Herdman, Babs and the art of dressing room wall material

It's been a winter of slights and sweet vengeance.

Canada manager John Herdman, in ebullient mood following his team's fine showing against Belgium, was overheard telling his charges that they were going to "f**k Croatia".

The Croatians weren't inclined to let this go, or place it in a more forgiving context, and took great delight in pummelling the Canadians next time out. Striker Andrej Kramaric indicated that Herdman had done his team a great service, thanking him for motivation, adding that Croatia had shown who "f***ed whom".

Down in Cork, perennial winners Nemo Rangers felt disrespected in the lead-up to the county final. After the Cork city outfit, in the unfamiliar role of underdogs, dispatched St Finbarr's in the decider, a host of players, Paul Kerrigan, Paul O'Donovan and Luke Connolly, emerged to tell the press and the rest of the county that they had presented them with ample motivation beforehand.

Croatia's group rivals in Qatar, Belgium, should have been fizzing with defiant energy after they had been labelled "too old" at the outset of the tournament. This is normally the sort of thing that is manna for any manager seeking out motivational material. This might have been the case were it not for the sorry fact that the individual making the charge was their own star midfielder, rendering it somewhat unusable.

What is known in this part of the world as 'dressing room wall material' - aka, 'ye wrote us off, yiz b*****ds' or 'you should hear what the other crowd have been saying about you' - has long been a staple of the pre-match team-talk, revered as an especially potent motivational tool by managers of the old school.

In recent years - whether on account of the decline of the print media or the unwillingness of