only way you’d get away with anything is by taking maybe 100 quid a day, but people are never happy with that, they want to take a grand, and then they’re caught. I’m not gullible enough to think it could never become an issue, there’s always a possibility, but the stewards are very good.”
Tony Leen: “In terms of hurling and football lads, where are the championships at right now in terms of public appeal? I’m coming around to the idea of a Champions League-type Championship format, for instance?
Donal O’Grady: “There’s so much finance and power tied up in the provincial Councils, for instance, that if you took those powers away from it then it’d be defunct. They’d have no raison d’etre because it’s the Munster championship that generates the finance — and the power, in turn — so if that goes so does their power. In hurling you’re talking about six teams. No-one will bet on Limerick next year after the shenanigans going on there; same for Clare. Cork’s graph is going downwards, so is Waterford’s. That leaves Tipp, Kilkenny and Galway.”
Tony Leen: “So is that Champions League format a non-runner purely on the basis of not touching the provincial championship?”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “At the Kerry convention (chairman) Jerome Conway said Kerry were setting out to win the provincial championship every year. I just wonder if that message is getting across to the players. The players with the top counties are now at a level where they’re approaching the latter end of the championship like the last nine holes of a golf major. That’s downgrading the provincial championship, but then a lot of players have lost count of the number of provincial medals they have anyway.
Players will favour the Champions-League system but there are two arguments against it, that you shouldn’t borrow from other codes, which is ridiculous, and more importantly, the issue of provincial council grants, as Donal was just saying. Those grants are very valuable and are linked to attendance at provincial games, but going up to Fitzgerald Stadium for this year’s Munster final, you knew the teams would meet later in the year, and the buzz wasn’t there.”
Donal Lenihan: “Surely from a player’s point of view, you train to play games, but the guy who loses the provincial championship, gets more games. The winners then have five or six weeks to wait, so how do you hold the interest — you’re penalised for winning.”
Donal O’Grady: “You’re playing inferior opposition if you’re going through the back door so you only have to peak a couple of times: Kerry only peaked for Dublin in the All-Ireland quarter-final and then the final. The same for Kilkenny for a lot of years, particularly with the standard in Leinster. This year was different with Galway, but for years they only had to peak late in the year — sometimes just for the final, not even the semi-final.”
Ruby Walsh: “That’s why Sea the Stars was exceptional this year, he had to primed for the Guineas in April, the Derby in June, the Eclipse in July, the York International in August..... he had to be primed every month and there were no soft touches, he only won by a length, a length and a half. Kauto Star is in the King George next week but he has to be primed, he can’t turn up half-cocked. I’d say GAA players would prefer to be playing competitive matches.”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “They want a do-or-die situation.”
Tony Leen: “And the downside of a Champions League is that you have dead rubber games.”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “But you can try out players in those games — take Man United trying young players in matches at the moment. There are anomalies with the present system, with Dublin winning five Leinster titles and in the old system, they would probably have gotten to an All-Ireland final.”
Tony Leen: “How big is the threat to the GAA from rugby?”
Dara Ó Cinnéide:” I like rugby, but at the Kerry convention there was a motion from Sean Kelly’s club (Kilcummin) about the opening of Croke Park and the word ‘permanently’ was used. That told me that a few years ago I was sold a pup. We were told it was exceptional circumstances and now there’s an element of slackening.”
Donal Lenihan: “But where is that coming from? There’ll be no international rugby match played outside Aviva Stadium, that’s part of the contract. To my way of thinking this is surfacing now because you’re seeing a lack of finance. However the reality is the only games that could be played in Croke Park would be Heineken Cup finals or semi-finals because they’re not covered by the arrangements within the Aviva Stadium. Or a Rugby World Cup game in this part of the world. It’s a non-issue regarding rugby.”
Liam Mackey: “...And soccer.”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “Look, it’s deeply unpopular to be anti-rugby — or not anti-rugby so much as to say ‘I think we should shut down Croke Park’. There is an amount of the bandwagon with rugby, but there’s is huge goodwill towards it. Yet if it started encroaching at club level — which it doesn’t really in Kerry at the moment, where there’s good co-operation and similar people follow both games – then things would be different.”
Donal Lenihan: “I can understand that, but given what’s been achieved...”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “But this goes back to Roy Keane’s argument, this sense of the GAA looking for approval for a big magnanimous gesture. I was all for opening Croke Park but if it were to become a permanent fixture, I don’t know.”
Donal O’Grady: “I’d have opened Croke Park long ago and calculated the rent and poured that money into coaching.”
Ruby Walsh: “Christ lads, I hope the GAA always has money and that they can afford to make the decision not to open Croke Park if they don’t want to. I’d say you could get a racecourse opened for a bunfight at the moment if you paid the money.”
Donal Lenihan: “There’s a wider issue. We’re a small country. It’s ridiculous to have two stadiums in Limerick, for instance. The Australian model is the one we should follow. You’ve one stadium owned municipally and with private investment in a city, and I’ve been in a stadium which had rugby league on Friday night, rugby union on Saturday and Aussie Rules on Sunday. You have to admire what the GAA has achieved, with stadia in every town in the country, but how many games does the Gaelic Grounds get?”
Ruby Walsh: “There’s an amount of people would never have been in Croke Park if it had never been opened.”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “That’s fine, but I think the options should be kept open for Croke Park rather than using words like ‘permanent’.
Charlie Mulqueen: “If Munster were drawn against Leinster in a Heineken Cup semi-final would you object Dara to the game being played in Killarney or Thurles?”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “It’d have to be exceptional circumstances.”
Charlie Mulqueen: “Would you have a personal difficulty with it?”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “I wouldn’t say I would, no.”
Charlie Mulqueen: “But it would never happen, would it?”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “It would take an awful lot. Croke Park was a gradual thing, but there was a lot of opposition, even though there was also goodwill. And it was only Croke Park.”
Donal Lenihan: “But to come back to my point, where is the ‘permanent’ issue coming from? It’s not coming from soccer or rugby?”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “From within the GAA.”
Donal Lenihan: “Then maybe it’s being driven by the number crunchers in Croke Park: they’ve seen the figures generated in the last few years, we’re in a recession – you used to wait 10 years for Croke Park corporate box, now it’s four weeks.”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “But the Croke Park debt is manageable.”
Donal Lenihan: “I accept that.”
Liam Mackey: “I can’t see any way in which having Croke Park available would be damaging to the GAA.”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “I’m not saying it’s damaging. That’s not the big problem I have with it, it’s that decisions have been made out of a fear of being unpopular. You’ll hear people at grass roots, club level saying ‘it’s the right thing to do to open Croke Park’. And it is, but there’s an element of back slapping and ‘aren’t we great’—-”
Liam Mackey: “Isn’t it better to make the right decision for the wrong reasons than the wrong mistake for the right reasons?”
Donal Lenihan: “You’re right, and it was better to do that than having Irish people go to England to watch Ireland — and that was the reason the decision was made in the first place. But all of a sudden the number crunchers saw this as a cash cow, though they should have made a big deal of the money and say ‘you’re getting this and you’re getting this out of it’ for your club from opening Croke Park.”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “It’s too early — we need to see that money come right down. Counties say they’ll use it for county facilities but clubs would feel better if they saw the results.”
Donal O’Grady: “My view is that the money should go to pure coaching at the bottom level. My idea is that every youngster of four is in school and can’t go anywhere else – a captive audience. Coach them well.”
Ruby Walsh: “I agree. Kildare got to the All-Ireland final in 1998 and that was the time they should have gotten kids into football, but they didn’t. The rugby clubs did, and all the kids who might have been with Naas GAA club went to Naas rugby club because they had kids training every day of the week. Coaching is definitely the way forward: give them something to work towards, two days’ training and a match at the weekend, and you’ll get them.”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “Is the parish idea as strong in Kildare GAA because it is almost now a commuter belt area?”
Ruby Walsh: “It is. Kill GAA club is very strong, but training wasn’t structured for kids in GAA, and it was in rugby.”
Tony Leen: “Jumping back to rugby, is Munster’s golden age of success starting to slip away?”
Donal Lenihan: “There has to be on the basis that nobody goes on forever. John Hayes is on the field for 80 minutes always, never substituted, even though his opposite number is always replaced with 20 minutes left by a fresh opponent. O’Connell and O’Callaghan have been to the forefront with Munster, in the autumn internationals, dogfights with the Lions. Players can’t play 100% all the time, but the problem is every game now is vital. Go back five or six years and the Magners League wasn’t as big as it is now. Martin Johnson told me he’d get away with playing at 70% of his capacity in the domestic game, but Ronan O’Gara and Paul O’Connell, players like that, the whole world is depending on them every day. David Wallace is 33, Hayes is 36, O’Connell and O’Callaghan are 30. There’s mileage.”
Charlie Mulqueen: “There’s another angle. Most of the successful Munster players came out of a very competitive All-Ireland league and were battle-hardened as they came through with Munster. That’s gone now — the AIL has gone back, and while there are good players coming through, are they of the same quality as O’Gara and O’Connell and so on? I don’t think so. Irish teams may be obliged to go further afield for players.”
Donal Lenihan: “There’s good talent coming through.”
Charlie Mulqueen: “Is it at the same level? There’s nowhere they can prove themselves first.”
Donal Lenihan: “The other problem is that a lot of those players will have to be replaced at the same time. You should be drip-feeding players into the team. We were supposed to have the dream team going to the World Cup two years ago, but now we have players like Fitzgerald, Earls, O’Leary, Heaslip, Kearney, Healy — none of those were starters in France.”
Charlie Mulqueen: “A lot of Leinster names.....”
Donal O’Grady: “Let’s be honest, though, you need your front five to win games. If John Hayes does his knee in the morning, where’s the tight-head to replace him?”
Donal Lenihan: “We’re two years away from the World Cup and by all accounts they’re trying to get Hayes to the World Cup. I can’t see that happening — Murphy’s law would dictate that six months out from the tournament he’ll explode. They must decide who’ll replace Hayes — Buckley, Court or Ross — and start giving him 15, 20 minutes per game. Hayes hadn’t played in four months, yet he was still on the field in the 80% minute against Australia! What he has done is incredible but it’s almost abuse.”
Tony Leen: “What about Stephen Ireland? Is it just a matter of washing our hands of him?”
Liam Mackey: “I think so.”
Tony Leen: “Isn’t a ‘good manager’ supposed to get his best team on the field, irrespective?”
Donal Lenihan: “But you must want to play. If you’re going somewhere under sufferance it’s not going to work. Everybody knows of hugely talented players that you were sometimes better off without, because if the attitude was wrong it could affect players around them.”
Tony Leen: “It’s a story, Liam, we’ve over-reported this year in the media.”
Liam Mackey: “We don’t dictate what people are interested in. But if we’d qualified for the World Cup people with no interest in football would have besieged Joe Duffy about Stephen Ireland. The best Irish footballer on the planet isn’t playing for Ireland, but that’s down to Stephen Ireland.”
Dara Ó Cinnéide: “The Andy Reid story is almost more interesting.”
Liam Mackey: “The Andy Reid saga for me is closest to David O’Leary. There’s obviously a personality issue between Reid and Trappatoni arising out of that row they had. I think Andy Reid would improve the team, but that doesn’t matter. If Trapattoni thought Reid would improve the team it wouldn’t matter if Reid had hit him a box. The reason he doesn’t is that they have a system and Reid doesn’t fit into that.”
Donal Lenihan: “But in the age of video analysis other teams will know what that system is. Surely you should then have an X-factor, a player who might go off-script?”
Liam Mackey: “I think so, but it’s me against Giovanni Trapattoni. We’ve had that argument with him at press conferences and he’s not for turning. He believes he’s right.”
Donal O’Grady: “Go back to 1990 when Ireland drew with Egypt at the World Cup — Egypt did an Ireland on Ireland — what you needed was Liam Brady, someone who’d pick the lock. It’s the same thing.”
Liam Mackey: “Trapattoni went to see Reid recently, but it was Reid’s worst game in months.”
Tony Leen: “Trapattoni doesn’t go to many games. That’s an issue.”
Liam Mackey: “He doesn’t, he watches games on DVD.”
Donal Lenihan: “But that’s a joke. The camera only captures so much. There’s a big context outside that, what’s happening over here or over there. That’s a cop-out. Capello goes to four or five games a week; the onus is on the employer to say ‘this isn’t good enough’. To my view he’s only doing half the job. The margins are so fine that if he’d gone to watch Reid play five times he might have convinced himself to bring him in.”
Ruby Walsh: “Being realistic, Eddie O’Sullivan brought an unbelievable squad to the 2007 World Cup but came home with nothing. Trapattoni brought a squad of limited talent to the brink of the World Cup, a tournament they had no right to be near. We can get patriotic, Thierry Henry and so on, but the bottom line is we didn’t make it.”
Liam Mackey: “We did see a good Irish team in Paris. It was do or die and partly due to the manager, partly to the self-belief, they didn’t win games they should have won earlier in the campaign — like Bulgaria in Sofia.”
Ruby Walsh: “Winning when it’s all or nothing is like riding a horse when it’s all or nothing — coming to the last and you’re half a length down it’s die dog or shit the licence. Clear the fence and you’ve a chance of winning, miss and you have no chance.”
Tony Leen: “You don’t think Paris was a corner being turned?”
Ruby Walsh: “You can’t say that, it’s a one-off.”
Donal O’Grady: “When your back is to the wall you can go out sometimes and the shackles are off.”
Michael Moynihan: “Tiger Woods, gents. There’s very little sport in that story at the moment.”
Ruby Walsh: “He had a bad year on the course, but what he does off the course is none of my business.”
Charlie Mulqueen: “Ruby, I can’t agree with you.”
Ruby Walsh: “I know the public image is important. I can’t be seen to fall out of here tonight and try to do my job at Kempton tomorrow. Everyone has to conduct himself in a fit and proper manner, but if Tiger Woods has his problems, I’m sure as hell not going to harp on about it. Some day I’ll be in trouble and I won’t want people talking about me.”
Charlie Mulqueen: “Tiger is a role model. Or was. We all assumed he was squeaky-clean. The truth is for the first 20 years of his life he was a bit of a nerd, unsure of himself off the golf course, but now it appears he can’t control himself. You might say what he does off the golf course is nobody’s business but he is a role model for golfers. I can’t tell you how many people are bitterly disappointed that he’s turned out to be a bit of a tramp.”
Liam Mackey: “What I’m interested in is whether one of the most focused sportspeople on the planet will be able to maintain that focus when he returns.”
Charlie Mulqueen: “Management and security will protect him.”
Tony Leen: “As a parallel, how much did Kieren Fallon’s troubles affect racing?”
Ruby Walsh: “It’s no different to Tony Adams in soccer and other sports. Kieren Fallon had an issue; he did the crime and did his time. Now he’s back and squeaky clean and after bringing publicity to racing: whatever damage he did on the way out he’s brought a lot of good will back with him.”
Tony Leen: “Is it possible that Tiger Inc will be even stronger when he comes back?”
Charlie Mulqueen: “None of this changes the fact that he’s behaved disgracefully.”
Ruby Walsh: “It might be against your morals, Charlie, but it’s not against Tiger Woods’ morals. We’re sitting here in judgement on his morals.”
Donal Lenihan: “It might be a reaction against an upbringing where he did nothing but swing a golf club from the age of five.”
Charlie Mulqueen: “That’s one excuse used for him. I have no doubt that some American journalists knew what was happening but were afraid to rock the boat. Tiger is difficult to communicate with for a journalist and they were probably afraid he’d ‘ex-communicate’ them.”
Donal Lenihan: “As a sports follower I’d hate to watch the Masters without him being there next year.”
Charlie Mulqueen: “John Daly said recently nobody was bigger than the game of golf –—until Tiger Woods came along. I think that’s nonsense.”
Ruby Walsh: “What fascinates me is that it’s still the same ball, same club, same tee. It’s like the Gold Cup, it’s the same as the three-mile chase in Thurles. You ride it the same way.”
Liam Mackey: “What about the self-belief?”
Ruby Walsh: “If he goes to the driving range, he can hit the ball. And it’s all about the ball, not his personal life. He won’t have a doubt in his head there. All he will doubt is the damage he’s done to his personal life. I’m glad he’s not married to my sister or daughter, I’d be fit to kill him, for all that I said I don’t care what he does.”
Donal O’Grady: “Charlie, did he promote the clean image or was it put out for him?”
Charlie Mulqueen: “I think parents are hugely important in this context. Woods had a horrible father. Rory McIlroy’s parents are the most down to earth, pleasant people who have brought that kid up extremely well. He’s 20, a multi-millionaire and he could go off the tracks, but if he does the parents can’t be blamed. Upbringing is hugely important in sport.”
