Whats ateing Eugene Cloonan?
Cloonan's problems, like everyone else's, can all be traced back to his childhood.
Every Christmas he'd ask for a S*butteo table, but his father Tom would have none of this and would give him a Neary 36' and the
Gaelic Sport annual like all the other kids in Athenry got.
One day he came to find Eugene and Diarmuid kicking a empty bottle of Score orange around the yard - s*ccer style.
He took it badly as most faaders do, he kept it quiet though.
They tried everything to prevent the onset of this dreadful vice, some would say he over indulged the boy to compensate.
I dunno. Maybe sending him out to the fields to pull a few rows of turnips would have cured him. Maybe a few extra decades of
the Rosary, maybe Fr. Iggy Clarke could have performed an exorcism.
Hindsight is great. What can be done for the boy now is another question.
Some would also say that is was the 1986 World cup finals that started it all. Eugene used to be quite a nice boy up until then but once he asked for a
Maradona jersey Tom went all strange and started foaming at the mouth. Joe Cooney was implicated too - jaysus if only the
hurlers had won the all-Ireland that year it would all have been very different. By the time Noel Lane tapped the ball into the
Kilkenny net in 87 it was too late. The cancer of soccer had spread to young Eugene. The infamous Score Orange episode is
documented graphically in Eugene's autobiography -" My life - the story behind the blaggardism". It is a warning to us all.
Setanta never had to contend with garrison sports. Noel Skehan didn't see a soccer ball til he was 34 years of age. How times
have changed.