SBP Headline FAIL!!!

Taken from the Huffington Post, perhaps the most unfortunate headline ever.

Kids These Days

This is fantastic.

Picture is not related to the story, unsurprisingly.

"The **** Had His Arse Out!"

If you happen to be easily offended by bad language then the video below isn't you, but if not then it's hilarious.  Mark Tapper was the leading Kiwi in last week's Rally New Zealand until he was distracted by a fan on the side of the road, and the subsequently crashed out.  Watch the video below, and then laugh.

I'll avoid the obvious jokes about being wary of any man distracted by another fella's arse...

Henry Handball Humour

I don't agree with some of the vitriol directed at Thierry Henry today, but here's some of the photoshopping that's happened in the last 24 hours.

 

  

   

  

Bent Bursts Liverpool Bubble

Here's a video of Darren Bent's goal for Sunderland against Liverpool today.  Watch how it deflects in off of a balloon on it's way into the goal.

But bétisier Sunderland Liverpool
by alloelo

On behalf of all Manchester United fans...

Bonehead Of The Week

My buddy Walshie won't like me posting this. It comes from Sunday's game between the Atlanta Falcons and his beloved San Francisco 49ers. It was a bad day for the ‘Niners fans – not only were they hammered by Matt Ryan and co. but they also had to watch cornerback Dre Bly make this idiotic mistake. Watch below as Bly intercepts a pass from Ryan, only to celebrate too soon and lose the ball when tackled by Roddy White. Stoopid.

Brett = Barney

Watching the first half here of the Chiefs - Vikings game. It's turgid stuff but I am a K.C. fan. Tonight also marks the comeback of Brett Favre and it was interesting to see him get a standing ovation from the Minnesota crowd.

His stats line's pretty poor (so far: typing at the end of the first half). Brett is 1 of 4 for 4 yards. Hey, at least he's got no interceptions or fumbles.

God he's old. If he wanted to see a purple dinosaur I'd have checked out this guy:

How NOT To Celebrate

The winner of the dumbest celebration of 2009 award is Spain's Alvaro Bautista who finished third in today's 250cc MotoGP race in the Czech Republic and then did this.

Woods Breaks Wind!

Tiger Woods, it seemed, took the chance to relieve some tension during the final round of last weekend’s Buick Open. This video has cropped up on Youtube and it appears to show Eldrick, arguably the finest sportsman on the planet, farting. Yes, farting. Check it out.



Sounds fake, right? I thought so too, I won’t lie. Yet here’s another video, taken from a news broadcast the next day, which shows the same thing.



EDIT: It seems that our old friend David Feherty, CBS golf analyst, is to blame.

A Youtube Gem

So for reasons I won't get into here, yet, I've spent most of today looking back on Ireland's trek through Italia '90. I've been reading, listening, watching everything I can find and while digging through it all, I came across this on Youtube. Christy Moore, performing Joxer Goes To Stuttgart, in the RTE Studios during the build-up to the Quarter-Final against Italy.

Knocked Out? Nowhere Close

I tweeted about this last night and now I've found it on Youtube. Look at how Danny McIntosh gets up from the second knockdown in the second round of his British Title Fight against Nathan Cleverly last night. It's a good round, so watch it all, but the moment in question comes after 2:05.

The Tour Hits B-Arse-elona

I’ve spent the last few hours online searching for today’s Tour De France action, Stage 6, in full.

The video of it I mean. I saw a lot of it live and I’m convinced there was an anal sex joke in the coverage. Allow me to explain.

With 36.4km remaining in the stage, shots of one of Barcelona’s most famous buildings appeared, the Agbar Tower. After showing this, there was a dissolve into a close-up of the bum of a cyclist.
Subtle, it was not. Funny, it was.

I’ve drawn an artist’s impression below. Well I say an artist...it’s not very good. You’ll have to use your imagination.



Now all I have to do is find a video. I’ve checked and checked but so far, no luck. It wasn’t in Eurosport’s highlights package. TG4 don’t have the full stage archived on their site. I’m at a loss.

PLEASE HELP ME!!!

Gick!

It's a fate worse than relegation itself. This is - no joke - Newcastle United's new away jersey. It might be the worst kit since Jorge Campos' goalkeeping jersey for Mexico circa 1994. This... thing is absolutely horrible but makes for great comedic material.

The Toon Army will be more like Bananas in Pyjamas in this one.

Altogether now... "You're shi(r)t and you know you are...."

Funny Sports Injuries, Warts And All

I won’t pretend that I’m a cricket expert. Or, for that matter, a big fan. I enjoyed Ireland’s odyssey in the 2007 World Cup, watched a little bit of the 2005 Ashes and I’m looking forward to Ireland’s entry in next month’s Twenty20 World Cup. That’s the sum of my cricket interest. But because of SKY News and BBC and the such, you do hear the headlines. I can tell you that Flintoff’s real name isn’t Freddie and even I know to steer clear of Kevin Pieterson. I’ve also heard of Pakistan’s Shoaib Akhtar.

For the uninitiated among you, Akhtar was at one stage the world’s most feared fast bowler and can still hurl the ball pretty well. He’s also a controversial fellow. In his time, he’s been convicted of ball tampering, been accused of drugs offences, been banned for abusing an opponent, been kicked off the Pakistan national side after rowing with his captain, hit a teammate with a bat, reportedly punched his coach, has been deported from England for visa problems and accused the Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) of corruption. Yes, I use Wikipedia.

So I suppose it’s normal to presume that there are cricketing people who have an issue with Akhtar. That may have something to do with the unnecessary statement released this week by the PCB. They announced that Akhtar is out of the aforementioned Twenty20 World Cup because he ‘was suffering from Genital Viral Warts and Electrofulgration.’ Surely announcing that Akhtar had a skin ailment would have sufficed? Revenge, I guess.

It got me thinking about other embarrassing sports injuries that I’ve come across throughout my years following sport.

• Adam Eaton, Texas Rangers pitcher, once stabbed himself in the stomach while trying to remove that annoying security tape on a DVD with a paring knife.
• Sammy Sosa sneezed twice before Cubs' game, sending his back into spasms and putting himself out of the lineup.
• Danny Ainge (basketball) was once hurt after he was bitten during a game. He required two stitches after he was hurt while playing for the Celtics in a fight against an Atlanta Hawks player. Pretty unremarkable, until you realise the player in question was Tree Rollins, alowing the headline 'Tree Bites Man.'
• Baseball player Glenallen Hill once had a bad dream about spiders, so vivid that he woke up, crashed through a glass table and fell down a flight of stairs
• While with the Cardinals, Bill Grammatica once tore his ACL while celebrating a successful field goal.
• Former Braves pitcher John Smoltz once burned his chest while ironing a shirt. He was wearing it at the time.
• Arsenal's Perry Groves was on the bench. When his side scored, he jumped up to celebrate only to hit his head on the roof of the dugout. He knocked himself out cold.
• Robbie Keane once ruptured his knee cartilage after stretching to pick up his TV remote control.

Got any more funny/weird injuries? Feel free to add them in the comments section below.

Motor-Mouth Indeed!

Courtesy of the good man Peter (Happy birthday by the way man!) comes a commentator at a Brazilian soccer match who makes Micháel O' Muircheartaigh seem quiet and reserved!

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.

***

This article was originally written for and can be seen at the fine website, http://www.extratime.ie

Preview To Thurles Thriller: Tipperary v Cork

Ciarán Ryan is one of our new writers. The Tipperary native (and devotee) works as a journalist for radio and for print and he's an all-round nice guy. In his first post for The Almost Daily Sports Blog, Ciarán previews this Sunday's Munster Hurling Championship clash between his native Tipp and their bitter rivals Cork.

* * *

The smell of fresh grass, three bars of chocolate for a pound, pipe bands, farmer tans, straw hats, glorious summer days that came out of nowhere, plastic caps, and a vendor squealing “who is for the last of the ices?”; it could only be the allure and beauty of that most holy of Irish sporting events – a Munster championship game between Cork and Tipp.

While times have changed – fancy baseball caps and coffees have replaced their eighties equivalents, you’d hardly get a club milk for under a Euro, and the opening of that back door twelve years ago has taken some of the jizz out of it, this is still very much a glamour tie in GAA circles. Even more so now, considering all the shenanigans that have gone on Lee-side this year, that unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or indeed “The Rock” O’Sullivan, you know all about.

For me, as a noble son of Tiobraid Árann , these games represent torture and exuberance in equal measures. My first ever championship game, at the age of five, was the classic drawn Munster Final of ’87. I recall listening to another draw in ’91 while on holidays with my family in Spiddal, and finishing our game of pitch and putt early to get the coverage. Again, it was the airwaves that were my only solace last year, when marooned in Zambia with only a dial up internet connection for company, the might tones of Tipp Fm legend Paddy Finucane boomed across the room as Tipp claimed a historic scalp in Cork. I had to be careful, mind you, not to move, as any slight jump in celebration forced that internet connection down. On the other side of the fence, I’ve suffered the heartbreak; numerous defeats in this decade (curbed by the ’07 qualifier win for Tipp) rank amongst them.

On to this year, and Sunday’s clash. Tipperary will have to deal with the unusual position of being hot favourites, but Cork’s recent form in challenge matches shows that they are still a veritable threat. A couple of retirements mean Cork have a depleted stock this year, and particular interest will be paid to the new additions in the middle of their full-back and full-forward lines, Eoin Cadagon and Aisake O’hAilpin respectively. Another oddity will be Tipp’s entrance as the neutral’s favoured team, given much of the disdain shown by hurling folk around the country to the antics of the Rebels this year.

Tipperary welcome back talisman Eoin Kelly and All-Star centre-back Conor O’Mahony , the only two changes from the team that lost the League Final to Kilkenny four weeks ago. The return of Kelly, in particular, is an interesting one. Many from within the county hadn't expected the Mullinahone forward to even play this year after suffering a fairly significant back injury. If he is able to bring an iota of his previous form into this game, it will be a huge boost for Tipp.

Cork will be looking to their elder statesmen, who might just have a few kicks left in them. For them to win, the likes of the O’Connors, Tom Kenny, Sean Óg, and John Gardiner need to be at the top of their game. Timmy McCarthy has traditionally gone well against Tipp, and may have an impact in the forwards. Ronan Curran, at centre-back, needs to rediscover some of the form that made him the best in his position in the country just a few years ago.

It may be Tipp’s young players, on the other hand, that tip the balance in their favour. Eighteen-year-old wonderkid Noel McGrath has stepped up to the mark with his displays in the forwards, and Paudie Maher of the famed Thurles Sarsfields club exudes confidence in the backline. Considering his performances last year, we better not forget that Seamus Callinan is still Under-21 also.

Strangely for me, both head and heart are saying the same thing – a Tipp win, but just about. Don’t expect there to be much more than three or four points in this. Either way, expect sunburn, melted chocolate, and some eejit sitting in front of you with a straw hat. Hey, it’s Munster Championship day folks, not a fashion parade.

Another Scary GP2 Crash

Not so long ago I showed you a crash from one of the GP2 races at the round in Barcelona. Well here's another one from last weekend's race at Monte Carlo. I'm sure you'll agree that it's far more exciting than anything the Formula 1 race offered on Sunday. The 'pilot' in question is Roman Grosjean and the cameraman is probably still thanking his lucky stars.

There's Hope For Me Yet!

If this woman can get a job then surely even I can too!!




What a gaffe. God bless Youtube!

Yours,
Gavin Grace....your potential employee!