Marty Morrissey
Speaking of skirting with serious injury, Marty Morrissey clearly thought it would be a good idea to ‘do a Ryan Tubridy’ and take on the greatest hurling manager of all-time within minutes of his masterminding a fourth successive All-Ireland title, and a seventh in total. There’s a time and a place for everything. This was neither.
They might share the same Christian name, but Brian Cody patently isn’t Brian Cowen. If it was a leadership contest Offaly wouldn’t get a look in in Leinster House, never mind the Leinster championship.
While the Taoiseach pretended it was “a pleasure” to have been shredded on Tubridy’s roundly-applauded ‘Late Late’ debut, the Kilkenny boss wasn’t in the mood to suffer foolish questions, gladly or otherwise.
As Cody was glowering above him, reddening and bouncing on what looked like the very verge of violence, Marty, like a mouse staring at a Tom Cat on a hot tin roof, must have wished he was in a more comfortable place. Such as being back on Podge and Rodge, for all their “cousin” jibes. Or even the halting site the time he asked Olympic boxer Francie Barrett’s mother live on television if her son had ever hit her (cough).
A drive-by in The Bronx – where Marty, believe it or not, was born – would have been a less menacing environment than being beneath Cody’s gaze, as we cowered behind the couch at home.
Back in the studio, as Michael Lyster suggested Morrissey mightn’t be buying Brian’s forthcoming book, Ger Loughnane laughed out loud at his fellow Clareman’s misfortune, asking mirthfully and mercilessly: “Will somebody please pick Marty up off the floor there?!”
Cyril Farrell observed that there were shades of Loughnane (possibly, to paraphrase Cody, at his ‘lunatic’ best) in the cringefest they’d just witnessed: a reference probably to the night of the 1997 All-Ireland final win over Tipp when Ger turned on one of his ‘Sunday Game’ predecessors, Eamon Cregan, for daring to criticise the standard of that afternoon’s match, which the victorious Banner boss had earlier branded “a classic”. Which in the context of the bona fide epic 2009 edition, it clearly wasn’t.
If Kilkenny make it back for a crack at a fifth McCarthy Cup on-the-trot, maybe the ‘Kilkenny cailín’ of RTÉ Sport, Evanne Ni Chuilin, should be chosen to pose the post-match questions. Not because she’s marginally better looking than M&M, but because she admits to being “starstruck” by Cody “every time I interview him. I’m not joking. I have so much respect for him and admire him so much. Coming from Kilkenny he’s someone I would always have on a pedestal. He’s the one person that I could still get a blank with.”
Marty could be getting a blank from Brian from now on.
