The All Ireland Football Championship reached the penultimate stage after the weekend’s quarter-finals and the draw that followed will see Dublin take on Monaghan on Saturday, July 15th (5.30, live on RTÉ and BBC) while defending champions Kerry face Ulster title holders Derry on Sunday, July 16th (4.0, live on RTÉ and BBC); both matches take place at Croke Park.
Kerry produced an imperious performance in hammering Tyrone, Monaghan squeezed past Armagh after a penalty shoot-out, Derry edged out Cork in a soporific encounter with Mary Hannigan beautifully capturing football’s version of the slow waltz in her television column where she wrote: “There were times in that first half that you’d be wondering if you’d sat on the remote and inadvertently hit pause, so little movement was there out on the pitch, and while it might have had some of our grannies and grandads spinning in their graves, some of us actually switched over to the cricket.”
Dublin answered a few of their detractors with an emphatic second half performance to see off Mayo. Denis Walsh wrote: “In a 24-minute spell, either side of half-time, Mayo went from two points up to eight points down, without registering a score. They lost control of their kick-outs, and when Dublin raised the volume of everything after half-time, it looked as if Mayo dropped their hands, dazed and defenceless.”
Ian O’Riordan in his fifth article in the series ‘Not A Sprint, Lessons in Marathon Running, crunches some numbers. “For the marathon it’s about consistency; if you want to run under 2:30, for example, this will mean running faster than six-minute miles, or an average of 5:42-per-mile; if you want to run under 3:00, the average would be about a minute slower per mile, 6:52. And so on up or down.
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“These marathon pace charts – in miles or kilometres – are the ally of every marathon runner and are best learned off by heart.”
Johnny Watterson is at Wimbledon for the next fortnight and when he is not consuming industrial quantities of Pimm’s and Strawberries, he will be on hand to see if defending champion Novak Djokovic can win a 24th Grand Slam title. The tournament begins today and Djokovic is in action, followed on court by the now 43-year-old five-time ladies single winner Venus Williams, her last success some 15-years ago.
Brian O’Connor was at the Curragh to watch the Aidan O’Brien trained Auguste Rodin become “the 19th horse to add the Dubai Duty Free Irish Derby to Epsom glory when eventually justifying shorts odds in an incident packed race at the Curragh yesterday.
“The 158th renewal of Ireland’s premier classic was marred by fatal injuries sustained by Auguste Rodin’s stable companion San Antonio, but even that grisly outcome couldn’t prevent a widespread impression of better to come from the winner.”
It’s 50 years ago today that a team composed of football players from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland came together in a Shamrock Rovers XI to take on the then world champions Brazil at Lansdowne Road. Cormac Moore has a look back at a game that thrilled a 34,000 crowd and ended with a 4-3 win for the Brazilians.
Team Ireland returned with 13 medals from the European Games with Aoife O’Rourke and Amy Wall winning gold medals over the weekend.
Mary Hannigan is away
ON TV
TENNIS: Coverage of Wimbledon starts at 10.30am on BBC 2, 1.45pm on BBC1 and 10.0am on Eurosport.
CYCLING: The Tour de France continues and you can track the action on Eurosport 1 from 11.30am-5.0pm, while on TG4 their coverage starts at 1.15pm.
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