LockerRoom / Tom Humphries: Sorry if you find us this morning in a worse state of dishevelment than is usual. Truth is we are intoxicated from too much reading of the Evening Herald. Can something so addictive really be legal? Every day a different insider clears his throat and announces a new favourite for the Irish job.
Sometimes there are even learned and illuminating dispatches from that most exalted of species, The Merrion Square Insider! Every day it is announced - following thrilling Deep Throat-style contact in a dark and deserted underground carpark, I would imagine - that the poor, befuddled FAI need headhunt no further. The brainy head of Martin or Stan or Davo or Roy or Craig or Noggin the Nog is sufficiently full with footieness to enable him to do the biggest job in world football.
Every day I sprint to the bookmakers and mortgage a good chunk of the money we've put aside for the kids' bail requirements on the outcome of the great headhunt race.
Frankly, I am surprised at how much fun it has all become. When John Delaney announced there would be no FAI Short List And Interview farce this time around I thought we would be short-changed in the entertainment department.
This though is much better. Nobody ruled in. Nobody ruled out. It could run forever.
And by the way, bad cess to those vinegar pusses who insist on belittling the importance of the epic process we as a nation are now embarked on by saying it will all end with tears, or worse, with Aldo.
Of course that's not the only reason we are a little discombobulated this morning.
You see, most weeks this column wakes up on a Sunday morning and doesn't feel like a column at all. No ideas. No inspiration. No motivation. (Merrion Square Insiders Say Locker Room Could Be Just The Man To Revive Irish Fortunes!) A quick review of the weekend papers reveals all the good ideas for columns have been taken. This morning though we feel brimful of ideas and have decided to celebrate by not looking at the Sunday papers at all. Who cares?
So. What about that Aussie Rules/Murderball debacle? Why, from the Irish media, so many plaintive cries of WHY? Why would the Aussies do this? To li'l ol' us? Why? Why? Why? What is wrong with them? Why? Because we made them that way.
Tadhg wasn't the first Kennelly to make it to Oz. In The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes's wonderful account of penal-convict Australia, the author tells the story of the only man to have escaped Macquarie Harbour twice.
Alexander Pearce of Monaghan, who got the junket out courtesy of the Armagh Assizes of 1819, was a hard dog to keep on the porch. Pearce was a recidivist absconder. Anyway, one day he and seven other convicts, including one William Kennelly, stole a boat, rowed across the harbour and then set out on foot through the bush.
The terrain was inhospitable and they soon began to straggle. They got hungry and they quarrelled. Kennelly made what might have been a joke. "I'm so weak," he said, "that I could eat a piece of a man." Before Kennelly could say, "Don't get me wrong," one William Dalton met his end (and an axe). The convicts divided him into "seven roughly equal portions."
All well and good. Now though the weakest among the seven were beginning to fret. Did they look a little too appetising? It was a sort of pre-Genesis-FAI-bloodletting scenario but with worse costumes.
Kennelly and a man known as "Little" Brown dropped back and disappeared into the forest mazes. The others briefly gave chase. Some days later Kennelly and Brown were found on the shores of Macquarie Harbour with pieces of human flesh in their pockets. They both died within days and it wasn't until much later that the authorities came to believe the truth about the takeaway Kennelly and Brown were carrying.
Of the five convicts left, a Thomas Bodenham was the next on the menu. Then four hobbled on, eyeing each other warily or hungrily.
Finally there were just two left: Robert Greenhill of Middlesex and Alexander Pearce of Monaghan. Greenhill had the axe. They walked on with a fixed distance between them always. They went two nights without sleeping. Then Greenhill succumbed and dozed off. Pearce grabbed the axe and Greenhill's arm and thigh. The first one'n'one. The capper is that when Pearce was captured he confessed all. He was disbelieved and found himself spared execution.
Pearce arrived back in Macquarie Harbour as a legend. So much so that a young convict called Thomas Cox begged to be brought along on Pearce's next escape. In November of 1823 Pearce absconded again, this time with Cox. When Pearce was arrested five days later he had half a pound of Thomas Cox in his pocket.
And we ask what it is in the Aussie character could force them to be so rough with us? It's us.
The week's other great story was the World Series win of one of baseball's most accursed franchises, the Chicago White Sox. Coming just 12 months after the equally overdue World Series win of the Boston Red Sox, last week's events leave the Chicago Cubs with the longest stretch of failure in American professional sports history.
The Cubs and the White Sox reside 13 train (or "L") stops apart on either side of Chicago. They might as well have set up house on either side of the world so different are their fan bases and outlooks. What united them until this week is failure. Until this week the White Sox hadn't won a world series since 1917. The Cubs are waiting since 1908.
It has often been said Chicago baseball fans tolerate each other and such a litany of failure because they are happy, given the elements Chicago endures, just to be able to get outdoors for a few months in the summer.
A White Sox World Series win will change the equable balance of the city forever though. Back in 1959 when the Sox won a mere pennant race for the regional division, Mayor Daly, a southside Soxer, let off the city air-raid sirens and many people thought Chicago was under attack.
This could be more alarming. The beauty of Chicago baseball is failure. The earnest Sox in their pig-ugly southside ballpark and the frivolous Cubs over in ivy-clad Wrigley Field were the last hope for a world where taking part was enough. The Sox have betrayed that tradition and it is to be hoped the beautiful, lost Cubs will have the strength of character to adhere to the path of failure regardless.
Finally a focal scor. It was a shock on Saturday night to read Keith Duggan's column in this space and to see that Cormac McGill, The Follower, had passed on.
No words here could add anything to Keith's rather beautiful farewell to a beloved character, but in the week when Jack Mahon also passed on we found it hard not to look back wistfully.
When we were starting out in this business 200 years ago it seemed as if (with a few happy exceptions) every journalist over the age of 50 was part of a confederacy of curmudgeonliness which viewed us young(ish) fellas as some sort of lethal virus.
Jack and Cormac were always gracious friends though, two men secure in their own achievements and happy to share not just the air of the press box but the breadth of their wisdom.
We'll miss reading them and we'll miss meeting them and the world of football in Donegal and Galway will be a little poorer without them.
