This Week In The League Of Ireland

The big story in the League of Ireland this week has been the sacking of Dundalk defender Dave Rogers in the wake of ‘Arse Gate.’ Rogers was left not too jolly with the decision by the Louth club to terminate his contract for ‘gross misconduct’ after he mooned the travelling Pats support at Oriel Park on Friday night. Unsurprisingly, many in the media were quick to have a bit of craic (or is that crack?) with this one. In fact, the only thing faster than the ‘bum’s rush’ given to Rogers was the rush of hacks and journo’s across the land as they tried to ‘out-pun’ each other.






There were plenty of ‘witty’ headlines in our tabloids about the Rogers’ sacking (‘Moon Walk’ was one of my personal favourites) but the pun-tastic headlines weren’t limited to the red-tops. ‘rogers calls foul play over bum rap’ and ‘hoping shirty conduct will end is asking for the moon’ are both the work of Aiden O’Hara in the Indo. The lack of capitals in these very cheesy headlines may be a mistake, or it may be an attempt at understating the descent into cheddar-ville.


The incident provoked an intense debate on RTE’s Monday Night Soccerball. Eoin “I’m not a prude” Hand says that if he had brought his daughter to the game, and he’d seen Rogers’ actions, that he “would have reacted.” Goodness only knows how... Meanwhile Rico had the counter-argument on the matter, standing up for Scouser. An MNS caption informed us that he once ‘played the bodhrán on an album by Tundra, a folk music group from Kent’ so it’s probably appropriate that it was he who was banging the drum in Rogers’ defence. He mused about possible conspiracy theories (“It makes me think that there’s something else in the background”) before analyzing the incident in detail, telling us that it wasn’t too bad because Rogers “had his briefs on underneath.” Thanks for saving us the bother to take such a close look Rico. “Have we all lost our sense of humour?” he wondered. Well, the journo’s certainly haven’t...


I’ll leave the last word to Neil O’ Riordan. The Irish Sun writer keeps a blog called The Big O in which he recalled an incident involving current Dundalk boss Sean Connor while he was boss at Bohs. According to O’ Riordan, in their preparation for the 2007 League Cup Final, Connor mooned his players as they practiced potentially crucial penalty kicks ‘in a bid to recreate the atmosphere they would face in a shoot-out at The Brandywell.’ ‘It’s worth remembering’ says Statto, ‘that Dalymount is overlooked by a primary school.’ Now that this scandal is in the public domain, should we expect the Dundalk board to sack Connor as swiftly as they booted Rogers out the door? Or will he stay, adding more fuel to the theories of the multi-talented Rico? Only time will tell.

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