Stynes: Ireland can win
by Arthur Sullivan, 12 October 2008
Australian Rules legend Jim Stynes reckons Ireland have a fantastic chance to win the International Rules series Down Under in a few weeks.
Irishman Stynes left for Australia to play the professional game when he was a teenager and although Australia have been the more successful side in recent events in the hybrid game, he reckons the hiatus of the series will favour Ireland.
"I think there's a real window of opportunity for Ireland to win. Even though the Irish won the game in Galway two years ago, the gaps between the teams were beginning to show and I felt that Australia were beginning to dominate the whole thing," said Stynes.
"Now that Australia have to start from scratch again and two years have passed, they face a real challenge. Not many of them have played before so I reckon they'll find it tough."
Stynes also claims that the anger over the physicality of recent series which led to last year's being scrapped was generated by the media.
"In the last series if we hadn't won it by such a margin and only beaten the Irish by a couple of points they wouldn't have complained. They were complaining about how our guys roughed them up before the start of the game but that's just part of it, people bumping each other," he said.
"But because we intimidated and then dominated them, they couldn't deal with it.
"When I say "they" I don't mean the players but people in the media. They started the story and people reading the papers bought into it.
"It was like the first game in Galway. The media wrote the game off as lacklustre but it shouldn't have mattered to the Irish how it was won as long as it was won. But the media didn't let it go.
"People like Liam Hayes disappointed me," he continues.
"It wouldn't have mattered what happened in the second test, that man would have kept banging on about the Aussies and how bad things were," Stynes concluded.