Granted, it’s only mid-January, but the voting for the 2023 Sports Personality of the Year award can be shut down now, just give Paudie Clifford the trophy and bow at the fella’s feet.
True, not everyone would approve of using your winning speech at the end of a highly lively All-Ireland Junior Club final to settle a few scores with the officials, but wouldn’t life be mad dull if folk didn’t go off script every now and then?
And Paudie, in fairness, did the obligatory thank yous - tons of them - including “Johnny our bus driver”. “He did an unbelievable job,” he said, “a sound man, fair play Johnny.”
But, “to the referee and his officials……”. Deep breath. “Obviously a tough game to ref there at the end, a good job other than at the end when I was wrongly sent off - unbelievable, I was sent off - but a great job all ‘round.”
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It was, by common consent, the most tremendously junior-ish football moment in the history of junior football, Paudie’s sense of injustice almost overwhelming his exhilaration at captaining Fossa to victory over Tyrone’s Stewartstown. Exhilaration won out though: not even being introduced to the crowd as “Paudie Fitzgerald” could dampen it.
His red card was one of six shown by a ref who, if he’d had eyes in the back of his head, might have brandished six more. Paudie’s brother David - also sent off - was given the man of the match award for doing his usual masterclass thing, but TG4′s Daithí de Mórdha must have been in the running too just for keeping count of how many players were left on the field.
At the best of times that Croke Park pitch is big, but in those closing moments the gaps between the players who had avoided red cards must have felt like the distance between Fossa and Stewartstown. Close enough to the length of the country, like.
It wasn’t, you can be sure, a lack of gratitude, but when TG4 presented David Clifford with his man-of-the-match gong, he wasn’t exactly beside himself. He was probably wondering where he’d fit the bloody thing.
Any day soon, a planning application will appear in the Killarney Advertiser along the lines of: ‘I, DC, am applying to Kerry County Council for permission to construct a humongous warehouse at my home to house my medals, trophies, awards and man-of-the-match prizes.’
Apart from a sprinkling of FA Cups over the last couple of decades and that Premier League trophy from way back in 2004, Arsenal have had no such trouble housing honours because there haven’t been all that many of them.
But they’re now eight points clear at the top of the table, and that sight will never not be weird, certainly not for young folk who thought Arsenal were just a team who played pretty football but always lost.
Their comfy 2-0 defeat of Spurs came as no surprise to Paul ‘Merse’ Merson, on duty with Sky, who’d forecast that they’d have a happy time of it in the north London derby.
Come full-time, he was purring, while busy offending Kiwis. “If you were living in New Zealand and you hadn’t seen football in the last four years and Arsenal were wearing light blue, you’d have thought you were watching Man City - that’s how good they were.”
And then he was rude about Spurs by calling them “cuffy”. “Cuffy?” asked David Jones. “Yeah, cuffy - they play off the cuff, if it happens it happens, you can’t see any plan.”
The second goal?
“The goalie’s kicking the ball out of his hands! 1989! That happens on Sunday morning at Wormwood Scrubs!”
Confession: some of us were at a loss here. He could just have meant those open spaces in the London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham where people do indeed kick the ball out of their hands, like it was 1989, but the interweb reckoned that he meant Hackney Marshes, kind of England’s version of Eamo Dunphy’s Phoenix Park, as opposed to Mountjoy Prison. God knows.
It was all very confusing. As is Arsenal’s march towards the title. They’re not even doing it in a cuffy manner, which will blow the minds of New Zealanders who’ve had no telly for four years.
You can almost hear Martin Ødegaard’s speech in May. “He did an unbelievable job, a sound man, fair play Mikel.”
