Bill Shankly famously said that, ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death … 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! It strives simply to celebrate the fun that is attached to Gaelic games and to give people a laugh or two. 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 is 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 Christy Ring to Ger Loughnane; from Joe Brolly to Joe Kernan; from Babs Keating to Pat Spillane; from John O’Mahony to John in the pub; from Eamonn O’Hara to Eamon Dunphy; from Angela Downey to that well-known GAA fan Kylie Minogue, and from Shane Curran to Garret Fitzgerald. If you need a laugh this is the book for you. A must for all sports fans.

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.