Brendan O’Sullivan is not a monster, whatever baying mob might say
Always wrong, usually false, and sometimes evil into the bargain. Someone even dreamt up by Dr Frankenstein, perhaps.
They marked the Kerry footballer down as a cheat, and the mob could do so because Sport Ireland had sanctioned him and had, in between appeals from the footballer, seen to it that he was banned for a total of 21 weeks.
Personally, I thought the mob looked a particularly sad bunch these last few days. There was no story, but they pedalled and pedalled, and when they were told that the footballer had unluckily bought a product that had been ‘contaminated’ they pedalled some more.
They turned their pitchforks on the GAA, and then the GPA, and demanded to know why both bodies were staying silent?
That, in fact, giving the yokels with the shiniest pitchforks their due, was not a half-bad question.
The GAA and the players’ body should have come out early this week and spoken up. Instead the GAA came out very late and added nothing. The GPA are still in conclave, presumably?
The GAA should have said what Marc Ó Sé said, that Brendan O’Sullivan made a mistake, that nobody died and nobody was cheated out of anything in this instance — ever so slightly dodgy substance or not ever so slightly dodgy substance!
Even someone with Donald Trump’s power of communication could have brought this tiny drama to an end with one single tweet, telling everyone to shut up and go home.
The GAA is in a lucky place, and it would be no harm if the association made this known more often. Our games are played on a small island, where mostly everyone knows everyone else’s business.
It’s a place that does not attract coaches from other countries; bluffers and chancers and professional cheaters with certificates to their names.
Gaelic football and hurling do, of course, welcome a few individuals from other sports in this country who are asked to lend their expertise, but there is absolutely no evidence to date that any of this occasional cross-pollination has endangered the good health of our games.
Fields where football and hurling are played remain safe and secure enough from the scourge of cheaters.
If anything, the Brendan O’Sullivan story showed an innocence, a naivety, and nothing more than that and the only wrong-doing in the entire story was Sport Ireland wielding a big punishment stick.
My sympathies are with Brendan O’Sullivan, whoever he is...