League Preview: Cork V Londonderry

1st Apr 2015

Brian Cuthbert and his footballing troops will journey the length of the island this weekend to play the last of their Allianz National Football League qualifiers. Still pinned to the top of Division 1 having put Mayo to the sword in Páirc Úi Rinn last weekend the Rebels make the trip north having already qualified for the knock-out stages.

This weekend they take on the worst team in the league who have been welded to the foot of the table and been facing certain relegation for weeks.

If you’re thinking of heading north this weekend check out our guide to the city on the Foyle….
 

Vomitball: Derry with 13 men inside their own 45m line last weekend in Croker

WHAT’S IN A NAME
Bickering and squabbling over the tiniest little things are part and parcel of life in the island’s most northerly city – a far cry from the harmony among inhabitants of the most southerly one.

In the divided city the only thing they seem to agree on is that it exists - and its GPS co-ordinates, presumably. But that’s it.

For a start its elected representatives can’t even agree on the name of their city to the point where they now officially (and hilariously) use both names, “Derry/Londonderry”, which aside from possibly being the only city in the world that boasts a forward slash in its name (which must be a nightmare for web developers) , it makes their highly polished tourist adverts on TV scream ‘sectarian division’ despite the carefully crafted pleasant imagery.
 

Joe Brolly is Derry/Londonderry's top langball - currently making a living out of complaining about how his own county plays football.

If, as many of its politicians would like, there was a united Ireland the “London” part of the city’s name definitely should be dropped and replaced with the name of its new capital city. We, here in Cork of course, will have spent decades as an independent People’s Republic by the time that happens so the affairs of somewhere in Not-Cork  like Dublinderry are no concern of ours – except to use its failings to remind ourselves how great we are down here of course.

WALLS
Derry/Dublinderry/Londonderry/Lotsofdairy is a county, like all in Norn Iron, where walls are extremely important. Especially big, tall and thick ones. The more stuff you have on the wall the better too -  spikes, barbed wire, shards of broken glass, rotating metal fencing, small children ready to throw rocks, red-faced male politicians with loud hailers etc.

On a recent visit we estimated that at least fifty percent of the city alone is made of wall and would have made the Berlin Wall in its prime look like a garden fence. It’s all about keeping one side out and the other in depending on whether you prefer Dublin or London. They obviously haven’t been to Cork – the obvious win-win solution to their problems.
 

In Derry/Londonderry they know how to keep you out. Will Cubby's boys find a way in this weekend?

Such is the love of walls in Derry that their senior football team has decided to become one too with their much hated defensive tactics. The upside, for them, is that they don’t concede a whole lot in each game they play which means less humiliation than usual.

The downside is a newish brand of what Pat Spillane branded “puke football” that combines the worst of Ulster’s mass defence tactics with the boredom of watching paint dry on a bland wall while someone whispers James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ to you  in an annoying south Dublin accent.

If Tyrone’s football churns up your tummy then Derry’s also activates lower regions. Their 0-8 to 0-4 defeat to Dublin in Croke Park last weekend was one of the worst games of anything in living memory - ever.

On coffin ships in the mid-Atlantic during the Great Famine there were more exciting games of watch-the-seagull-spit-drift-around-the-deck to be had than watching Derry try to play football.
 

It is more interesting to stare at Cork City Library for 70 minutes than to watch a football match involving Derry

In fact, there were more entertaining scenes to be had in Cork City Library last Saturday afternoon as a man in a grey jumper renewed his membership that had lapsed a number of years previous and more thrilling moments to be found looking at people paying for their parking in the multi-storey across the road.

If you’re bad at sports, especially football, then you should man up and take your pulverising and then try to do something to fix your problems without childishly squashing fifteen players behind your forty-five metre line.  

Walls are a problem in Derry but we’re still looking forward to this weekend’s game. In the Aviva Stadium last Sunday night Derry man Martin O’Neill might have appeared to be the one who created the plan to break down the Polish wall but, nicely below the radar, we all know it was a certain Cork man pulling the strings and we expect the same from the Cork manager and his Rebel troops this weekend.

In the words of U.S. President Ronald Regan, as he stood at the Brandenberg gate in Berlin “Mr. Cuthbert, tear down this wall!”.