Breaking views: No more chancers

Iturbe’s case is different to Pennant in some ways, but their stories are fundamentally part of the same problem facing international football. Pennant aspired to play for England when his stock was high. Now, with his earning potential waning and his career entering its final phase, an appearance at a major championship with Ireland would help keep his value inflated a little longer.

To understand the strange set of values that resulted in Pennant issuing his plea to the FAI — and the poison at the heart of the whole idea — remember where he came from. When Pennant was 15, then Notts County manager Sam Allardyce bemoaned the terrible pressure already being imposed on him by a cabal of top Premier League clubs to move clubs. For all his moralising, Allardyce then handed handed Pennant a first-team debut before he even turned 16.

When Pennant did join Arsenal for €2.5m a few months later in 1999, Mark Curtis, an agent involved in the sale, was found guilty of making payments to Pennant and his father Gary, and acting for a player licensed to another agent. Gary Pennant reckoned it was a good move for his son, but not for financial reasons. Pennant had already started skipping training at Notts County, his father said. He needed a new challenge.

It was a spiral of behaviour Pennant never really turned around. His career stalled at Arsenal and fell into disrepute at Birmingham where he wore an ankle tag after a stint in jail on a drink-driving conviction.

Looking back now, Pennant was Arsenal’s Theo Walcott prototype. The lessons learned with Pennant helped make Walcott a star. Pennant made money, but never became the player he promised to be. Maybe that’s enough for him. England was his dream. Ireland is his reality.

Is that good enough for us? Ireland’s ridiculously flexible attitude to the granny rule over the years has desensitised everyone to the nuances that should dictate the selection of players under that rule. Many of the players granted caps under the granny rule displayed more pride in the jersey than some native Irish players, but Pennant recalls the need to protect that honour.

Imagining Pennant playing for Ireland in these circumstances recalled the horrifying sight of Vinnie Jones in Dublin with a camera crew tracing his family roots. Three days later he had a Welsh tattoo on his back. There was also the memory of Paul Butler. His parentage made him eligible for Wales, while his marriage into an Irish family qualified him for Ireland. Butler applied the same logic as Pennant. “No disrespect to Wales,” he said, “but Ireland have a better chance of the European championships.”

Mick McCarthy handed Butler a B cap in February 1998 and a full cap in 2000 against the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, a teenage Richard Dunne was compiling first-team appearances at Everton, stuck behind a journeyman whose presence in an Irish jersey devalued the principle of international football.

Quite apart from the moral issue, Pennant doesn’t provide the answer to any question currently posed for Ireland. His best role throughout his career has been confined to the right wing. Would he be worth a spot ahead of Aiden McGeady? Keith Fahey? Seamus Coleman? Pennant is a classic product of modern professional sport: a footballer on the make. No more. No less. Ireland shouldn’t be party to it.

Rich value found despite GAA losses

Maybe we’re all too poor, cynical and worn down by the real world to see the good in what little we have, but it’s hard not to be impressed by the GAA sometimes. Their annual report last week made grim reading in some parts, but hidden among those cold, unforgiving figures was enough to warm us.

As an amateur organisation, the GAA aren’t run to make a profit but their ability to endure punishment and still knock out a decent return has always been impressive. Their report this time had a set of accounts perched on a knife edge. Last year the departure of soccer and rugby from Croke Park caused a €10million drop in overall revenue, while the first increase in gate receipts since 2007 was described as ‘fortunate’ by GAA finance director Tom Ryan.

Only 39 inter-county games out of 370 last year actually turned a profit. Commercial revenue will drop further this year due to the reduction in televised matches, but the GAA’s beancounters live in a bizarre world where maximising revenue isn’t their main priority.

The money to fund 200 coaches has stayed steady. €11million was invested in development, roughly the same as the IRFU ploughed into community and domestic rugby in 2010. Player welfare costs increased. Another €11m went into helping clubs cover costs.

Two figures leapt out from the blur of numbers. The gross gate for the Lory Meagher Cup hurling competition was €1,128. The cost of staging those games amounted to €20,482. In any other environment, a competition that couldn’t even get near the water required to wash its own face would shut down. The GAA, though, supports different values.

Hurlers in the weaker counties need a ladder to climb. The Lory Meagher, Rackard and Ring Cups don’t draw the monied classes like the Broadway shows of the mainstream but they give oxygen to the game in places it would expire without assistance. The GAA’s losses are undoubtedly everyone else’s gain.

Stars to whisper tweet nothings

We can’t claim to be inveterate lovers of the tweet, or to hold any fascination around the practice of tweeting, or any great dreams to live in the land of Twitter, but sometimes it’s nice to visit.

Last week was fun, for example. Alongside the incessant ramblings of Charlie Sheen, the marvellous idea of David Norris’s presidential rally hosted at one of Peter Clohessy’s bars in Limerick, and Cesc Fabregas’s mea culpa following his errant backheel against Barcelona last Tuesday night, a strikeforce from the small platoon of tweeters in the Irish rugby team headed out to engage with their critics head-on. When one tweeter asked Brian O’Driscoll, inset, to retire gracefully, O’Driscoll didn’t lose the rag, but showed the same deft touch he still provides on the field by retweeting the message to his thousands of followers. The result was a week of atrocious abuse for the anonymous, befuddled pundit.

Eventually the team’s tweeting rights were revoked before yesterday’s match against Wales and for a 24-hour period after. Manager Paul McNaughton’s explanation struck at an interesting point. It was just as convenient to impose the ban now, he said, rather than wait for the World Cup, when more stringent restrictions would come into force, particularly “in terms of commercial arrangements”.

Having seen O’Driscoll use his Twitter account as a hoarding for a product he was hired to plug, the IRFU are presumably keen to limit him to jumping from lavatory cubicles with Jonny Wilkinson to sell razors or anything else on his own time. Whatever about the increasing contractual limits being placed on professional sportspeople to remain dull as dishwater until instructed otherwise by their employer, it should be interesting this summer to see if those familiar old phone calls received by various media people from tired, and frequently emotional, GAA players hurting from their team’s elimination from the championship might be replaced by the more instant satisfaction of a tweet.

Meanwhile, the tweeters among the Irish rugby team sit in their cages, waiting for tomorrow. If any little missives do chirp up, expect feathers to fly.