After his own injury experiences through his career, Gordon D’Arcy can empathise with Leinster’s Jack Boyle who faces a lengthy absence from the game after damaging his Achilles tendon. “I’m genuinely gutted for him,” he writes, but he is hopeful that when Boyle returns he will have the same mindset that Gordon had when he finally came back after shattering his arm. “I never took another season, or another match, for granted. I played with gratitude, not obligation, with perspective, not fear. It was like embracing an old friend.”
As Johnny Watterson puts it, “every injury for one player is an opportunity for another”, So, in steps Billy Bohan to the Irish squad, capping a “meteoric rise” for the 20-year-old prop. Johnny traces that rise, talking to two of the coaches who helped him along the way.
Bohan will have a new comrade at Connacht come the summer following the signing of Will Connors from Leinster, Linley MacKenzie talking to assistant coach Rod Seib about the impact he believes the backrow can have on his arrival.
Ulster, meanwhile, are hoping to bounce back from that late, late defeat by Scarlets when they take on Cardiff on Saturday. “It’s a massive one for us,” coach Richie Murphy tells Michael Sadlier, the challenge not made any easier by the absence of nine frontline players.
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In Gaelic games, the GAA is nervously waiting for news on what effect Chandra had on pitches around the country, with 31 National League games scheduled for the weekend. Gordon Manning fills you in.
The hooter caused a bit of a storm itself in Killarney on Sunday when Tomás Kennedy’s last-gasp winner for Kerry against Roscommon was allowed to stand. Seán Moran worries about “possible controversies ahead”, as does Kerry’s Brian Ó Beaglaoich. “What’s going to happen in an All-Ireland final if someone is hand-passing over the bar or kicking right on the hooter?
Also in Gaelic games, footballer Niamh Crowley, a two-time All-Ireland winner with Dublin, is, quite literally, one in a million. That’s the percentage of people impacted by Landau-Kleffner Syndrome, an extremely rare form childhood epilepsy. The 21-year-old talks to Ian O’Riordan about her battle with the condition, which included her having to learn how to speak all over again.
Muireann Duffy’s Fantasy Gaelic Games debut last weekend had, well, mixed results. She struck gold with a few of her picks, but she wasn’t helped by selecting a player who is still recovering from an ACL injury, and a few more who were nowhere to be seen. It was, she concedes, “a tumultuous” beginning for Duffy’s Dynamos, but she’s hooked. “We have may have created a monster.”
And in soccer, tonight sees the final round of games in the highly “protracted” group phase of the Champions League, six English Premier League teams currently in the top eleven. “Given that level of domination,” writes Jonathan Wilson, “why have English clubs won only three of the past 10 Champions Leagues?”
TV Watch: Thirty-two of the 36 teams in action in tonight’s final group phase Champion League games are still in with a shout of reaching the last sixteen - you can read up on all the permutations here. Among your TV offerings are Liverpool v Qarabağ (RTÉ 2, Premier Sports 1 and TNT Sports 2), Napoli v Chelsea (Virgin Media Two and TNT Sports 4), Manchester City v Galatasaray (TNT Sports 6), PSG v Newcastle (TNT Sports 3), Arsenal v Kairat (TNT Sports 7) and Eintracht Frankfurt v Tottenham (TNT Sports 5). BBC1 has highlights of all the games at 11.40pm.
