Double Vision
Do I love football more than Chelsea?
For the first time in my life I’m questioning whether I love football more than Chelsea FC. Of course I do appreciate how ridiculous that sounds; that such a question has no place in the life of a healthy and happy grown-up, but hey, that’s testicles for you.
The most exciting season in the history of the Premiership was heading to a conclusion. Chelsea were playing away at the footballing cathedral that is Anfield. Liverpool as a city was enveloped in emotional hysteria for the 96 dead at Hillsborough, fired up by a team flying high, playing beautiful flowing football towards the phenomenal goal-scoring partnership of Daniel Sturridge and arguably the finest striker on the planet, Luis Suarez.
The Chelsea manager, Jose Mourinho, is a brilliant tactician. Scrupulously, he plans and prepares like no other in the game.
Sadly, his forte is ‘not losing’. From the first minute of that match against Liverpool it was clear that Chelsea’s players had been instructed to waste time.
Yes, they defended with great discipline, but that’s how Chelsea beat both European giants Barcelona and Bayern Munich.
Yes, they beat Liverpool, 2-0 at Anfield, in a famous victory.
But there it is, in plain words. I just typed ‘they’ in reference to Chelsea. A subconscious choice which not very long ago would have been ‘we’.
Time wasting from the start? Chelsea?
More than likely you’re simply delighted to have your TV schedules back. Have you spent a miserable six months flipping the channel-up button on your remote, muttering out loud to yourself “Football, football, bloody football! Why don’t they show any dramas? What about a good comedy? Is that too much to ask?”
No, my grumpy friend, it is not. To enjoy all of the above, simply abandon your channel surfing and watch the football instead. The Beautiful Game can satisfy those needs and add a touch of poetry too.
If only you better understood what you just missed. This season was phenomenal.
Cue twinkly-dinkly harpy music and wavy TV screen. Husky male voice: “Previously on The Premiership…”
In a land not very far away at all, the Very Ancient King from the Very Far North, victor of countless battles leading the United Clan of the Not Really North stood down from his throne. To replace him he called upon the blue-eyed Younger King of the Blue Not Really North But By The Sea Clan. Like the purple-nosed Very Ancient King, this young pretender was also from the Very Far North.
Unfortunately for the United Clan of the Not Really North, that was where the comparisons ended. A new time was born: a time for all who had suffered under the rule of the Very Ancient King to rise up, to fight back . . . to make amends . . .
Thrones were dangerous seats to sit upon this season. Only 11 of the 20 managers that started the Premiership survived in their jobs. Chelsea started this trend 10 years ago, when money arrived in the shape of oligarch owner Roman Abramovich, alongside power in the handsome charismatic style of Jose Mourinho.
The capricious entity that had previously been Chelsea FC, a vagabond collection of footballing artists and piss artists who played brilliantly one day and just couldn’t be bothered the next, turned into a corporate entity.
All that corporate entities require is results. Yes, it was great to win back to back League titles – brilliant! – but now I sit and cringe as a Chelsea fan.
Yet my love for football grows. Away from all the hyperbole of insane wages and grown men falling over far too easily, I cannot remember a season that I have enjoyed as much as this one. The fact that Chelsea won nothing at all doesn’t bother me in the least. That might sound strange. To be honest, I’m a bit confused myself.
See Charlie’s full column in this week’s Connacht Tribune and Galway City Tribune.
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
The crowds that flocked into the centre of Dublin last weekend provided the clearest indication yet that, thank God, a cure had been found for Covid.
The masses dancing and hugging on the streets was vindication that all of the self-isolation had been well worth it, when you could now congregate as close as you like to each other, to your little heart’s content.
Or so you’d think.
One weekend of slightly relaxed licencing laws was all it took, and in the blink of an eye thousands of revellers were up and at it like this was Paris in 1945 after it was freed from the Germans.
The newly-imposed regulations for relaxation would suggest that all of these bouncy people at least had the benefit of a nine-euro meal inside them – how else could they get served?
So, we’d better brace ourselves for when they go out on an empty stomach.
Much has already been made of the fact that pub life will never be the same again – and that might well be the case.
Social distancing is bad news for the publicans, limiting their ability to wedge the entire student population of NUIG and GMIT into the equivalent of a phone box.
But it’s great news for curmudgeons – particularly for those whose capacity for imbibing alcohol is shot.
Advancing middle age has seen the tolerance of the early twenties reduced from the equivalent of a sizeable plastic bucket to an amount that once wouldn’t have even pass the standard definition of being out.
Three pints? That’s what you’d order when they rang the bell at closing time.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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Double Vision with Charlie Adley
More than any other time of the year, when we sit around our dinner tables on Christmas Day, we are aware of who is there and who is not. At the age of 17, having performed impressive acrobatics with my Yamaha 250, a saloon car, a ditch and a barbed wire fence, I spent six weeks in hospital over Christmas and New Year.
My femur was snapped in two, which is no mean feat with thighs like mine, and my tibia had a crack or two as well.
Bed-bound, with my leg in traction, I developed a bronchial chest infection after an emergency operation.
Every two seconds for six weeks I coughed in hacking spasms, thus shaking my smashed leg, which was hung in a sling, supported by a metal pole they had driven through me, just below the knee.
Suffice to say I came to terms with pain.
In our part of the ward, there were four beds and three bikers with broken bones.
There was Kev, who had fallen off his sleek and mean Suzuki GT750 (a two stroke 3-into-1, since you ask), and opposite us two was brick shithouse Yorkshireman Gary, ex-SAS, and mighty embarrassed, having survived several covert tours of duty in Northern Ireland, to have to admit to falling off a Honda 125.
Compared to the other patients in the hospital the three of us were well off.
We were not sick. We’d had our operations, and apart from antibiotics for wounds, and pain killers for broken bones, we needed very little medical attention.
We were young, male, bored, and allowed to drink beer. Naturally, we tried to attract the attention of the student nurses as much as possible, and equally, they were happy to have a bit of a laugh with lads who were not ill, physically, at least!
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Double Vision with Charlie Adley
Saying “I love newspapers!” feels these days like buying a ticket for the next David Bowie gig, but I do: I love them. When I read a newspaper, I’m not a slave to the algorithm. Were I ten years younger, I’d read all my news online, on apps that I’ve set to my personal preferences.
Even when I visit media sites I’ve never been to before, there are cookies and bots and gordknowswot working away to offer me more of what the algorithms think I want.
Every link off each page is tailored to please me, but that’s no good.
I don’t want to be fed things that only fit into my areas of interest and opinion.
Sitting at my living room table, mug of tea and two slices of toast (peanut butter, since you ask), and a paper – any paper – open in front of me, I can see the full wonder and horror of the world, as interpreted by The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Irish Times or Daily Mirror.
As I browse into the heart of the paper, far from major news items, I let my eyesight fall all over the place, because each page is full of varied items, and, here on page 14, I’ll find the big story that’s being buried: the story they have to report, but are under instruction to dampen down.
Also here are stories that no algorithm-driven link would ever lead me to. Quirky little tales, able to dissolve an adult brain in seconds.
When driven sufficiently doolally by what I’m reading, I tear that particular piece of madness out of the newspaper, placing it on top of the wobbly towering stack of other torn madnesses by my desk.
There are dark torn madnesses and fearsome ones, but today I’m in the mood to prowl the ones that force me to furrow my brow, gasp for breath, pout my lips and grunt “What the -?” at the universe.
Notes are seeds, from which every writer will grow different fruit. When that writer is working for the Daily Mail, the fruit need bear only minuscule relation to the seed.
To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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