1. Back to search

Breaking Balls, the Funny Side of the GAA

Bill Shankly famously said, ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.’ In professional sport today and increasingly at amateur levels the desire to win is the dominant force. Sometimes it seems that we’ve taken the sport out of sporting activity. This book will change all that!
Breaking Balls is the product of twenty years of research through interviews with hurlers, footballers, camogie players, ladies footballers, fans, pundits, managers and media commentators to find the funniest GAA quotations and anecdotes. The only criteria for inclusion was that each story had to be funny.
This book celebrates the great GAA comedians, although much of the time the humour is unintentional. Everybody who is anybody in gaelic games is here, as well as some less obvious candidates, from John O’Mahony to John in the pub, from Angela Downey to that well-Known GAA fan Kyle Minogue, including Christy Ring, Ger Loughnane, Joe Brolly, Eamon O’Hara, Joe Kernan, Babs Keating, Pat Spillane, Eamon dunphy, Shane Curran and Garrett Fitzgerald.
A native of Roscommon John Scally is the author of over 20 sports books including the best-selling biographies of Dermot Earley, Tony Ward and Ger Loughnane as well as ghostwriting the best-selling ‘No Pat on the Back’ for Pat Spillane.