Before he accused Maurice Deegan on doing something unmentionable to Tyrone in yesterday's semi-final, Joe Brolly continued to take pot-shots at the Milwall of Gaelic football in his Sunday Independent column yesterday.
The previous weekend, Peter Canavan had penned one of the more impassioned/mawkish defences of Tyrone football, and specifically those accused of diving and feigning the previous weekend.
It is fair to conclude that Brolly did not need to wipe a tear from his eye while reading Canavan's piece.
Instead, he collared Canavan himself as the 'original expert' in the art of feigning. Returning to the glory days of Ulster football in the mid-1990s, not usually a time associated with the 'unmanly' arts, Brolly accused Canavan of manufacturing the sending off Derry player Fergal McCusker.
Fergal handpassed a ball over his head, Peter rushed into Fergal's arms, made contact and went prostrate on the ground. As the medics rushed in, the TV cameras showed Peter winking. McCusker was enraged and protested his innocence, but to no avail. Fergal is a mate of mine and to this day he is enraged when he is rescinded of it.
Well, what to make of this? Diving in 1995?
The game itself, a significant victory for Tyrone over the All-Ireland champions of 1993, saw three red cards, only one of them going to a Derry player.
Contemporary press reports on the game did not allege feigning on Canavan's part. The Irish Independent merely reported that Canavan 'was felled off the ball. The linesman intervened and McCusker was banished to the sideline'.
This short highlights video steers clear of such controversy.
