Search Results for 'Willie Joe Padden'

At this time of year it can be very difficult to know what to get for people at Christmas. When you are 15 or 20 years married or more and the collective libido may not be what it used to be; there is always a temptation for a female to buy her partner a good book which might stop him bothering her, trying all night to do what he used to do all night.

At this time of year it can be very difficult to know what to get for people at Christmas. When you are 15 or 20 years married or more and the collective libido may not be what it used to be, there is always a temptation for a female to buy her partner a good book which might stop him bothering her trying all night to do what he used to do all night.

Twenty years is a very long time in any individual’s journey through life. And 1989 seems like a different planet compared to some of the advances and negatives that we have experienced in the country over the past two decades.

I have fond memories of the summer of 1985. The Mayo football team was managed that year by Liam O’Neill. He was an excellent manager and coach, a driven man who really wanted nothing more than a Mayo team to express themselves in a meaningful way on the national stage. The former Galway player left no stone unturned in generating a self belief in the players in order to shake off a perceived mental weakness of the Mayo team back then. He was working with the nucleus of an All- Ireland winning under-21 team that had claimed the title in 1983. We were blessed at the time with a number of great footballers, players like Willie Joe Padden, TJ Kilgallon, Martin Carney, Eugene Lavin, Frank Noone, Jimmy Burke, and Jimmy Browne to name just a few, all talented footballers that in hindsight should probably have won lots more. We lost the Connacht final in the old Pearse Stadium in 1984. I remember big Tom Byrne scoring what appeared to be a perfectly legitimate goal in the dying minutes of that game that would surely have won us the final, but for some reason the goal was disallowed by the referee Mickey Kearins, he of Sligo fame.

I didn’t get to Kerry on Sunday due to my own club commitments, but reports from the south would appear to be encouraging. My spies tell me Mayo could have won, or at least drawn, the match, which is more than anticipated. Rightly, John O’Mahony was critical afterwards of the demands being made on certain players. Take a footballer like Kevin McLoughlin, who didn’t play on Sunday due to an injury – he has come through a Sigerson Cup campaign, his senior debut, and the start of the u21 championship, all in the space of a few weeks.