Bring a Hard Hat

Yes! For only €175 you can watch Ireland play 'an outstanding match' against Bulgaria on March 28th. Screw Croke Park: 'For those seasoned football fans among us: the Landsdowne Road in Ireland is the perfect venue to see Ireland - Bulgaria!' I'm not sure which is more fanciful, the idea of it being an outstanding match or Lansdowne Road being the perfect venue.

I suppose there's an obvious joke about a building site suiting our style of play, but I am not going to make it. Lets just see how Worldticketshop.com survives the recession.

Holding out for a Hero

Alex Rodriguez's admission on Monday that he had used steroids has left baseball writers in something of a bind. Aside from all the moral outrage at what has come to be known as the 'steroid era' - encompassing the players, the owners, Major League Baseball, and the players union - it has led to a fundamental problem regarding the interpretation of the game's history.

Baseball is a sport which prides itself on history. More so than any other sport, it is a game of numbers. Numbers are hugely important even to those who are not statistically inclined. It's a game of twenty-seven outs organised into nine innings. Three strikes and you're out, four balls and you get a walk. It may be a cliché, but most Americans can tell you that Babe Ruth wore number 3, or that Hank Aaron hit 755 home runs, that Joe DiMaggio had a 56 game hitting streak, or that Ted Williams was the last player to have a batting average of .400. The great players have their uniform numbers retired. The truly great can hope to acquire a sufficient number of votes to gain entry to the Hall of Fame. It's a game of numbers, numbers, numbers.

The BALCO scandal began a process which is still playing out and may have a long distance left to run. Being integral to it, Barry Bonds' achievements (breaking both the single season and all time home run record) have been invalidated, even though the history books will show that he hit 73 home runs in 2001 and 762 for his career. He is due to stand trial for perjury on March 3rd for lying to a federal grand jury about intentional drug use.


Bonds was never very popular and although he trampled all over the history books, the proximity of a number of less bulky, and less obviously 'roided players to Bonds in the all time home run list meant that his record was not expected to endure. Alex Rodriguez, the prodigy who made the major leagues at the age of eighteen and who did not seem to physically change much throughout his career would break it. While A-Rod was never a popular figure - he was seen as vain and preening and a big-time choker - he was at least assumed to be clean. Hell, he didn't need steroids, or so they said (nevermind that this applied equally to Bonds. Also, lets ignore the fact that baseball's history is littered with cheats who bent the rules in a myriad of ways).

It turns out that Alex Rodriguez is another drug cheat.

People always gasped and gawked at the sudden emergence of Sammy Sosa to become a perennial 60 home run threat in the late nineties, or at the size of Mark McGwire's arms when he and Sosa went head to head for the single season home run record which had stood for 37 years in 1998. Bonds' late career power spike drew similar amazement. A-Rod never experienced this. He was a natural from the get-go, one who hit 36 home runs in his first full season in 1996 at the age of 20.

A-Rod was the saviour of baseball, the redeemer, who although lacking in charisma and public relations savvy, would at least wrench back one of the sports' most hallowed records for the good guys. That won't happen now.

A revisionist movement is suddenly under way. Nobody from the previous twenty years is above suspicion. Players who had been somewhat overlooked are now being rehabilitated on the fly.

Take Frank Thomas for example. Thomas was similar to Bonds in his career - surly, seen as a bad team-mate, and not particularly kind to the press. He won two MVPs in the early 1990s and topped 500 home runs for his career last year. He was always viewed as a borderline Hall of Fame candidate at best due to his 'character issues' and the fact that he didn't 'play' a position for large chunks of his career (being a designated hitter). Thomas was the only player who consistently spoke out against performance enhancing drugs, advocated the introduction of testing, and more importantly, was the only player in all of Major League Baseball who agreed to cooperate in full with Senator Mitchell's report into the issue. Could he be the hero?

People are looking once more to Ken Griffey Jr., the original 'natural', a lithe and athletic guy with a sweet swing who was sure to break both the single season and career home run records in the mid 90s without all that muscle. Injuries derailed his career somewhat in the late 90s and especially into the 2000s and he missed out on baseball's steroid fuelled home run binge. He has still topped 600 career home runs. Larry Stone of the Seattle Times wrote on Monday that 'Griffey will rightly emerge as the most celebrated player of his era.'

Some writers are advocating the abolition of all records set in the 'steroids era'. It is a measure of the distrust that has gripped baseball over the past five years. Nobody is above suspicion. Numbers have become meaningless. The players of the steroids era etched themselves into history and now the process of rewriting this history is beginning. The dust has yet to settle. Baseball needs to decide who its hero is going to be.

ClapTrap

The official FAI website recently ran a feature called 'Ask Trap'. This allowed readers to submit questions for the great Trapattoni with the promise that the six 'most popular' questions would be answered by the lovable but indecipherable Italian. One wonders why they would choose to run with the six 'most popular' when it's clear that, in my opinion at the very least, the six most popular questions amongst Irish fans would be the following:

1) Whither Andy Reid?

2) Whither Stephen Ireland?

3) Why are you so bloody conservative?

4) What do you make of the Robbie Keane drama?

5) What's Marco Tardelli's favourite nightspot?

6) Is 'mentality' the only English word you've learned since you've been in charge of Ireland?

Ok, so the last two aside, I think that the other four, perhaps in slightly different forms, would be the most popular questions. And although we have heard plenty in the press about both Stephen Ireland and Andy Reid, it doesn't make these any less pressing issues for Irish fans, especially given the former's scintillating club form.

The questions published on the FAI website were predictably censored. Most popular? Lets see...

Question 1: Do you think Robbie Keane going back to Spurs is a good move?

That's one of the six, fine.

Question 2: When we were 1-0 up on Cyprus we had them for the taking and if we had pushed on we would have easily scored and killed the game but instead we played out the 1-0 win but came very close to conceding at the end which would have been a very bad result, we were lucky I feel. Do you not think that when a team is there to be beaten more than one goal that we should be more attack minded?

That's also one of the six, but seriously, don't they have an editor at the FAI? Ultimately, I have no problem with this one as it elicited the wonderful response from Trap that 'If you give [Cyprus] space they will skewer you like a chicken.' I'm not sure if he means they will skewer you in the manner that a psycopathic chicken might skewer its quarry, or in the manner in which a kebab shop employee (lets say Fatih Terim) might prepare his produce. Either way, I'm with Trap on this one.

Question 3: How important do you feel it is having 'B' internationals and should we be putting more impetus on our u21 side?

This is a reasonably important issue but ultimately tangential, in my opinion. Bigger fish to be fried. Yes, the food analogies will continue.

Question 4: Who was the best player that ever played for you and how does Robbie compare?

This is clearly a joke entry that slipped through the net.

Question 5: Mr. Trapattoni. Your opinion about Georgia national team? About Héctor Cúper? What is your prognosis about the recent match between Ireland and Georgia?

Eh? Seriously? This was one of the top six most popular questions submitted? And this was the best phrased example? Just who are we trying to kid here? It's so badly phrased that you'd be forgiven for thinking that Giovanni had written the thing himself.

Question 6: Why not go with a 4-3-3- formation and go for it from here on out?

Yawn.

The media people at the FAI could have claimed that they would print the best six questions (a little more plausible, but still way off the mark) instead of the most popular ones. Are they trying to pretend that Irish fans simply do not care about the Ireland and Reid situations? They may be exasperated by the former's inexplicable moodswings, but he's still a huge source of comment, for better or worse, amongst Irish fans. Andy Reid too. Hell, he's even broached the subject a couple of months ago. While we never would expect that Trap would give away all the inside information in such a format, it is ridiculous of the FAI braintrust to claim that it's not an issue.

[Also: they never answered my question about Mick Wallace. Bastards].

Ireland's Midfield Dynamo

I'm not sure which is worse - a misleading headline/photo combination which insinuates that Keith Andrews is an exotic dancer, or one which insinuates that he's a racehorse. Neither will be of much use in the Irish XI against Georgia (we already have one Kevin Kilbane, thank you very much).

Bad Analogies

Lost in the hoopla over the Michael Phelps bongathon-extravaganza-scandal-shame story was one of the most ridiculous analogies in recent history, even by the standards of tabloid sports reporting.

The News of the World's source claimed that: 'He looked just as natural with a bong in his hands as he does swimming in the pool. He was the gold medal winner of bong hits.' Nice.

If there was like, a competition for bong smoking, and if, like, Michael Phelps was one of the competitors, y'know, like he is in swimming, and if there were gold medals awarded for the best smokers, he totally would've won like at least one gold medal.

Tortured.