Have you ever looked at Twitter during a really tense, exciting, incident-filled GAA game?
Sure you have. Every man, woman, dog and bot seems to have an opinion on what is unfolding or what the referees are missing.
Everyone, it seems, apart from the inter-county players.
It is not that these players are off training or plotting out their meal plans and gym sessions for the week. Most counties will have Twitter guidelines that prohibit their players from sharing their thoughts and opinions on any and every GAA matter.
Most players adhere to the rules. Not everyone is for constraints, though, and Colm Begley certainly falls into that bracket. The latest episode of The GAA Hour Football Show covered Twitter bans [from 12:00 below] and how some players react to them.
Host Colm Parkinson recalled the time Begley was disciplined by the Laois county board after breaking the football squad’s rules on tweeting. Parkinson said:
“The rule with Laois, in their guidelines, was ‘No GAA-related tweets’.
“You’re often watching a match on a Sunday and there’s no-one from any county offering their opinion on any game. They’re all not allowed tweet about GAA. I’d imagine this is a guideline in all of the counties.
“Begley, anyway, got an operation in hospital and he was lying in bed with a cast on his leg. He took one of these selfies and wrote something like – Laid up for the next two months now but on the long road to recovery… hashtag whatever.
“That was deemed a GAA-related tweet and he was disciplined for it… That will tell you how ridiculous it gets.”
“The only Twitter ban I was ever involved in was under Anthony Tohill on the International Rules tour in 2011. He had every reason to do so and I’m glad that he did it.
“We travelled down to Australia and Anthony said, ‘Until we play our last Test, nobody under any circumstances tweets anything at all’.
“We’re down in Australia a Begley is tweeting away like mad, so he is! He’s the only one doing it. He didn’t seem to care what anyone was saying.”
Not everyone would have the neck to go against Tohill at the best of times but that is what makes Begley such a unique character.
He knows his own mind and he doesn’t mind sharing it, one tweet at a time…
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