HELL IS LACK OF RESPECT

WHY on earth have some people gone into Didi Hamann bashing mode?

Didi might be a German footballing legend, but over the years he has become one of us.

And I defy anybody who still watches RTÉ’s depleted panel to deny Didi brings so much wacky, quirky entertainment to something that has gone very stale since the halcyon days of Giles and Dunphy.

His bizarre obsession with Stephen Kenny’s interviewing technique is neither right nor wrong, it’s just so damn entertaining.

Disagree

So to anyone who thinks Didi is the problem, I couldn’t disagree more.

When Didi went into full exploding eyebrow mode, expressing his astonishment that Stephen should be delighted with his first competitive win, shouldn’t we have questioned the great German or those who didn’t seem to understand that Kenny should have been challenged.

Interestingly, instead of giving him some hard questions to answer, some people felt it was time to carry on the new bland, vanilla love-in.

Didi asks the hard question. We all should be more like Didi.

But one thing:when he called football ‘soccer’ with a chuckle, that insulting term, no one even corrected him.

Didi, it’s the Football

Association of Ireland.

It’s football all over the world.

WHILE RTÉ might have lost their way in some sports coverage, Ultimate Hell Week has been a must-watch for all of us, especially as our own Stephanie Roche (below) was flying the flag for all Irish football lovers.

However, there is such hypocrisy in how this tough love challenge is being embraced, with impressive viewing figures, and yet when it comes to developing young girls and boys on and off the sports pitch, tough love has gone completely out of fashion.

In the development of any young person, respect must be core. But sometimes hard truths can challenge people to get to a level they never dreamt possible.

Arresting

My point is the way people are talked to on Ultimate Hell Week would see the gardaí arresting people if it happened on sports pitches throughout the country.

But we must never lose the right of our best young talent to understand you can sometimes learn more through direct honesty than dishonest comfortable analysis. We have to believe that any Irish team, not just after a fabulous week of results for so many of our sides, must understand that direct talking and brutal honesty are not the enemy political correctness suggests.