Ireland lacking a special individual

BACK in the day when The Office

● was the best thing on television — and its impact hadn’t been diluted by endless repeats — David Brent was musing on how he saw his role as leader.

“There’s no ‘I’ in team,’’ he said,

“but there is a ‘me’ if you look hard enough.”

Ricky Gervais’s logic takes a little

● while to figure out, but he did latch on to an eternal truth. Something that rings true in football, anyhow.

For all the talk of great teams

● and the power of the collective, it is individuals that make the biggest mark.

What do people remember now of Manchester United’s great side of the 1960s?

George Best, Bobby Charlton and

●

Denis Law. It was Ajax and Cryuff in the 70s.

Ireland have a team now that work hard for each other. What we would give for a special individual, though.

One of the dumbest lines that still endures is that everyone has a book in them. It’s nonsense, of course. Most don’t even have half a chapter.

Carr is different. He is the only journalist in Ireland who should write an autobiography — purely because he’s lived about 300 different lives...

Boxing

Modern journalism is in thrall to third-level colleges, with most recruits coming straight from media courses and with little life experience outside of that.

It could do with more who have taken the road not taken. Like Eamon. Not many journalists these days have written poems and plays, or completed a PhD in History of Art.

You won’t find many that have been part of poetry readings alongside Seamus Heaney while also being a regular at boxing venues, big and small.

I’ll always remember a press junket to New York a decade ago for a fight between Joe Calzaghe and Roy Jones Jr in Madison Square Garden.

After the fight, we headed to the press conference room, waiting for the two boxers to come in. I was sitting beside Eamon and he recognised a chap in the row in front of us. It was Richard Williams, then the chief sports writer of The Guardian.

Eamon introduced himself. “Remember me? I was on with Horslips when you were presenting The Old Grey Whistle Test.”

Wild

To many, he isn’t even Eamon, they know him as Guru Weirdbrain.

That was the pseudonym he used as a music svengali in the 1980s, promoting gigs that were wild and wonderful.

There were a lot of us at the 2002 World Cup who have grown tired of Saipan, but only one really used that extraordinary time to good effect.

Eamon took notes out there and, when he came home, he put it all into The Origami Crow, a book of poetry.

That’s Eamon Carr. A one-off. Write that book, Weirdbrain.