It’s the same every summer; the football ends, I exhale deeply, and say, “thank God that’s over.” Jaded and fatigued I wave the Premier League goodbye and look forward to lazy Saturdays in the sun, Sundays spent with family and weeknights sampling the great outdoors.
That usually lasts for all of two weeks.
I start to get twitchy, I tire of sunny Saturdays, grow bored of my family, and crave live sport. In need of a fix I watch tennis, rugby, Formula 1, athletics, golf, cycling, anything which might recreate the drama of Hull versus Burnley on a rainy Monday in February.
But they can never compare, they don’t even come close. No, in order to experience the raw-blooded emotion, the unbridled passion, of a night at the KCOM Stadium, I must wait for our own Premier League to begin, for the All-Ireland Championship to roll into town.
And it never fails to deliver. Year after year it produces moments of breath-taking quality, edge-of-your-seat drama, never to be forgotten games which will be talked about for years. It truly is a national treasure.
So why then do we see so little of it? Why are we restricted to a couple of games each weekend, the same old teams dominating the schedules from one summer to the next?
The hurling qualifiers began last weekend, slain giants given another opportunity to reach the promised land having been dumped out of their provincial championships. Okay, so the four ties weren’t exactly classics in the making, but as I checked the listings on RTÉ 2 between three and seven pm on Saturday afternoon I rubbed my eyes in disbelief.
Surely, they had to be showing one of the games? Maybe Tipp and Westmeath? Even Dublin and Laois? No. All they had was Mayo and Down (a game which turned out to be quite entertaining, but that’s besides the point). One solitary match on a day when the fates of counties were being decided up and down the country.
The Kilkenny Limerick match was on Sky, but that shouldn’t stop our national broadcaster from screening one of the other games, football or hurling. You might say that there’s enough GAA on telly, that The Sunday Game is the main gig and we shouldn’t even have matches on a Saturday, but respectfully, I disagree.
Before Sky came along and revolutionised the way English football was broadcast, viewers in the UK were treated to one or two games a week, always the same teams, United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Everton. If you supported Coventry or Wimbledon or Southampton then you didn’t get to see them on tv, that was just how it was.
And that’s how it is here right now. I know that Waterford, Tipperary and Dublin emerged from their games with a minimum of fuss, dispensing of weak opposition without breaking sweat. But nonetheless, I’d liked to have seen how Westmeath hurl, seen if they had any young exciting players. Laois too. I draw the line at Offaly, I’m not a masochist.
Why can’t RTÉ follow Sky’s suit and host double and triple headers every Saturday and Sunday? It’s not like there’s anything else on. And this is the Championship, where every game means something, even if it’s contested between two teams who can only ever dream of trotting out at Croke Park. Why is television coverage limited to a few elite counties, the rest left to languish in a sporting netherworld, ignored unless they’re called upon to be whipping boy for one of the big guns?
There’s so much sport on television nowadays that we’ve become spoiled for choice; even the football never really ends, with some tournament or another filling the void until August. But our national games, our great games, continue to be served up sparingly, drip-fed lest we somehow overdose on excitement. Now, at the business end of the Championship, the games will come thick and fast, familiar foes locking horns on the biggest stage of them all. Yet I can’t help but mourn those games I never saw, those battles, those glories and those agonies, which, for all the world, might as well never have happened at all.
