There was plenty of excitement in the Rockett household on Saturday night, when Waterford camogie player Niamh was honoured with her first All-Star award. With another impressive season put down, the 28-year-old was honoured alongside the game’s finest as the best right half forward in the business. What a journey it’s been, having been told […]

5 years ago

Kilkenny’s All-Ireland final hero Denise Gaule was named as the Camogie player of the Year on Saturday night. The Windgap player enjoyed a sensational season for the Cats, bringing the O’Duffy Cup back to Kilkenny with a late, great penalty in the All-Ireland final against Galway. Gaule edged her teammate Grace Walsh and Galway’s Shauna […]

5 years ago

When Paul Robinson finished in 4th place in the European championships in 2014, just 0.17 of a second off the podium, the world of athletics was at the 21-year-old’s feet. If you’d told him back then that it would take seven years before he’d compete in another major championship race, seven years before he’d reach […]

5 years ago

Cian McPhillips has gears and on the biggest stage of his career, the 18-year-old romped up through them. In doing so, the Longford youngster left some of Europe’s most talented 800m runners in his wake as he qualified for his first major championship semi-final in his first major championship competition. How’s that for a fella […]

5 years ago

“Horses are my life. I love them. No one comes into racing for money – it is a hard way to make a living. We are here because we love the horses.” With the toughest week of his life behind him, Gordon Elliott is taking his heavy penalty on the chin and insists he will […]

5 years ago

It was only her second game back from a cruciate ligament injury and Aimee Mackin only played the second half. Her club, Shane O’Neill’s, were trailing Crossmaglen Rangers at half-time and needed inspiration. Shane O’Neill’s won that game by 30 points, Mackin scored 8-1. How is that for inspiration? Any worries that the Northern Ireland […]

5 years ago

In a locked-down world, the footballers of Tipperary found divine inspiration. Backs were to the wall when the League shut up shop last March as for all intents and purposes, the team had two games to save their season. Lose to either Offaly or Leitrim in the restart and they were heading back to square […]

5 years ago

When Jerry Kiernan told a young John Travers to get out of his sight and not to bother coming back, it was exactly what the Donore Harriers athlete needed to hear. A prodigious talent who’d romped through the underage ranks, Travers was slowly but surely losing his way. Kiernan had no sympathy and when the […]

5 years ago

Gordon Elliott committed an indefensible error for which he has paid a dear price. His best horses have been loaded up and taken away. His sponsors have left him and his reputation as a racehorse trainer has taken a seismic hit. The pile-on should now end. Speaking on Today with Clare Byrne on RTE Radio, […]

5 years ago

If you’ve been keeping a close eye on the world of sport, and you’ve no reason not to, a solid 16/20 is within your grasp today.

5 years ago

Gordon Elliott was last night banned from racing horses in England until the investigation by the Irish authorities comes to a conclusion. The BHA made this decision on Monday night on the back of a photo of the 43-year-old trainer sitting on a dead horse. Elliott has been the subject of widespread criticism in the […]

5 years ago

After five minutes of verbal jolting with Roy Keane, Jamie Redknapp had the face of a man who’d gone 12 rounds with Muhammad Ali himself. Spurs were the subject and nobody was safe, not even Matt Doherty, burned badly in the crossfire by his own compatriot. “Does anyone really think Doherty is going to make […]

5 years ago

Cavan’s Aishling Sheridan and the Collingwood Magpies continue to romp through the 2021 AFLW season. It’s now six goals in five games for the prolific Mullahorn club-woman, who has inspired her team to the table-top after an unbeaten start to the season. The Pies faced one of their toughest challenges yet on Sunday morning, when […]

5 years ago

John Connellan is a barrister, a footballer, a father, a busy man. Busy enough anyway, not to go looking for a hiding to nothing. In taking on his latest mission, the Westmeath player has let himself in for a mountain of work, he’s opened himself to the hyper-sensitive criticism that comes with the territory, and […]

5 years ago

Are some of the GAA’s best individual players missing out on All-Star awards because they didn’t win an All-Ireland? Colm Parkinson certainly thinks so. With a record total of nine awards heading to champs Limerick and Dublin this year, Parkinson feels that some of the season’s most influential players were left out because they weren’t […]

5 years ago

Throw the kitchen sink at it.

5 years ago

If you’re good enough, you’re old enough. Lyndsey Davey won a ladies football All-Star when she was 16 years of age. Cliche confirmed. Lean times, mucky fields, glory days later and the Skerries Harps player is tipped to pick up her fifth All-Star this Saturday night, at 31. If you’re good enough, you’re young enough. […]

5 years ago

You’ve done your cruciate. Could you think of four more jarring words for a GAA player to hear? The mind wanders. Nine months they say. You might come back but will you come back as good, as strong, as fast, as confident? Will you come back at all? Think Ciaran Kilkenny. Every time a cruciate […]

5 years ago

When Siofra Cléirigh Buttner ran an Irish indoor 800m record of 2.02.46 in March 2018, it was the fastest mark recorded by an Irish female in five years. The Dubliner’s record-run survived the 2019 and 2020 indoor seasons but the year is 2021, and Cléirigh Buttner’s mark has been smashed six times in the last […]

5 years ago

There’s a big score on for someone with a finger on the pulse.

5 years ago

The year is 2021, and Cora Staunton is still shooting the lights out. Cora Staunton made her debut for the Mayo ladies senior football team at the age of 13. She won her first All-Ireland title at the age of 17, back in 1999. For 23 years, the Carnacon club woman scored for fun in […]

5 years ago

There ain’t no loneliness for Ireland’sdistance runners as our strongest team in years prepares for next month’s European indoor athletics championships in Poland. Competition has been at a premium these last few months and so Saturday’s government approved micro-meet at the national arena was as eagerly anticipated as it was essential in terms of ranking […]

5 years ago

All dressed up with nowhere to go. Brian Fenton and Gearoid Hegarty are the GAA’s top dogs for 2020 while youngsters Oisin Mullin and Eoin Cody accepted their young player of the year awards from the comfort of their own homes. Over a blurry zoom link and wearing a set of earphones, the lads were […]

5 years ago

Would you prefer to spend the team holiday talking tactics or making memories for life? For Paul Ryan and the Dublin hurlers, the tactics could wait and under man-manager supremo Anthony Daly, they had the best days of their lives. As he looks back now on 11 years in blue, the wins and the scalps […]

5 years ago

As a young, budding and impressionable cross country runner in Tipperary, Sean Tobin was the man. In some farmer’s field was where you first heard about him, spattered with cow-dung when you first caught a glimpse. He was a couple of years older and the talk about this fella from Clonmel, was that he was […]

5 years ago

When you’re breaking your own national records, that’s when you know you’re onto something. It was only a fortnight ago when Dubliner Nadia Power ran 2.02.44 to break the Irish women’s indoor 800m record previously held by Siofra-Cleirigh Buttner. With the European indoors on the horizon, Power looked primed to mix it with the continent’s […]

5 years ago

Take it out.

5 years ago

3 games, 4 goals. Aside from the nostalgia and a long way from Cavan, the AFLW is the closest thing you’ll get to a GAA game these days. 14 Irish players are in the thick of it on the other side of the world and as we contemplate another two long and boring months without […]

5 years ago

It says it all about Dan Morrissey’s move from wing back to full back that you hardly even noticed he’d left. So dominant and solid were the Ahane man’s performances in Limerick’s last line that he’s been likened to one of the greatest of all-time, in Kilkenny’s JJ Delaney. JJ made the move back mid-way […]

5 years ago

Crossmaglen native Tony McEntee is in his first year as the Sligo senior football manager and as you can imagine, it’s been a haphazard couple of months. It wasn’t helped, McEntee says, by the GAA’s letter to counties on Wednesday night to say that inter-county training would not take place until easter at the earliest. […]

5 years ago

It’s fair to say that 2021 has been a slow burner from a GAA perspective, with players twiddling their thumbs while supporters fight away the withdrawal symptoms. The last two months have been a slog and truth be told, Wednesday night’s announcement of a further two months in no man’s land was needed like a […]

5 years ago

“I was always conscious that there was only one Dermot Earley and I wanted to do his name proud, but at the same time, I wanted to plough my own furrow.” As his father’s son, the spotlight was always going to follow the boy with the same name. For his tour-de-force during their most successful […]

5 years ago

Getting back to Australia was like breaking into fort-knox for Colin O’Riordan. But you get the impression the Tipperary man would have served a 314 day quarantine for that one day in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.  There were police escorts, hotel room workouts and shut-down airports but the glow of Tipperary’s famous Munster final win over […]

5 years ago

With not so much as a ball being kicked in Ireland, the AFLW season has taken centre stage. In the faraway hills Down Under, there are 14 Irish women lighting up the Australian league and for idle Irish eyes, TG4 is the channel and their coverage is the tonic.  The marks, the stoppages and the […]

5 years ago

It’s Monday, it’s 12.00. Get stuck in.

5 years ago

Paul Hennessy only has two horses in training. It’s quality not quantity though, because on the biggest weekend of the Irish racing calendar, one of those horses made its way to the winners enclosure. It was a welcome bolt from the blue on a stage and at a time when Willie Mullins’ dominance was beginning […]

5 years ago

The AFLW is a growing phenomenon and Irish women are central to the movement. Established in 2017, the sport took some time to find its feet against a competitive and at times confrontational backdrop in Australia, but now with interest and status growing, its trajectory is heading up. Most importantly, progress is being made in […]

5 years ago

Anticipation and excitement reign as Patrick Horgan looks forward to getting to work with Cork’s new analysis coach Donal O’Grady. During lean times for the county’s hurling team, the return of their lost messiah has lifted spirits. No All-Ireland in 16 years, O’Grady was the mastermind when the Rebels last scaled hurling’s peak and the […]

5 years ago

Something didn’t click for the Wexford hurlers in 2020 and manager Davy Fitzgerald reckons he’s discovered what it was.  Lock-downs, thinking time and a great deal of analysis later, Davy has found what he’s been looking for. “I’m pretty certain I have the reason we didn’t perform,” he says in an interview with Colm Parkinson […]

5 years ago

As a GAA player, what can you do? In any normal year, these are the days when you’d be out slogging over puddles and ice with a manager in your ear and with teammates by your side. There’d be a match to base your weekend around and looking back now…God did we even know how […]

5 years ago

Ballymun Kickhams won the Dublin senior football championship in 2012. Dean Rock top scored that day while James McCarthy and Philly McMahon were key men in their one point defeat of Kilmacud Crokes. A 20-year-old John Small couldn’t even make the Kickhams team, underlining their strength in depth,  and with a county championship under their […]

5 years ago

As Willie Mullins looks ahead to the Dublin Racing Festival, the realisation that his team is down a key man for now and forever nags away. Just a fortnight ago, David Mullins announced his retirement from race-riding at the age of 24. One of the most naturally gifted jockeys of his generation, David said that […]

5 years ago

Johnny, do we even know ya at all? Offaly hurling has quite the aura about it. All drink and one-liners and All-Ireland medals. You wouldn’t see it these days anyway and as the face and the voice of this novel and laid back hurling revolution, Birr’s Johnny Pilkington stands alone. Caricatury and mythical. With the […]

5 years ago

There’s plenty of good days, plenty of bad days. For 25 years now, Paul Nolan has been rolling with the punches in an unpredictable game. Horses have broken his heart, jockeys have made mistakes, owners have too. But he hasn’t been knocked out yet and the boyish enthusiasm that brought him here in the first […]

5 years ago

Get on it!

5 years ago

Irish racing, don’t ever say it doesn’t entertain. With a loose horse selling dummies like they were going out of fashion, a ‘downright disgrace’ of a start turned a race upside down and then there were the breath-taking heroics from Kerry jockey Kevin Brouder, who somehow stayed on board a four-legged-animal desperate to say its […]

5 years ago

The Irish made their mark Down Under on the first weekend of the AFLW season. Both Sinead Goldrick and Ailish Considine enjoyed victories for the Melbourne Demons and the Adelaide Crows respectively while despite ending up on the losing side, Niamh Kelly and Aishling McCarthy, in particular, impressed for the West Coast Eagles. Considine’s Adelaide […]

5 years ago

It took some serious courage and a brass neck to pull it off. Thankfully, the bould Shane Curran had both. His moment of madness may have resulted in the cup for the 1989 Connacht minor final being taken away from Roscommon, but all’s well that ends well, with Cake scoring a penalty in the replay […]

5 years ago

Do you know your horses? Do you know more than your mates know about horses? The lockdown has been tough, January has been a slog. But thankfully, there is light at the end of the tunnel – light in the form of the 2021 Dublin Racing Festival weekend in Leopardstown. On February 6 and 7, […]

5 years ago

The attacking instincts are still alive and well in Galway’s Aidan Harte. With a daisy-cutting rasper from 40 yards, a man with the number four on his back knocked Tipperary out of the 2020 championship. It wasn’t your typical corner back’s contribution but then again, Aidan Harte isn’t your typical corner back.  As an underage […]

5 years ago