Anthony Daly has jokingly suggested that Donal Og Cusack would probably resort to fairly desperate measures if the primacy of hurling in Cloyne was ever threatened.
'Dalo', the upcoming autobiography from the infectiously charismatic former All-Ireland winning captain and ex-Dublin and Clare manager, hits the shelves this week.
And Daly has a cut at those pundits, notably Ger Loughnane and Cusack, who airily insist that Dublin hurling needs to convince their dual players to drop the football as early as fifteen.
If Loughnane or Cusack are saying that Dublin needs to ensure guys pick hurling ahead of football at 15, that’s fairly rich coming from the both of them. Ger is a hurling purist from Feakle where football has no place or order. Although he apparently was a decent footballer, I’m sure Cusack would be ordering boxes of pen-knives if football ever became a serious imposition on the hurling culture in Cloyne.
Also in it's pages, Daly takes aim at those who mocked the Dublin side as 'manufactured hurlers' after their loss to Tipperary in Thurles this summer.
When we scored 2-25 against Galway in the 2013 Leinster final, nobody was talking about basics. Some of the hurling we played in the All-Ireland semi-final against Cork was as good as anything seen in Croke Park during such an electric summer. Surely you need shooters and good players to play in those kind of games? Yet all of a sudden, now we’re only seen as ‘manufactured hurlers.’
He recounts how he texted Brian Cody to thank for slamming the characterisation of Dublin as a bunch of artless, gym-created 'manufactured hurlers.'
I had retreated into the bunker at home after the Tipperary game when Richie Stakelum sent me a text and told me to look up (Brian) Cody. In an interview he’d done that week, Cody had rejected the characterisation of Dublin’s players as ‘manufactured hurlers’. I’d never texted Brian Cody in my life, but I took out my phone and tapped a few words on the screen: ‘Brian, just want to say thanks for what you said during the week’.
‘Just thought it was a load of rubbish, Dalo,’ he texted back.
[Irish Examiner]
