The Importance of Team Cohesion

Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.”
Michael Jordan
Carron (1982) defines team cohesion as “a dynamic process which is reflected in the tendency for a group to stick together and remain united in the pursuit of its goals and objectives” in other words the ability of a team to come together and remain cohesive in achieving their common goal no matter what challenges they are faced with.

Groups and teams share similar charteristics. They are both a collection of people who share a common goal and have a shared interest. An example of this would be accountants, who work in an office; they have shared interest of doing the same type of job in an equal setting as their colleagues. The key difference and what separates the two is that a team must, if it wishes to be successful, interact with and depend on the other members of the team to achieve its goal of winning a championship.

This answer will look in detail at the characteristics of a team, the internal factors and external factors that affect a team’s ability to become cohesive or indeed stay cohesive, for example the size of the team, whether the sport is co-active or interactive, the effect of infighting or a bad result may have on the team and social loafing.

It will also examine the positives and negatives of Tuckmans (1965) Linear group team model that explains that a team comes together through a set of stages; forming, norming, storming and performing as well as Carron’s (1984) Pendulum Model for team cohesion, which explains cohesion as a dynamic process that swings back and forth..This answer will also assess whether team cohesion leads to greater performance and is an important factor in a team winning or losing.

Before we can look at if indeed Team Cohesion affects performance we must first look at what a team is. Kremer and Moran (2008) argues that a team is made up of five characteristics those being interaction, structure, cohesion, identity and the goals of the team.

They theorized that the cohesion aspect is multi dimensional between social (meaning how a team gets on off the pitch) and task (meaning how well a team plays together to achieve its goal of winning). A good example of a team who not only met all five of those characteristics but excelled in them would be the 2004 Boston Red Sox.

In Seth Mnookin’s (2006) book, Feeding the Monster about the 2004 Red Sox he points out that they were a very close knit unit that rallied around the mantra of Pitcher Curt Schilling “why not us” a simple question that asked his team mates why could they not become World Series champions. Schilling got every member of the Team a t-shirt with that slogan, a shirt all the team wore through the playoffs. Mnookin also noted that at times during the season it looked like the Red Sox were “communicating in some sort of goofy sign language that involved lots of fist thumping and pointing at the sky” and only really started to take off later in the season when they embraced their identity as self professed idiots.

The turning Point Came on July 31st of that year when the team traded star shortstop, Nomar Garciaparra from the team. Mnookin notes that Nomar was unhappy with the team and threatened to sit out the last two months of the season, causing distraction in the locker room. After a clear-the-air meeting failed between both sides Mnookin quotes team President Larry Luccino as saying “by that point there was a high degree of alienation on Nomar’s part from the team”.
In exchange for Garciaparra the Red Sox got Orlando Cabrera, a player of lesser skill then Graciappara. According to the Baseball Reference website, Garciaparra is a career .313 hitter while Cabrera is a career .274 hitter. But Cabrera fitted in seamlessly with the club. The book shows that Cabrera created indivdual handshakes for every member of the team that he would use whenever a particular player made a good fielding play or got a hit.

Statistics (Baseball Reference) show that with Garciaparra the Red Sox had 56 victories to 46 losses and would not have qualified for the playoffs. After Garciappara they went 46-18, qualified for the playoffs and ultimately became Champions.

Kremer and Moran(2008) argue that sports that are interactive i.e., sports that require co-ordination between team members like football to advance up the pitch (you must pass the ball to a teammate to break down the defensive wall) need a higher level of team cohesion than a sport that is co – active. In a sport like golf, for example in the Ryder cup ,the golfers while in a team setting play their own shot and they do not need a teammate to aid them.
But it can be said that the above example dispels this notion and that team cohesion is important in all sports. Baseball is a unique mixture of the co-active and interactive but it is a primarily a co-active sport. Batting is co-active and while some elements of fielding are interactive. As seen above the Red Sox did not realize their true potential until they became a more cohesive unit when they got rid of star player Garciapparra for another player of lesser talent that fitted in better in terms of getting on with team mates.

Others who disagree with the idea of cohesion being essential to performance may use another Baseball example of the 1977-78 New York Yankees, a team famously dubbed the Bronx Zoo according to Jonathan Mahler (2005) in his book the Bronx is burning. A team that despite a volatile manager in Billy Martin and a bullying owner, George Steinbrenner, won back to back World Series led by star player, Reggie Jackson, who famously got into a fist fight with Martin on June 28th 1977 in a game against the Red Sox.

Ron Guidry, a pitcher on the team, notes in the same book however that that time period was the best time of his career. Which suggest that despite the infighting and volatile nature of the clubhouse it was a bond not unlike one shared by survivors of accidents, that while not cohesive in a stereotypical way the team still was cohesive after going through such a unique experience as a team. While their social cohesion was weak their task cohesion was very strong.
Moran and Kremer (2008) suggest in their book that in extreme circumstances chaos in a team is not always a bad thing and that sometimes it can even spur on players in the team.

Another anecdotal example of this would be in the TV show Hard Knocks, (2010) New York Jets head coach, Rex Ryan, wanted to spur on one of his players, Vernon Goldstein, so he arranged for this player to get into a fight with a bigger player on the team to drive him on.
Moran and Kremer (2008) also points out that by allowing conflict in a team encourages the team to express ideas and opinions. They argue that a team that is fully supportive of each other will fall into what they call group thinking.
Teams that suffer from group thinking and that are too afraid to disagree suffer as they underperform and it can have a negative effect on individual talent as no one player wants to stand out and disagree for fear of a backlash from the team.
This idea is similar to the idea of social loafing. The concept as Moran and Kremer (2008) explain is when a team, bonded by a common goal, does not perform as well collectively as it would as individuals given the same task. Sometimes members of a team will not try as hard in a team setting as opposed to an individual setting. Players won’t try as hard if they know they won’t get the recognition.

A study in America done by Rune Høigaard and Rolf P. Ingvaldsen (2006) on the sport of floor ball found that the players reported greater effort and a reduction in their social loafing when they were recognised for their efforts. The study even finds that athletes who are highly skilled and highly motivated suffer from social loafing also only to be re-motivated by their individual performance being identified.

It can then be theorized that a current example of social loafing is the Miami Heat. This Basketball club in the offseason signed Lebron James and Chris Bosh to go along with star player, Dwayne Wade.
Wade, Lebron and Bosh are considered by basketball experts as three of the top twenty players in the game and in the case of Wade and Lebrons two of the top five.
Yet they got off to a sluggish start and won 9 games and lost eight although have rebouned lately. It can be said that because they are the three main players on the Heat and were the stars on their previous teams that they are suffering from social loafing as they were no longer individuals heaped with praise for a team win as the outstanding player. Instead they are now just another guy on a superstar team. And thus may not be trying as hard.

Research on the subject of team cohesion is usually done through individual questionnaires. The most popular model of these measures has become the Group Environment Questionnaire .This is based on the concept of Caron, Widemeyer and Brawley (1985) which broke cohesion down into four different sections;
Group integration, task, social and an individual’s attraction to group. Group integration means how a team member views the closeness of the team overall, While individual attraction measures what makes them participate and want to stay a member of the team. The questionnaire asks the participations eighteen different questions broken into the above sections and asking members to rank on a scale of one to nine whether they agree or disagree with statements.

Carron, Colman, Wheeler and Stevens (2002) carried out a study which shows that cohesion has a large effect on performance, that how cohesive a team was had a direct link with how a team performed. They also found that both task and social cohesion affected performance. This is in contrast to Mullen and Cooper (1994) that summarised that task cohesion was more important and that in essence it was a waste of time for team to do team building exercises.
However, researchers point out that there is no one way to truly measure the effect cohesion has on a team’s performance for empirical evidence. Widemeyer, Carron and Brawley (2002) say that there is no theoretical or conceptual model that can be used to measure cohesiveness.

Murdak (1989) argues that while cohesion measures groups it is hard to measure as a whole. While the GEQ is the most reliable test Dion (2002) argues it does not measure the group as a whole. How an individual may feel personally towards his playing time may not affect how he interacts with the group. He may be personally unhappy but it does not affect the group as they may not express their unhappiness outwardly and thus have no effect on team chemistry at all.
It can be argued that another flaw in the way cohesion in a team is measured is that while all the researchers on this topic agree that team cohesion is a dynamic process meaning it is ever changing, for example a team could have good cohesion after a comprehensive victory or an important win whereas their cohesion may be low after a loss. Only one study has been done on a team through a season and that was by Holt and Sparkes (2001) who documented a university football team in the United States and how it changed over the year.

In that study Holt and Sparkes found that when the team was eliminated from a tournament they as a collective revised their goals to focus on winning other tournaments
External factors can have a huge effect on a team’s cohesion both positive and negative. As mentioned above it is a commonly held belief that while a loss is detrimental to a team’s cohesion a win can also be equally detrimental.

Basketball coach, Pat Reilly, believes that winning for teams that experience sudden success could cause members of the team to become more focused on themselves. Despite a team win some members will be unhappy unless they get all the credit. Riley relays his own personal experience when he was coach of the LA Lakers in the 1980’s in his book, winning from within; players became more invested in trying to take credit for winning the championship and establishing themselves as the alpha dog of the team. Riley says that star player, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, worked harder then ever in the offseason and came back in the best shape of his life. His main goal was to establish himself as the best player on the team and not the winning of the championship. His wish to get all the credit for the team’s success caused the locker room to divide into cliques and ultimately led to the departure of Jabbar from the team. Riley calls this theory “the disease of me” when the team gets more focused on the me instead of the we.

However cliques can be considered either a good or a bad thing. Weinberg and Gould view cliques as bad, noting that it only benefits the few who are in the clique while alienating the rest of the team.

Dr Katie Gentile, a psychologist, in a videotaped interview for American radio station PBS, suggested that cliques can also be
She found that a clique like a family .It lets members experiment with different identties and find who you they are and what theyare good at. It can be argued then that cliques can also cause teammates to become close to one another in the face of adversity.

The structure of the team may also affect how together a team is. For instance, the number of players in the group may affect the cohesion. A smaller group of players like a basketball squad for instance which has a 15 man roster is easier to control then a rugby squad which has 25 players who are further fragmented into forwards and backs.

New England Patriots head coach, Bill Belichik, in a recent interview detailed how he dealt with a larger group. In American football the roster of the team is 53 players. To makes sure his message is getting through and that all the players and staff are on the same page Belichick uses techniques such as regular meetings with the captain of each unit to get them to help relay his message and goals for the team back to the other players. He also likes to have a smaller coaching staff because “it's easier for me to communicate with a smaller group of coaches and get us all on the same page, rather than have 25 assistants and for us to all get on the same page, then get all the players on that same page”
All the above agreements would support the Carron model of team cohesion which is more of a dynamic model of cohesion rather than the Tuckman model which is more rigid.
Tuckman (1965) believes that every team goes through the following stages as follows;
Forming, when a team gets together for the first time,
Storming, the process in which the team comes together exchanges ideas on how to tackle the challenges that faces them;

Norming when team members start to fall into roles in the team both informal and formal and have their own code of rules and ethics. An example of a team’s rules is when Dallas Cowboys rookie wide receiver, Dez Bryant, refused to take part in the traditional rookie hazing from veteran players on the team. As a punishment Bryant had to take all the players out for dinner. The players ordered everything on the menu and left Bryant with a bill for 55,000 dollars.
Performing, where the team is now in theory a cohesive unit and is able to bring everything together and win.

Tuckman believes that whenever a new player comes aboard that the team must start a new and begin the process from the first stage again.
Moran and Kremer disagree with this model. They argue that this model fails to consider what happens after the stages of development. Moran and Kremer propose the introduction of a new stage called Waving, a more dynamic stage that would allow a team to deal with conflict, infighting, and poor team morale after a bad result within the set structure of the team i.e. those rules drawn up in the norming stage.
Carron’s theory therefore lends itself more to the idea of team dynamics. In his model, Carron believes that team cohesion is like a pendulum that swings back and forth and is always dynamic depending on what a team is facing.

Conclusion
While there is no one generally accepted method for calculating the true value of cohesion on a team’s performance it can be said that the above evidence supports the idea that cohesion lends itself to greater team performance. A team that is together will be willing to try harder and perform better if they are having fun and like their teammates as opposed to a team that is in an unhappy environment. While there are exceptions to the rule in most instances successful teams must have either a strong sense of task or social cohesion if it wants to reach its fullest potential.

Nothing is quite like it Sheens

I admit it I was just as bad as everyone else. I just could not get enough of the wildly amusing ramblings of a mad man. I tried to fit the words WINNING and TIGERBLOOD into every situation be it paying for something in the shop or in conversations with family and friends. If Charlie Sheen was addicted to winning then I was addicted to his tales of Tiger blood and Warlocks. But somewhere between the talk of fighting his boss and losing custody of his two kids the ramblings became as funny as a Brendan O’Carroll routine. The laughs stopped when it became apparent that the only thing Sheen was winning at was self destruction.

After “careful consideration” the head honchos at CBS have decided that Sheen is no longer fit for work and have fired him as the star of Two and a Half men. What they had to consider is beyond me even Stephen Ireland looks at Charlie Sheen and thinks wow that guy is nuts. You know things are bad for Sheen considering CBS did not fire him when he allegedly beat up his ex wife and thrashed a hotel room on a drugs binge. They stood by him as Two and a Half men raked in an estimated 155 million dollars in profits to CBS a year. However his latest behaviour has made him a 155 million dollar headache not worth dealing with.

Let’s thinking about that for a second how destructive does your behaviour have to become that a company walks away from 155 million a year just because of the actions of one man? Most times with diva actors studios and executives just suck it up and take the outlandish behaviour and soothe themselves with their riches. 155 million dollars can buy a lot of relaxing holidays to the Caribbean. But not in the case of Sheen once the golden boy of network sitcoms he has turned himself into been as un hireable as Mel Gibson.

Sheen transformation and indeed downward spiral has been unprecedented. Sure we have all seen crazy celebrity antics before be it Britney, shaving her head, Winona Ryder, shop lifting or anything Lindsay Lohan does but what makes this sad tale different is that through social media we all have a front row seat to the madness.
When the self professed rockstar from Mars joined Twitter he amassed over two million followers in the space of two days all eager to feast upon the morsels of WINNING insight he fed us. Now as I said above I was one of those people, but when Sheen started to go off on increasingly bizarre tangents about torpedoes of truth and promoted his radio show and webcam broadcasts where haggard and sickly looking Sheen spewed out his inner drug fuelled thoughts something dawned on me. In America you or I if we were so inclined could pop along to our local Prison take a seat and watch a man be executed in front of our very eyes and that’s is how this whole Charlie Sheen Twitter thing feels to me. We are all witness to the last words and testament of a man who is seriously ill, whose addiction has taken over him and who and to put it frankly seems like he is dying in the glare of the media spotlight.

What is lost in this entire mess are his kids. Not to sound like the Reverend’s wife in the Simpsons but won’t someone think of the children. He has five young children he has lost custody to those children and there is a real chance unless he gets some help that he will not see them again. This is a man behind all the bravado and bullshit sayings who is in serious need of help but currently he is surrounded by enablers be it his two goddess the Nanny and porn star he lives with clinging on to him for fifteen minutes of fame or his friends egging him on so they can profit through t-shirts with his slogans or the attention it brings. If they really truly cared about Sheen they would get him the help he clearly needs but I fear they are not like CBS and are unwilling to walk away from the money Sheen is bringing in. For that reason I fear that the madness will continue until its natural untimely deathly conclusion.

Super Bowl Preview

They say everything is bigger in Texas and this Sunday’s Super Bowl clash between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers in Cowboy Stadium, Arlington, Texas could be the biggest of them all.

The matchup between two of the NFL’s traditional powerhouses, both of whom enjoy fanatical fan bases in Pittsburgh’s “Steelers Nation” and Green Bay’s “Cheese Heads”, is expected to attract over one hundred thousand people to the game more than the entire population of the city of Green Bay and become the highest rated show in American television history.

The Super Bowl is a sporting event unlike any other, a spectacle in which the commercials and halftime show are as much as part of the viewing experience as the game itself. How much will said commercial cost those companies who wish to peddle their latest products? $5 million per minute or because we are in the midst of a global recession they may prefer the cheaper option of $.2.5-3 million for thirty seconds. Super Bowl Sunday sees an estimated fifty million dollars spent on food and 325 million gallons of beer to wash it all down. It is no surprise then that after all that gluten and excess that 6% of Americans will call in sick the next day and with the growing popularity of the sport here in Ireland I am sure there is a few people reading this are planning on doing the same thing.

The Steelers and Packers are both steeped in a rich history of success. Since the introduction of the playoff system the Packers and Steelers rank number one and two respectively in terms of best winning percentage in the playoffs.
Pittsburgh, owned by American ambassador to Ireland, Dan Rooney, comes into the contest as the most succesful team in Super Bowl history with a record six titles. The Steelers rose to prominence n the seventies lead by head coach, Chuck Noll, flamboyant Quarterback, Terry Bradshaw and one of the most dominant defences in NFL history. Dubbed the steel curtain the unit was fronted by the legendary quartet of Mean Joe Greene, L.C Greenwood, Ernie Holmes and Dwight White. They won four Super Bowls in six years during that time period and remain the only team to have achieved such a feat, their last title coming in 1979.The Steelers would have to wait a further twenty seven years to lift the trophy again when they bested the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl Forty in 2005 They captured title number six under the tutelage of current Head Coach, Mike Tomlin, who became the youngest head coach to win a Super Bowl in 2007.

The Green Bay Packers themselves are three time Super Bowl winners. Although they may be based in a small city, when it comes to winning the Packers are anything but small time. Before the Super Bowl was invented they had twelve NFL championships on their resume. The team won their first two Super Bowls with back to back wins in Super Bowls One and Two in 1966 and 1967.It was a team filled with NFL icons such as Quarterback Bart Starr, Halfback Paul Hornung and ferocious linebacker Ray Nitschke with charismatic Head Coach, Vince Lombardi, at the helm. Lombardi had led the Packers to five championships in his seven seasons as head coach and was just as adept at conjuring up a inspirational quote as a winning game plan. When Coach Lombardi passed away at the age of fifty seven due to cancer the NFL decided to honour his immense contribution to the game by renaming the Super Bowl trophy after him. The Packers faded in to mediocrity after Lombardi departed following their second Super Bowl win. It would not be until 1992 when the Packers hired Coach Mike Holmgren, and traded for Quarterback, Brett Favre that they would start to become relevant again. Favre was like an old- fashioned wild west gun slinger, a brilliant yet flawed player who zipped the ball up and down the field with sometimes reckless abandon. Indeed Favre holds the NFL record for most touchdown passes thrown and interceptions thrown. With the addition in 1993 of Defensive Lineman, Reggie White, nicknamed the Minister for Defence as he was an Evangelical minister, the Packers became a more complete team and in 1996 captured their third super bowl with a 35-21 victory over the New England Patriots.

While the championship pedigree of the two clubs may favour the Steelers the momentum going into the game is most definitely with the Packers. They come into the game as the slight favourites with bookmakers. Green Bay, plagued by injury in the early part of their campaign, saw some of their key players lost for the season. The Packers scraped into the Playoffs as the sixth and last seed in the NFC with a record of 10-6. They were aided by a stingy defence that has allowed an average of just twelve points against in its last twelve games headed by dynamic Linebacker, Clay Matthews, who leads the NFL in sacks and with Quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, whose outstanding play both with his arm and legs has led his team to the big dance, pulling the strings for an explosive offense. Green Bay looked like it had put all the pieces together just in time for a run at the Super Bowl as they saw off the Philadelphia Eagles, Atlanta Falcons and Chicago Bears to reach the final.

The Steelers faced some adversity of their own at the start of the season when Quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in the bathroom of a nightclub during the offseason. He was not charged but the NFL suspended him for the first four games of the season as this was the second time in his career that he was accused of such behaviour. Despite that the emergence of wide receivers, Mike Wallace and Emmanuel Sanders, complimented by a mean defence headlined by defensive player of the year, Troy Polamalu and hard hitting Linebacker, James Harrison, whose aggressive style has earned him 100,000 dollars in fines during the season, helped the Steelers finish the season with a 12-4 record. This was good enough for second seed in the AFC and overcame bitter rivals, the Baltimore Ravens and New York Jets, to reach this Sunday’s championship showdown.

Pittsburgh go into the game with centre Maurkice Pouncey a doubt. Pouncey broke a bone in his ankle against the Jets but lists himself as having a 75% chance of playing. If Pouncey is unable to play that would leave the Steelers with a make- shift offensive line charged with protecting their Quarterback from the oncoming rush of a very dangerous Packers defence. .This could see Rotheilsberger getting acquainted with the cowboy stadium turf for most of the game. The mobility of Ben Roethlisberger and his almost Houdini- like ability to escape the grasp of oncoming defenders and make plays when it looks like all hope is gone could well be vital to the Steelers’ chances of success.

The fact that the game will be played indoors plays well to the strength of the Packers team speed. The Packers’ offense averages 31 points in games played indoors. The Steelers this season have struggled against offenses like the Packers who can spread the field and open up the big play opportunity and Green Bay will be hoping to turn the game into a track meet with their Wide Receivers running down the field at will . However despite all their offensive weapons the Packers inability to knock opponents out when they are on the ropes could hurt them. Pittsburgh are a tough team and come into the game with recent championship experience. For the Steelers to be successful on Sunday night they must hope running back, Rashard Mendenhall, is successful running the ball. They must dominate time of possession and do everything they can to keep the ball away from Rodgers and Co. If they fail to achieve any of those things then the Lombardi Trophy will be making its way home to Green Bay for a fourth time.

Tears of a Clowen

In the book The Late Shift writer Bill Carter chronicles the battle to replace legendary American performer Johnny Carson as host of the Tonight Show.TV executives were faced with the choice of either safe, inoffensive, yet dull Jay Leno, or vibrant, edgy, but troublesome, David Letterman. Initially the network picked Leno but when his show began to flounder serious discussion were held to replace him with Letterman.

The key scene of the book sees a meeting of the head honchos of the network discussing whether to ditch Jay for Dave. Unbeknownst to those at the meeting was the fact that Leno had snuck into a closet in the room and was listening intently as the pro and cons of each man were batted around. Armed with this vital information Leno plotted and schemed to keep his show.
It is by no means a stretch of the imagination to image Brian Cowen hiding away in some closet puffing nervously on a cigarette with a Guinness in hand as he tried desperately to persuade the Fianna Fail delegates to pick him for the coveted role of party leader on Tuesday night.

Fianna Fail were faced with a similar decision to those network executives back in 1993 stay with the steady pair of hands or chose the younger more dynamic yet unproven model to try and save a party that was suffering from low ratings. Cowen survived but it was the equivalent of winning a stupidest person in the world contest. Yes you’re the best at what you do but what you excel at is been stupid.
On the other hand it can be said that there is something noble about Cowen wanting to fight on and stay as party leader. While the other rats have already decided to abandon ship he will play the role of captain ready to go down with the ship he has steered to ruin. Then again it might just be a simple case that Cowen is still hungover from that infamous Galway hotel session and thinks that he can win the next general election.

Most political pundits are predicting political Armageddon for Fianna Fail on March 11th. However what a person does in the privacy of the voting booth is very different to how a person may answer a poll questions, the fear of going against popular public opinion may change their answer. In essence Fianna Fail are like the bad guy in a horror movie you do not believe they are dead until you see their head cut off and despite numerous scandals in the past they have survived. During a interview I did with retiring Labour TD, Liz McManus, just after the last general election which was at the height of Bertiegate Mrs. McManus remarked how the polls leading up to the vote favoured a change in government but when judgement day happened the old guard of Fianna Fail survived.While maybe this recession and IMF invasion on our finances may be one hurdle to many for Fianna Fail, the notion they will be wiped out is fool hardy and short sided.

It is not like Cowen is going against people who the public are madly in love with. Eamon Gilmore is all sizzle and no steak and Enda Kenny reminds me of the priest from Father Ted with the boring voice that helped Ted and Co escape from the largest Lingerie section in Ireland. A result better than expected would look favourably for Cowen, that despite unprecedented outrage at his party they had avoided a total wipe-out.

In the end all Brian Cowen won himself was a seven week stay of execution on Tuesday night and proved to himself that there was some political game left in the old dog .It will most likely be his last political victory of his career, come March 11th he and his colleagues who have overseen Ireland go from a position of great wealth and stature to poor and a laughing stock put their futures in the hands of country fed up, disenchanted and eager to wield the axe. Sure isn’t that a thought scary enough to drive anyone to drink?

Gilroy's Army a fan's perspective

There are three things that are a certainty in life - death, taxes and Dublin losing in September. While the rest of the nation rejoices at the Dub’s inability to break the pattern for Dublin fans it’s a sad case of déjà vu all over again.

For the many of you who are not fans of Gilroy’s men being a Dublin fans feels a lot like being Cinderella but without the fairytale wedding. You get very excited about going to the ball, have a great time, totally forget about your wretched life or in Dublin’s case awful recent history of big game failure, think finally this is your time and when you think you’re going to seal the deal, boom!, the clock turns to midnight, or September, and everything turns into a pumpkin.

It’s too early to tell if Pat Gilroy is Dublin’s Prince Charming but there are signs he could be the one. He has crafted a hard working team with a great game plan based on the highly successful Tyrone model of suffocating attackers and swarming around opponents to afford them as little time as possible and force them to make quick ill advised decisions. He has turned a bunch of mouthy, arrogant, show off footballers with a me first philosophy into a hard working team unit, gone are the days of playing up to the hill like an untrained, dramatic actor on the stage would to the gallery. Instead, yob like behaviour has been replaced by a team effort and dare I say it maybe the most likable Dublin team, if there is such a term, in a while and perhaps his greatest miracle of all he has thought Alan Brogan to pass the ball, a feat that even Jesus himself would be in awe of.

But alas, there is to be no open bus parade down O’Connell Street, as the team Parades Sam in front of Anto, Deco, Steo and Zumo. There is enough hope to suggest that the 16 year and counting journey maybe be coming to an end soon, that a summer that started with calls for the head of Gilroy after they stumbled out of the gate against Wexford and got humbled old country way by Meath, ends with a sense of hope and the knowledge that if they can curb there indiscipline and poor decision-making something only big game experience can solve then maybe just maybe Gilroy’s army will march in to Croker one sunny September afternoon and claim the prize that has eluded them for so long.

And yet the pessimistic in me also knows that the two monsters of football, for the last decade, still cast a shadow over every team in the country for next year. There is no way Kerry and Tyrone will play like they did this year, next year, no way. Instead they will shuffle off into the winter wilderness and evolve and grow stronger and even though the media will write them off and call them ageing or too old, class is permanent and it would not surprise me to see those two lock horns again for Sam next summer.

And so we are here yet again in September left with an all too familiar empty feeling in our stomachs...roll on next year!

Hurt

To those of you who may stumble across this blog and expect a rational well thought out piece on Irelands crushing exit from the world cup I warn you that’s not what this is going to be, instead this will be the ramblings of a fan still to bitter and angry about last night to use journalistic perspective on what occured.

Last night hurts it hurts that after a two year campaign that that’s how it ended, it hurts that Ireland played their absolute best and still are not going to be on a plane to South Africa, while a French team that showed no sprit and played at 70% will be. It hurts that pundits and analysts and even some Irish players blame the referee last night more than Thierry Henry saying the French thief was doing what anyone would have done ,it hurts that somehow his cheating is accepted part of the game and will be viewed by some as quote a brilliant piece of professionalism which in truth is just code for cheating and that’s what it was blatant cheating he handled the ball twice and still got away with it,he basically hand passed the ball maybe inspired by his trip to Croke Park last week to William Gallas who scored the goal, it hurts that when ever I watch the world cup and watch the French or see Thierry Henry play for Barcelona that all I will be able to think of is that handball, is the reaction on my dads face as the goal scored and the realisation set in that no we where not going to the world cup. It hurts that I force myself to watch myself to watch the replays in some sort of combination between masochism and blind hope that somehow the ref will blow his whistle and the goal wont stand but he never does.

For a small country like this the world cup even just getting to the world cup means everything we are realistic Ireland will never win a major trophy but we just want to get to the party and have a good time and see where we end up, we may never get laid by the really hot chick at the party but we will have a fun time trying.Yeah I know I am rambling now and yeah I know this probably sucks to read but fuck it my country was robbed of a world cup spot and its one if not the worst losses of my sports watching life I think I better stop writing now and go watch the replays some more to help the grieving.

Money can't buy me love, but it can buy a world series!!

Not only did the New York Yankees win their 27th world series but by winningsaid championship world peace broke, the global econmic downturn ended not that it seemed to affect the yankees in the firstplace and disease such as cancer,aids and the swine flu have beng eradicated in the afterglow of yankee victoryIf it was sunny in your part of the world you probably have the yankees to thank for that also.If winning the world series was not enough it is believed during the celebration parade that Yankee Cptain Derek Jeter will walk on the hudson river of course what i have said is less hyperbolic than what the new york media has suggested after the yankees won.the pharse everything is right with the universe now that order has being restored in the baseball world is another reason like we needed any to loathe the yankees.The truth of the matter is all the yankees win proves is that those who spend the most in mlb will be victorious and in the end is that really such a good thing for the baseball universe?