Lads, come on.
It’s probably more bother than it’s worth being on The Sunday Game nowadays. Everyone loves watching it, they really do, but they also love picking every aspect of it apart.
To very, very loosely paraphrase a famous Pat Spillane quote: There are two types of people, those who love watching The Sunday Game… and those who don’t know they love watching it and, sometimes, we all fall into that category.
It’s cathartic, taking a swipe at the big boys and, a lot of the time, it feels very necessary considering the audience that the pundits are exposed to every weekend so call it a moral crusade or a redressing of the balance but The Sunday Game is going to get jumped on when needs be.
Go on then, try argue https://t.co/fKLtVu7TGM
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) September 3, 2017
During the much-anticipated highlights show, the classic first Sunday of September shooting wildly from the winners’ hotel and back to a packed studio, the panel put together their 15 All-Stars from the 2017 season.
Granted it’s never going to be easy to fit everyone in, keep every county happy and do every player justice, but there were some big calls that never made the list.
- Mark Coleman (Cork)
- Pauric Mahony (Waterford)
- Austin Gleeson (Waterford)
The Rebel youngster’s omission was perhaps met with the most opposition after a stunning Munster championship-winning year.
Pauric Mahony finished the championship as top scorer ahead of Joe Canning. 50 points he hit through, 11 of which he nailed in the final – four coming from play – but he too was overlooked just like he was on the SportsJOE team of the year.
Then you have Austin Gleeson. A man whose two goals dragged Waterford through an epic semi-final revenge mission. A special hurler who was once said to be in contention for player of the year and now doesn’t find a spot on a team of 15. Then again, it’s not a massive surprise considering some of the treatment of Gleeson after the final.
And that took some doing considering there were seven of them making it up but here’s what Eddie Brennan, Anthony Daly, Brendan Cummins, Tomás Mulcahy, Michael Duignan, Jackie Tyrrell and Cyril Farrell came up with in the end.
For Hurler of the Year, the panel went for Gearóid McInerney who no doubt had an outstanding campaign and a crushing final but one question from that remains: What about Jamie bloody Barron?
