Inside Track: Being an Olympics year won’t take the focus off Louth sport
Last year’s slate has been cleaned in two areas. Louth GAA’s premier team is sailing under a new flag in 2024, and there are also fresh faces in Oriel Park.
No need for change at Dundalk Stadium. The horses are set to gallop as strong and as often as ever; while the other sport practised at the venue, greyhound racing, will continue as long as there are owners and trainers keen to stay in the game, providing runners for the twice-weekly meetings.
The likes of badminton, tennis, snooker, cycling, darts, rugby, coursing, boxing and athletics may be on the undercard with regard to participating numbers, but they’re important to protagonists.
We’re talking local here. On a national and international scale, athletics, boxing and rugby, along with golf, will have a huge audiences, all but rugby of that quartet featuring in the Olympic Games.
It makes sense that Paris should have been chosen for the 23rd celebration of the Games. It was there where last year’s Rugby World Cup had its focal point, and therefore why discommode the hawkers, ticket-scalpers, flag-sellers and stall-holders by asking them to go elsewhere?
The pity is, the greatest scalpers of all, the Parisian hotel-owners, will benefit more than anyone else.
International soccer will also be in focus. Euro 24 is going ahead in Germany, but without an Irish involvement.
The teams from both parts of the country failed to make their presence felt in the preliminaries, and will be among the onlookers during the summer.
Anyone with a drop of Celtic blood in their veins will shout for Scotland; but it seems unlikely the team from the north side of The Cheviots will last as long in the tournament as the team on the south side.
Then, again, Gareth Southgate’s England have already been tipped up as this page’s choice to succeed, and as Belgium know to their cost – we’ve been told there’s a big Democrat readership among the Walloons – that probably amounts to the kiss of death.
The Louth team and Oriel Park are a long way from Paris and even longer from the venues where the soccer is to be played.
The former are under new management and on the weekend after next face their first major test.
When Mickey Harte took over, his Louth team were on the bottom rung of the National League ladder, scrapping in Division Four.
The air is more rarefied now. Providing the opposition to new manager, Ger Brennan’s men in Division Two will be three counties who’ve sampled All-Ireland success in the past 22 years.
If recent tradition counts for anything, it won’t be easy for the Reds going out to face Armagh, Donegal and Cork. The others in the group are not too bad either. Meath, Cavan and Kildare have all been in a provincial final in the years mentioned above, the latter making an All-Ireland semi-final after taking the qualifier route.
A tough one, no doubt, but Brennan should be encouraged by having players available to him who were involved in the defeat of Meath, Kildare and Cork in last season’s campaign. And he’ll be pleased with his side scoring that morale-booster victory over Westmeath at Kinnegad at the weekend, albeit in a glorified challenge.
Stephen O’Donnell would love to be in Brennan’s place, being able to call on the best of his last year’s recruits. Instead the Oriel supremo has to engage in a team-building process. Finding a replacement for Pat Hoban presents the manager with his most difficult task.
The club’s record-breaking scorer is now with Derry, where he’ll find a lot of the dressing room voices familiar to him. A half-dozen or so of his former Oriel colleagues are long settled in at The Brandywell, and are taking instructions from Ruaidhrí Higgins, another who had a regular appearances on the Carrick Road as a member of the coaching staff.
This is just slightly reminiscent of what it was like back in the 1950s, the only difference being that Dundalk were beneficiaries back then.
There was a good bond between Dundalk and Drumcondra, fostered, no doubt, by Sam Prole’s involvement with both clubs. Once resident in Kincora Terrace on the Carrick Road, Prole had a long and honourable association with Dundalk before moving to Dublin. There he joined forces with Drums.
He may have been the one who guided the likes of Johnny Robinson, Shay Noonan, Kit Lawlor and Benny ‘Rosie’ Henderson to Oriel when they sought a change of clubs. Dundalk benefited in 1958 – Robinson and Noonan were pivotal in defence in the Town’s FAI Cup win that year.
Goalkeeper, Eamonn ‘Sheila’ Darcy, went in the opposite direction, though before linking with Drums he figured with other clubs, most notably Shamrock Rovers, where he won many honours with the then-Glenmalure Park club.
And on the connection between Dundalk and Drums, Johnny ‘Hudda’ Lennon, who died over the weekend, lived in town, but spent most of his playing career with the Dublin club.
We, in the Democrat printing works, got to know him well. We printed the Drums programmes as well as Dundalk’s, and the lad known as “Hudda” to his friends would collect them on his way up to Tolka Park for a home game.
Time, perhaps, to get this piece back on the track from which it set out. There are big seasons ahead for Louth and Dundalk, the county team in its bid to consolidate, Dundalk aiming to get up alongside Shamrock Rovers and Derry City and stay there.
Ireland rugby team has no ground to make up.
Everything that Europe had to offer was hoovered up by Andy Farrell’s men last year, and the question now is, can there be a repeat in 2024 without the services of Johnny Sexton.
The Olympics are always good to watch. The prospects of medals coming to Ireland are far from forlorn.
Best chances would seem to be in disciplines, such as gymnastics, which previously would have been of little interest.
Down and Offaly were the worst of friends on the Gaelic football field back in the early 1960s: Could it happen that there’ll be a coming together of these counties in Paris, McIlroy and Lowry making it on to the podium to be presented with a gold?