Cathal Dervan
by Cathal DervanRSS 
Recent Posts
- Phil Mickelson’s collapse during U.S. Open was heartbreaking for many reasons
- Crazy squirrels and great memories - the 25th anniversary of the greatest day in Irish sporting history
- Despite economic misery of the Irish our sports will always be our pride -- the glow of optimism that comes with athlete's success
- Ireland against England in Wembley - the soccer fixture to beat all soccer fixtures
- Rugby ace Ronan O’Gara makes us proud to be Irish
Archives
What could be possibly worse as the coach or captain of the English rugby team than seeing your Slam chasing team humiliated from start to finish in a new stadium where the home side had never won a competitive match in before?
Will I tell you what would be the final insult if your name is Martin Johnson or Toby Flood or Chris Ashton, and you’ve just lost the clean sweep against the Irish of all people?
The Kildare jockey had just steered the brilliant Quevega to a third consecutive win in the Mares’ Hurdle to set a blistering pace in the race to become top jockey at this week’s festival.
Such an honor is nothing new for the son of trainer, former jockey and TV analyst Ted.
Now, I understand that most of you reading this in New York have probably never heard of Double Diamond, but it was a very popular bottled beer in times of yore, something like former Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern’s beloved Bass Ale if memory serves me right.
The chances are you also won’t remember the bakers Johnston, Mooney and O’Brien, who used to deliver the bread to our house in an electric van when bread was white, brown or batch, and rye was only to be found in the title of a very famous book.
For many years Stephen Carr stood in a tent with a sandwich in one hand and a bottle of mineral water in the other, not an unusual occurrence in the seaside Wicklow town of Bray.
He was there as a professional footballer coming to the end of his career with Newcastle United, who had just won a pre-season friendly against the local Wanderers. I was there as a journalist from the Star group of newspapers.
We spoke, but not for the first time. The first time was many years earlier, when I was working in London covering the formative years of the Premier League and Carr was a teenage apprentice at Tottenham Hotspur.
It was the Spurs press officer who introduced us, a wonderful man called John Fennelly whose father came from Dublin and inspired his willingness to help any journalist of an Irish persuasion.
