Tweeting a whole lot of twubble

HARDLY a day goes by now without a well-known sportsperson being caught tweeting in compromising circumstances. The latest casualty of the nimble fingers was young MJ Tierney of Laois who tweeted his disappointment at not only not starting against the Dubs but not even being sprung as a substitute.
Fair enough. Twitter is public space (and thank Christ I never registered is all I can say!) but there is something slightly malicious about it being used as a source of backstairs gossip by TV pundits, as The Sunday Game did with MJ’s understandable expression of chagrin.
MJ, while listening to Brahms’s Requiem on his iPod on the road back from Croker, tweeted that he was, quote, “disillusioned”. He followed this by telling his chum, Conor Mortimer (the Mayo player who wore a ‘Michael Jackson RIP’ T-shirt which he revealed after he had scored a goal in a match Mayo drew with the Holloway Road Junior Bs), that he was annoyed that he had not gotten a run out against the Dubs.
Current Laois manager is Justin McNulty, All-Ireland winner with Armagh in 2002. I doubt that them boys did much tweeting.
It will be interesting to see then whether and to what extent Tierney features in Laois’s sojourn through the qualifiers. He is a useful player and might well have been an addition to a pretty ineffective Laois forward line, so hopefully his indiscretions are not punished.
Tierney was perhaps a bit naïve in believing that his tweets were ‘private’ and he also posted his thoughts on Facebook, which again is public space, as several people have discovered to their embarrassment and indeed cost. As a fellow county man of his said to me when discussing this, you may as well hire a billboard as put anything sensitive into what is perhaps erroneously described as the ‘social media’.
Tierney was clearly annoyed that Des Cahill of The Sunday Game had gone to the trouble of “following” him on Twitter. And indeed it does have connotations of stalking and creepiness. Obviously a journalist who ‘follows’ a sportsperson or a politician or any other celebrity is not going to be interested in what they had for breakfast or looking at their holiday photographs. (Mark Joyce take note ).
The lesson then is — and one would imagine that the Sunday Game might have more insightful insights into what happens on the pitch than a pissed-off footballer’s tweets — that if you don’t want lots of people to know what you are thinking, avoid the social media.

OME sportspeople can’t seem to. Take Wayne Rooney, for example.
In the interests of research (an excuse I should have used that one when our Harcourt Street hide was uncovered!), I had a look at the Roon’s Twitter page.
Ludwig Wittgenstein he is not. Then again, he never claimed to be. There is not actually an awful lot about football and Manchester United there other than his celebrating their Premiership win last month and a few tweets about stuffing himself with pasta before a game and looking forward to the Champions League final against Barcelona.
But after all the build-up he becomes a bit like Stanley in Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party. No tweets for three days and then he’s back to talking about various acts on Britain’s Got Talent and drinking Blossom Hill rosé in his garden while listening to John Legend. Oh, and he’s gotten a hair transplant, as all you red-top tabloid readers will know by now.
Then he went on holidays but you could follow him in Barbados on the missus’s page.
All very strange and I have to admit I felt a small bit sad after my brief interstitial trekking. But clearly there are millions of people whose lives in small or in large revolve around the moons of their heroes and heroines. And it is a nice post-modern touch that Rooney himself seems to spend a lot of his own time watching other aspirant celebs. Oh, if only I was Jurgen Habermas I might make something of it all!
One slightly disturbing note was a response from Colleen Rooney to a tweet from tabloid photographer Terry Kane, whose most recent oeuvre includes a fascinating piece for the Sun about Louie. ‘Who the fuck is Louie?’ you might ask. Well Louie is “a small pig who thinks he’s a dog”. Right, so Robert Capa he is not.
Colleen Rooney’s response to Kane’s importuning was a telling: “Oh no, it’s the old man with the camera who follows women and children.” Enough said.
And when you bear in mind that some of Kane’s other recent ‘work’ has included a close-up shot of Colleen Rooney, amid a piece regurgitating Rooney’s ill-fated tryst with some ladies of the night, you might imagine that there is no fondness there.
And what in the name of Jaysus would he be asking her via Twitter? What colour underwear she had on, perhaps? So I’m on the Rooneys’ side on this one.
I am also inclined to be on MJ Tierney’s side. If Des Cahill wants to know what a player thinks about something he should have the balls to ask him to his face or call him on his phone rather than stalking him in cyberspace.
My thoughts on these and other pressing matters will shortly be available updated by the minute @grouch_angry