Occasionally, if you're looking at a Gaelic football or a hurling clip on youtube and fail to close the tab after watching, allowing the site to automatically direct you on to similar videos, you will get trapped in a Laochra Gael cycle, wasting hours watching breezy tributes to great men like Mikey Sheehy and DJ Carey.
Regrettably, too many Laochra Gael videos have been whipped off youtube. One is afraid even to draw attention to the ones that remain lest the TG4 people whip them off the site.
Yesterday, appearing on a US soccer podcast called 'Beyond the Pitch', Roy Keane lamented the changing nature of what constitutes coolness in professional football.
Back when he was a sheepish young novice in the Nottingham Forest dressing room, 'cool' meant showing up for training on time, giving it socks during the ninety minutes, and remaining discreet about the money you were earning and the women you had scored.
Nowadays, coolness seems to mean roughly the opposite of what it allegedly meant during Roy's time. We say allegedly because we are a tad dubious about Roy's claim that punctuality was as cool as all that during the 1990s.
And while we claim no special expertise on what constitutes cool, we are confident that Roy saying the word 'cool' does not qualify as cool.
Anyway returning to the Gaelic Warriors, here is a man who most certainly does qualify as cool, probably in any era.
Elegant, stylish and gloriously successful, he also epitomised that old Cork hurling/Kerry football mentality, bred into players and supporters once fed on a steady diet of victories.
'Walk aisy when the jug if full'.
Roughly translated as 'take victory in your stride and don't lose the head and turn into a dippy, insufferable lunatic.' (A John B Keane quotation which was alluded to in Larry Ryan's treatise on the condition known as 'Corkness' in the Irish Examiner last year.)
A man whose greatness as a player is almost outweighed by his otherworldly soundness, JBM probably stands as the most universally revered GAA man of the past five decades.
