Dublin GAA versus Irish Rugby… at Ultimate Frisbee

Ahhhhh... PlayXPlay, our weekly sports show where we get our presenters to do whatever we want!

On this week's show our hosts Jenny Murphy and Niamh McEvoy are leaving their beloved rugby and football behind and battling it out on the Ultimate Frisbee pitch. Now, we didn't have a pitch, so we used the courtyard in front of our office but being the extremely professional production team we are, we brought in the help of a newly crowned European champ to bring these elite athletes up to speed with everything to do with flying disks. Fiona Mernagh is a member of the Irish Women's Ultimate Frisbee team, they've recently returned from Hungary after a week long competition in blistering heat which saw the Irish emerge triumphant to claim the crown of European Champions in Ultimate Frisbee.

“My warmest congratulations to the Irish women's ultimate frisbee team on winning gold at the European championships - a wonderful milestone in the history of this fast-growing sport.”

— President of Ireland (@PresidentIRL) July 8, 2019

So, what exactly is Ultimate Frisbee? It's a non-contact, self-referring sport that involves goal-scoring with discs on a pitch with end-zones on each end. A goal is scored when the disc is caught in the end-zone being attacked by the team, sounds pretty straight forward right? WRONG. There's forehands, there's backhands, there's jumping, sprinting, collisions, you name it! We thought long and hard about how best to showcase this sport and we decided that getting an Irish rugby player and an All Star Dublin footballer to compete on concrete would be the best way. Lads, it got competitive fast. https://twitter.com/Herdotie/status/1151229768307634176 You can watch the full episode of PlayXPlay below (see who throws the best disk at 17.05) or listen to the show here. You can watch last weekend's women's ultimate frisbee final here. 

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