‘Celebrity Bainisteoir’ scores over Wayne Rooney

I  OBVIOUSLY lead a very sheltered life as prior to watching Celebrity Bainisteoir I had never heard of Breffni Morgan or Gavin Duffy or Mairead Farrell or Derek Burke (although I do confess to having watched Crystal Swing on YouTube).
My ignorance is particularly inexcusable as from time to time Kaniah gets me to trawl through the tabloids for the Sinn Féin Press Office in the morning while she has a few quiet pints in the Windjammer.
The red-tops are a source of vast information on stuff you don’t really want to know about: from Wayne Rooney’s text messages to ladies of the night, through the mating habits of participants in X Factor, to semi-literate rants on why the profligate ways of the freeloading, overpaid lollipop lady outside Ciara’s school is responsible for the state of the economy.
But back to Celebrity Bainisteoir.
The first episode I saw this year was the one in which ‘Breff’ (to his chums) and Gavin respectively prepared Kilconly from Galway and Roche Emmet’s from Louth. Your boy Breffni hadn’t the first clue about football and put his team through some antiquated weight training that you might imagine John L Sullivan would have employed prior to fighting Jake Kilrain in the last bare-knuckle heavyweight championship decider in 1889.
Gavin, on the other hand, used his considerable motivational skills to put some pep into the Louth lads and apart from that actually seemed to know something about the game. Anyway, Kilconly won by 21 points, so much for all that.
Clearly then there is more to it all than inspirational speeches and psychology and one of the Kilconly players possibly hit the nail on the head when he said that it would be about football ability with the two celebs there as a “sideshow”.

TO digress slightly, the dressing room psyche-ups reminded me of a story about a Kildare team that were getting hammered by Dublin years ago. At half-time the manager, who had not abandoned all hope, demanded emotionally of the players: “Who’s going to win this fucking match?!!!” To which one of them responded: “Jaysus, you’d have to fancy the Dubs.”

THE most impressive of the bainisteoirí has been Derek, who is in charge of Castleisland Desmonds’ home club of the legendary Charlie Nelligan. Fair enough, we must qualify that by our earlier reference to football abilities but he is certainly enthusiastic. And he dances a mean Hucklebuck.
Desmonds have reached the final having dispatched Breffni’s team and by the time you read this you will know that it is going to be a Kerry/Dublin final after Ballymun Kickham’s beat Nobber from Meath.
My own club and Kickham’s once captured the front page of the Evening Herald and dominated the Joe Duffy Show for an afternoon following some differences of opinion during a football championship encounter a few years back. So the final will be worth seeing.
Anyone got a spare Desmonds jersey they would like to lend me?