And Paddy Barnes to come Tomorrow Conor! Teak tough opponent just like Katie yesterday but landed the better shots and was clearly the classier boxer. Brilliant !!!

Yes Nick you are correct, the reasons are two fold for underperformance in track and field. There is not enough funding for future athletes, and Ireland do not have the facilities/ trainers needed. Team GB won 1 Gold medal in Atlanta 96, look at them now 16 yrs later.. Its not rocket science how they have achieved what they have, please can we give better support to our potential athletes?? I am thrilled for our boxers, but their massive sucess will only mask the underperformance of the Irish team as a whole! Its embarrasing when you compare the medal tally of nations with similar populations. Best of luck to the remaining athletes. Katie Taylor is a sporting legend.

We’re not doing too bad, Richard. Here’s a selection of countries performly as poorly as us:
Greece: 0G 0S 2B
Austria: 0G 0S 0B
FInalnd: 0G 1S 0B
Portugal: 0G 0S 0B
Spain: 1G 4S 1B

Countries like NZ and Denmark are just exceptional. Personally, we should be aiming to beat Spain (revenge for Euro 2012). And it looks like 2 boxing golds may just do that.

Bang on. Time to ditch our under performing track & fielders and plough money into boxing. High performance my ass. These guys are the real deal.

But then again, boxing is one of the best supported sports in Ireland. Are you sure other sports wouldn’t get more medals if they had more support?

Exactly, Nick.

British cycling is funded to the tune of 36m on its own. Our entire “elite performance squad” gets 11m with only the boxers performing regularly. So I’d disagree with you nick.

I’m not just talking about money (although I know several national sporting organisations would disagree that it’s fairly proportioned) but about organisational structure. Irish boxing is very well supported from a youth level, with lots of not only financial investment, but a high standard of coaching. I don’t think that’s universally true of all the sports sending Irish athletes.

It is something that has struck me a lot this Olympics – there are amazing athletes out there, but results do seem to have a lot to do with how much your country supports your sport. Ireland does really punch above its weight (pun intended!) with boxing, but it’s very hard to compete with the countries with more money in most sports. I’d argue that boxing in an exception in that athletes from countries with minimal financial investment (seriously, Cuba?) can still compete with the incredibly well-funded and supported athletes from the USA and China.

Are our track and fielders under performing? Its seems to me like there is a serious lack of facilities. The nearest running track to me that I know of is an hour and a half away in Santry. Whilst schools in other countries have running tracks a lot of our schools don’t even have sports halls and children are still being going to classes in prefabs.

So how do you explain new Zealand? a rugby nuts country with a smaller population than us but with 8 medals to date. Athletics should be massive in this country with the start that Ronnie Delaney, Eamon Coghlan, John Tracey, Marcus o Sullivan, Frank o Mara, Catherina McKiernan and Sonia gave us. Boxing is expertly managed from youth level up on a community basis but thank god our boxers don’t ponce around going warm weather training 4 times a year and altitude training twice a year. They just get on with it.

While you’re clearly not a fan of track and field, it really is unfair to compare boxing to, say, gymnastics in Ireland. It’s clearly very hard to be a successful gymnast (even if you’re quite good) if you come from a country without a well-established gymnastics team and to say that it’s just down to athletes that they’re not winning medals seems overly simplistic.

the ref don’t score the points. Its up to the judges to see he’s fooling and not award the point.

Yeah watched it in marseille, there was uproar! French lad threw a lot of wild punches though. Conlon was the more clinical.

Yeah I viewed it from France, they were fuming, said it wasn’t right and that their guy was robbed. I can’t tell though, it’s a very confusing sport!

F**k em

Right on man ^

cheat is a French word…. Their man could swing plenty of punches, quantity over quality!

you can throw a 100 punches but if they dont land you dont score. That was oubaali’s problem. Conlon picked him off constantly and increasingly.

I didn’t forget about Paddy Barnes, Bernard. I just didn’t consider it relevant mentioning him in the context of a news piece about Michael Conlan winning.

However, he will, of course, be referenced extensively over the next 24 hours in the Olympics Breakfast feature etc.

Sorry Paul, you’re dealing with an idiot here, thought Paddy had already secured bronze as well! Jumped the gun a bit! My apologies

Go to Specsavers Greg !!!!

Yeah, the playback and the commentary can really shape your view of a performance, especially when we’re not all experts ourselves.

What does win like a rosbeef mean? Does it mean winning in a perfidious and underhand (pun intended) way? Well then the French, through the graces of a certain Thierry Henry, managed to win in the most rosbeef way imaginable a few years ago against Ireland (do we really need these redundant celtic, rosbeef cliches?). Conlan soaked up a lot of pressure last night from Oubaali who seemed at times to be flailing and lashing out wildly whereas the Irish fighter was a lot more precise with his punches. I watched it on Turkish tv and they, having no pro or anti bias either way, gave it to Conlan!