When Pat Rabbitte embarked on a recent series of grouchy valedictory interviews after announcing he was not long for the Dail, he made his usual comparison between the Irish and Greek governments.
While the Greek government wasted time holding referenda and, worse still, lecturing their European betters on irrelevancies like macro-economics, the Irish government got on with the real job, stealthily planting pro-Irish articles in the foreign press.
It was an interesting revelation. It got us to wonder whether inter-county managers are doing likewise.
After Waterford's victory yesterday, perennial Man of the Match Maurice Shanahan was being interviewed by Joanne Cantwell.
Maurice almost grabbed the mic and let a holler out of him proclaiming that the win was a defiant 'in your face' to the county's platoons of critics, the people, and worse still 'experts' (arguably the lowest form of people) who had 'wrote us off' after the Munster Final.
That's them answered.
Except that no one can find any of the articles in which Waterford were written off.
Waterford were so disrespected in the lead-up to the quarter-final that Paddy Power only installed them as 1/3 favourites.
In future, RTE should get players to cite articles directly, naming individual journalists, perhaps providing links to the offending piece in a caption below.
But then maybe it's the Waterford county board that are responsible for planting this incendiary content.
Perhaps, like the Irish government, Derek McGrath has his minions (or secondary school students) hard at work on a free-sheet which is then disseminated among the Waterford players.
Titled 'The Irish Sports News Bulletin', one can imagine it is probably full of copy and paste jobs on soccer from English newspapers.
But no doubt it leads with the provocative headline 'Waterford fancy dans get the simple things wrong'.
In the paper, correspondent Sean Smith, who, for the purposes of their latest encounter, is a strong Dublin hurling man, described Waterford as 'soft as shite' and 'not serious contenders for an All-Ireland'.
In that light, Maurice's outburst at the national media is more understandable. In no other light, do Maurice's protestations make sense.
Donal Og Cusack - weird analogies = greater anger
Rec1080 by swflb
With the exception of the 2012 All-Ireland semi-final, every Cork defeat to Galway leads to an orgy of soul-searching. It was known that Donal Og Cusack would be perched on the Sunday Game panel and the Cork hurling hierarchy were braced for a blast.
He didn't disappoint, sprinkling his tirade with curious analogies.
The Cork clubs were 'asleep in Rome while Rome burns' - probably the worst place to be asleep while Rome is burning.
Frank Murphy, the stubborn 'Don' of Cork hurling, is surrounded by a pliable phalanx of 'stooges and yes men'.
What's more, as a collective, their knowledge of 'serious level sport' is apparently comparable to Donal Og's awareness of 'the sleeping habits of the Ayatollah'.
The randomness of this analogy is both pleasing to the viewer (we believe this is the first time the Ayatollah's sleeping patterns have become a topic of discussion on the Sunday Game) and indicative of Donal Og's level of frustration.
The more unorthodox the analogy the angrier its author.
Joe's seductive slouch
Joe Brolly's indecent posing at the beginning of the Sunday Game became quite the online phenomenon last night.
More interesting is what it says about Joe.
For, the pose seems to capture the whole essence of Brolly. The cockiness, the sneering rebelliousness, Joe has now reached the point, consciously or not, where he is unable to sit on a chair without drawing attention to himself.
His every appearance on the panel automatically generates a truckload of tweets calling him 'a prick'. All of these tweets are delivered with a mystifying pride. Why don't these folk not decide to express something original.
But then it's this hostility to originality that fires their dislike of Brolly.
