Latest news with #LiamSheedy
Irish Daily Mirror
26-05-2025
- Sport
- Irish Daily Mirror
Why Waterford's veterans chances of an All-Ireland title are disappearing
Tipp's former All-Ireland winning boss Liam Sheedy fears Waterford's ageing heroes have missed their chance of ever winning an All-Ireland. The Deise contested the 2017 and 2020 deciders but lost out to Galway and Limerick respectively. And since then they have flopped in Munster - finishing fourth in 2022, 2024 and 2025, fifth in 2023, losing a quarter final to Clare in 2021. Read more: WATCH: The Sunday Game's Joe Canning, Anthony Daly and Jackie Tyrrell highlight four possible red cards in Dublin, Galway game live on RTE Read more: Waterford boss Queally 'irritated' as Ryan demands better effort for Cork's Limerick return But that year there was a second chance offered via a structure that allowed them to navigate their way past Laois, Galway and Tipp to reach an All-Ireland semi-final. That backdoor route has disappeared and the intense nature of Munster means the teams finishing fourth and fifth in the province are ruthlessly dispatched from the Championship by the end of May. And Sheedy fears for the team now. He said: 'For any manager going into the Munster Championship, success is getting into the All-Ireland series. 'For the second year in a row, Waterford managed to win their first game which is a big thing in the round-robin and you thought that might have given them momentum. 'They had chances early on in today's game to push on a wee bit more but they needed to open up a much bigger gap. 'For Waterford and for Clare when you don't get out of Munster, it is not seen as a good year and for players like Stephen Bennett, Tadhg de Burca and Conor Prunty, you just wonder if the best chance of getting to the very top is passing them out.'
Irish Daily Mirror
26-05-2025
- Sport
- Irish Daily Mirror
'Not being applied' - hurling refs scared to use the black card
Liam Sheedy and Donal Og Cusack believe refs are abandoning the black card. The two Sunday Game pundits were reacting to a clear foul on Stephen Bennett yesterday which led to a free rather than a black card and a penalty. Waterford, at that early stage of the game, were in front before they ultimately were overhauled by Cork, prior to exiting the Championship following their defeat in the Pairc. Read more: Emotional Davy Fitzgerald slams hurling legend over 'lack of class' as he considers his future Read more:All-Ireland senior winner to line out in fifth tier hurling semi-final despite opponents rage at 'disgraceful GAA decision' But that Bennett decision was key and highlighted by former Tipp boss, Sheedy. He said: 'Stephen Bennett gets hauled down clearly. But there was no penalty, there was no black card and he didn't convert the free. 'That was a big moment that could have changed things. 'Waterford will feel aggrieved that they didn't get the extra man because the extra man does make a big difference. We have seen that over the course of the Championship 'It is not being applied.' Donal Og added: 'You have to ask, why was it (the black card) brought in first? It was brought in to stamp out cynical fouling whenever there were out and out goal chances. 'And it was a good rule. 'For some reason the referees do not seem to be applying it when it seems obvious that they should.'
RTÉ News
26-05-2025
- Sport
- RTÉ News
Referee standards 'one of hurling's biggest problems'
Dónal Óg Cusack has called on the GAA to show leadership on refereeing after a day of unenforced rules in the provincial hurling championships. "Hurling has never been better," said the former Cork goalkeeper on The Sunday Game. "The game is excellent but one of the biggest problems that we have in the game is the standard of refereeing. "We respect referees. Especially at club level, the games won't go ahead without referees. But it's just not good enough. "Has the day come to get some sort of technology introduced into the games to help them? "The GAA are going to have make big decisions as well. There are way bigger decisions in the game of hurling than trying to handpass the ball quickly. "The tackle is one of the biggest issues. A number of years ago when some of us were speaking about the spare hand [tackle] and all of the issues that that was going to bring, the GAA avoided trying to define it. "You would have to question them from a leadership point of view." "For some reason the referees don't seem to be applying it when it seems obvious that they should" Dónal Óg Cusack and Liam Sheedy react to the black card issue after a flashpoint in Cork v Waterford 📺 Watch #TheSundayGame live - — The Sunday Game (@TheSundayGame) May 25, 2025 Cusack and former Tipperary manager Liam Sheedy questioned referee Johnny Murphy deciding not to award a penalty against Cork's Mark Coleman for denying a goal-scoring opportunity to Waterford's Stephen Bennett. Coleman wasn't even shown yellow as Waterford had a to settle for a free. Though it could be argued that the restrictive and vague framing of hurling's 'black card' rule - it can only be for a 'pull down', trip or careless use of the hurley - has led to it being rarely enforced. "We had a similar scenario in the game last week [Limerick v Cork]," said Sheedy. "I think it has to be reviewed because right now it's not being applied. "You might see it in February or March but you certainly won't see it in May or going on in the championship." Time to fix hurling's broken and ignored black-card rule (From 2022) Cusack added: "Why was it brought in? It was brought in to stop, [for] out and out goal chances, cynical fouling and professional fouling. "It was a good rule and when it came in first we saw lots of situations where we would have seen defenders taking down players [previously]. "But for some reason, referees don't seem to be applying it when it seems obvious that they should." "It's something like you'd see in the French Revolution... I can't understand how the umpires didn't see that" Dónal Óg Cusack and Liam Sheedy look back on some of the challenges from Galway v Dublin 📺 Watch #TheSundayGame live - — The Sunday Game (@TheSundayGame) May 25, 2025 The panel also agreed that three red cards had been missed in Galway's win over Dublin. Óg Cusack questioned why the umpires had not alerted Colm Lyons to Galway keeper Darach Fahy swiping at AJ Murphy off the ball. "We've said it on numerous occasions. There is a duty on the umpires to be calling the referees. "There's a duty on the tackler [Daithi Burke on Conor Burke] in those situations to be careful. A shoulder to the chest could go seriously wrong for a player. "The last one [Conor Donohue's pull across the neck of John Fleming] is something that would have been happening in the Bastille [the guillotine]. I can't understand how the umpires didn't see that.
Irish Times
26-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
From Tipp to Salford via Wall Street: How businessman Declan Kelly joined the dream team
Six years ago, before Declan Kelly went into business with Tom Brady and Serena Williams and Ronan O'Gara and David Beckham and Gary Neville, before his takeover of Salford City, and before his soaring business career was temporarily derailed by scandal, he was part of Tipperary's secret sauce. After the final whistle in the 2019 All-Ireland hurling final Kelly materialised on the touchline in Croke Park, sporting an access-all-areas pink wristband, and a versatile sports coat and chinos, apt for a cocktail evening in the Hamptons or midtown Manhattan. Sponsors are not usually part of the post-match, on-field hootenanny, although JP McManus is another recent exception. In this case, Kelly and the Tipp manager Liam Sheedy were childhood friends. Growing up in Portroe in North Tipperary, Sheedy and Kelly were part of a thriving Scór scene, the GAA's cultural championships. Portroe had a tribal following on the village hall circuit and Sheedy and Kelly were a pair of fiery set dancers. READ MORE At the time of the 2019 All-Ireland Kelly was chairman and chief executive of Teneo, a global consultancy and communications firm he had founded at the beginning of the decade. He would have had the wherewithal to sponsor Tipperary long before then, but the timing of his intervention didn't need to be decoded: Sheedy had returned for a second spell as Tipp manager and Kelly swept in as his wing man. Between the sponsorship deal and ancillary fundraising, it was estimated that anything up to €350,000 had been generated for the team during the season, and once the All-Ireland was won the harvest continued. On a parallel track, Kelly was an active supporter of the Gaelic Players Association (GPA) from its inception and for many years played a pivotal role in their New York fundraising. Kelly's links to the GAA, though, are easily traced to his roots. How he came to build business connections with Brady, Williams, Beckham, Neville, O'Gara and others is a longer and more complex story. Teneo chief executive Declan Kelly at the homecoming for All-Ireland winners Tipperary at Semple Stadium in August 2019. Photograph: Laszlo Geczo/Inpho Until now, sport had not been his business, though he drifted in and out of that world. In his early life as a business reporter, Kelly moonlighted as a hurling columnist in the Cork Examiner, as it was called then. The column bristled with inflammatory opinions that, from time to time, landed the Examiner in bad odour with the Cork county board. One memorable column, calling for Canon Michael O'Brien to be removed as Cork hurling manager in the early 1990s, ran under the pithy headline Fire The Canon. In the offices of the county board no marks were awarded for cute wordplay. [ Serena Williams to be advised on business interests by Declan Kelly's Consello Group Opens in new window ] Kelly left journalism in the mid-1990s to make his fortune, and for the next 25 years, his success was extraordinary. He set up a public relations company with Jackie Gallagher, another former reporter, which they built up and sold for more than €8 million. He was later involved in a management buyout in which Kelly and his partners acquired the business for €40 million before later selling it on for about seven times that amount. By the early 2000s he was spending more and more time in New York and in 2007 he was introduced to Hillary Clinton at an event hosted by the journalist and publisher Niall O'Dowd. A year later, when she made her first run for the White House, Kelly was one of her most prolific fundraisers, generating up to $3 million for her campaign. It started a relationship with the Clintons that blossomed over the next three or four years. When Hillary Clinton was made secretary of state in the Barack Obama administration, she appointed Kelly as her economic envoy to Northern Ireland. Over time, though, tensions arose, and the relationship cooled. In March 2012 Bill Clinton resigned his seat on Teneo's advisory board. The company continued to grow, regardless. In June 2019, three months before Tipp won the All-Ireland with Teneo's name on their shirts, they sold a majority stake to a private equity group for more than $350 million, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, put the company's worth at about $725 million. Two years later, though, the sky fell in. In a report by the Financial Times Kelly was accused of 'inappropriate behaviour' while in a 'drunken' state at a charity event. After a few days of irresistible pressure, he resigned from Teneo. In a statement full of contrition Kelly acknowledged that he 'behaved inappropriately towards some men and women at the event,' and that he had apologised to those he had offended. The statement also said that Kelly 'was committed to sobriety' and was receiving treatment. Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs at Salford City's stadium in February 2021. Photograph:People wondered how Kelly could recover from such reputational damage. The people who knew him best didn't wonder so much. Within months he founded Consello, an advisory and investing platform and among his original partners were former executives of Uber and Qualcomm. Then, in April 2022, they were joined by Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback in the history of the NFL. It was yet another demonstration of Kelly's extraordinary talent for networking and renewal. Over the last three years, Consello has acquired the services of blue-chip names from the wide world of sport: Williams, O'Gara, Neville, the two-time NBA winner Pau Gasol, the former Ryder Cup captain Paul McGinley. The relationship with Neville catalysed Kelly's latest project. At the beginning of the month Kelly, Neville and David Beckham took ownership of Salford City, the League Two side that was famously owned by Manchester United's Class of '92. Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Philip Neville owned 60 per cent of the club, but they have been bought out. Kelly is now co-chair of the club along with leading UK financier Lord Mervyn Davies. [ Irish businessman Declan Kelly teams up with Beckham and Neville to buy Salford City Football Club Opens in new window ] Another Wrexham? Since the Welsh club's Hollywood takeover by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, Wrexham have secured three successive promotions and have landed in the Championship with their gaze fixed on the Premier League. On their return to the EFL, in League Two, they generated astonishing revenues of nearly €32 million. With Kelly, Salford are about to launch their own moon shot. This is not 'a vanity project', he said. Whatever people thought about him, he has always meant business. The next chapter will be fascinating.
Irish Times
28-04-2025
- Sport
- Irish Times
If hurling is so good, why is it so small?
This is the time of the year when hurling is placed on an altar for worship. Even the agnostic are curious. It is like when Wimbledon is on telly, or The Masters, or the Six Nations, or the World Cup – any World Cup. Everyone's eye is drawn to something shiny. So, the Munster championship was launched to a symphony, the Leinster championship was launched to the sound of brass, and for the next while people will pay attention. The Clare-Cork game on the opening weekend attracted a peak viewership of 388,000 on RTÉ, and a staggering audience share of 42 per cent. For a bank holiday weekend, those numbers were far beyond the norm. But it won't last long. In the Liam MacCarthy Cup 27 matches are stuffed into eight weeks, and then there will be just seven games for the rest of the season. Two of those will be mismatches in the preliminary quarter-finals, and five of them will be played on Saturdays. Ask the Leinster Council about the attractiveness of Saturday matches. And then what? If we have convinced ourselves that this is a Golden Age for the game, what good will come of it beyond a few blissful weeks of spectacular matches and feverish coverage? Does it make anybody want to play in places where nobody ever really wanted to play before? READ MORE 'Complacency is a disease which is more lethal in hurling than in any sport,' wrote Liam Sheedy as chairman of the Hurling 2020 committee, 10 years ago. Wrapped up in that complacency is a streak of self-regard. As a community, hurling people have always felt superior. They like and admire other games but can't see one that compares with hurling. They're right, of course. But sometimes that can be a blinding condition. If hurling is so good, why is it so small? When hurling was booming in the late 1990s what was the dividend for the game apart from the excitement that coursed through the championship? Did it break down any of the GAA's local discrimination? No? Offaly and Galway in action on Saturday. Photograph: Andrew Paton/Inpho People who are immersed in the game are fiercely protective of it. Paudie Butler was appointed national director of hurling 20 years ago and excelled in the role for five years. His engagement with hurlers, or aspiring hurlers, in every corner of the island had a pastoral quality. 'I want every child to have the chance to hurl because they're Irish,' he said to journalist Kieran Shannon in 2015. 'I have this belief our game is a treasure like the Ardagh Chalice or the language. It's ancient and something unique to ourselves.' Nobody ever disputes the claim that hurling is a national treasure, whether it has safe harbour in your club or not. It is an easy thing to believe. Hurling never wants for flattery or lip service. In 2018 Unesco accepted hurling on to its Representative List of The Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and there is a similar list curated by the State. In a long entry on the website, written for the uninitiated, one line has a particular resonance. 'As custodians of hurling, the GAA believes that the best way to preserve the viability of hurling is to ensure that it is played as extensively as possible.' This has been the circular, intractable problem. All gains in areas where the game had no traditional home have been small and against the tide of entrenched local preference. In those places the game has always depended on the energy and endurance of people who often feel isolated and under-resourced. The majesty of the game that half the country has just watched on television never seems to make a difference. While social media lights up with paeans to the spectacle, these people are deadlocked at the bottom of a hill. Martin Fogarty was the national hurling development manager from 2016 to 2021, at which time the position was discontinued. Like Butler, he pounded the roads, offering support and looking for solutions. When Jarlath Burns established a new Hurling Development Committee [HDC], Fogarty agreed to come on board. The GAA's hew head of hurling, Willie Maher. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho From years of hands-on engagement he had an unparalleled knowledge of the clubs in the northern half of the country, from Mayo to Louth, who were trying to nurture the game. When the HDC considered doing a roadshow Fogarty produced a list of 102 clubs, divided them into four regions, and picked a venue that was no more than an hour's drive for everybody invited to attend. He presented a draft itinerary for the meeting, which included 'a motivational speech' by Brian Cody, and an opportunity for every club to outline their challenges to a listening ear. That kind of outreach, though, has obvious limits, and Fogarty was conscious of that too. These clubs have been subject to scoping exercises many times before. During his time as the national hurling development manager, Fogarty was adamant about the need for greater funding. He was certain that the only route to progress was with targeted resourcing of clubs who had a sincere desire to grow the game. By the time he resigned from the HDC last December he saw no evidence of this. In his 1,600-word resignation letter, seen by the Irish News, he accused the HDC of 'going around in circles'. How long has the GAA being going around in circles on this issue? Decades. Willie Maher started as GAA's new head of hurling at the beginning of the month. Unlike Butler and Fogarty, his role will be less 'operational' he said in an interview with John Harrington on and more 'strategic'. 'It's been a listening exercise [so far] and will be for the foreseeable future as regards finding out what's going on and then drilling down into counties. So, what operational plan do you have? Where does hurling fit into that operational plan? How do we hold county boards and county games managers to account in terms of what we've agreed to do from a hurling development perspective? Is it being done or not?' Is it being done or not? The answer to that question has damned the GAA for generations. At least Maher is talking about accountability. That would be a good start.
