About time the great man had his own thread. (He probably already has one that I can’t find)
Latest installment here.
When people say, may you live in interesting times, I’m never sure if they mean it as a blessing or as a curse!
This is an interesting summer for the GAA. Good games. Good weather. Good final chapters to look forward to. All blessings.
It’s interesting too in another sense which may be more of a curse than a blessing. The relationship between the media who cover the games and those who cross the sideline to actually play them is declining in a way which should alarm everybody on either side of the divide.
Last season finished with the replayed All Ireland hurling final between Kilkenny and Galway and that great event was marked by a spurious attempt to turn a harmless remark in a long interview given by Joe Canning into a blood feud with Henry Shefflin. I’m sure Henry, if he read the original piece, knew the spirit in which Joe was speaking. I’m sure Joe’s conscience was clear. But he didn’t need the bother, the phone calls, the talk. Neither did Anthony Cunningham or Galway. So why would Galway players make themselves available again?
What inter county player didn’t look at that debacle and wonder why he should ever give an interview even to a journalist he knows and trusts if other journalists are going to lift lines out of context and turn them into ‘controversies’.
This summer you can smell the distrust. In the last few weeks things have gotten even worse. My friend Sean Óg, who has given as much to Cork hurling as just about anybody I know, is quoted as saying that there are fellas playing for Cork now who come from clubs that Sean Óg has never heard of.
I read that first and grinned. Anybody who knows the man would know that this was a little joke and not a little bitterness. First, Sean Óg is playing hurling and football for Na Piarsaigh since the time he could shave. He has been everywhere and played everywhere. Second, there isn’t a club, a school or a crossroads in the county of Cork where he hasn’t presented medals or given talks or taken coaching sessions on his own time, and free gratis may I add.
Spend an hour with Sean Óg anywhere. It’s impossible not to experience a person coming up and reminding him of the time he visited this hamlet and that village and Sean Óg saying things like “Oh yeah, are you the cousin of the man who wouldn’t go on in the junior semi final in 1976 because he had chicken pox.”
Sean Óg has clocked up more miles on the highways and byways than a rural farms inspector but the man was left twisting in the wind.
This week things got worse. I was out to dinner with a couple of past and present intercounty players on Friday night. Part of the conversation involved media, journalism, punditry, and entertainment versus analysis etc. On Saturday morning one of them sent me a link from a newspaper article saying ‘this sums it up’. I read of an unnamed “former star” being quoted on the woes of Cork hurling.
This courageous mystery man insulted Bernie O’Connor, John Allen, Donal O’Grady and pretty much every club coach in Cork with an unchallenged assertion about where Cork hurling had gone wrong. The ludicrous point he made wasn’t even put to Bernie, John or Donal for response. Is this a new low? Is this the future? Slating people anonymously? I thought that only happened in chat rooms, not newspapers.
Kieran McGeeney waded in this week giving expression to that old maxim of the dressing room that there are a lot of former players turned pundits who are far braver with a pen or microphone in front of them than they ever were with a number on their back. Kieran was a unique and spiky man as a player and he is the same as a manager. He’s also a phenomenally dedicated and interesting man. You can see though that there are people out there happy to give him a kicking and take cheap shots when the chance comes. Kieran deserves better.
Anybody who has made it to an intercounty dressing room as a player or a manager has a lifetime worth of home truths, disappointments and droppings for big games under their belt. They aren’t looking to be treated with kid gloves. Nor though are they £200,000 a week strikers who haven’t scored in months and spend their evenings in nite clubs with badly spelled names.
Criticism is fine. There is an undercurrent of malice in a lot of what gets written these days and a decline in ethics in some quarters. GAA players and teams could be more open. That openness demands responsibility from journalists though.
There is no point in sitting down and arguing about whose fault this impasse between the media and the dressing room is. We need to get together and agree that it is doing the GAA no good, it is doing players no good, it is doing media no good , it is doing sponsors no good and it is doing fans no good. We need to find a better way, otherwise the toxic world of the premiership and the tabloids is what we will end up with.
We just have to look at rugby. The game has done a brilliant job of selling itself to Ireland in the last ten years. Absolutely brilliant. Players are available. They accept media as part of the package. The big picture. The upshot of all that is that if you sat a roomful of kids down and showed them mugshots of the Irish rugby team and mugshots of the Kilkenny hurling team, one of the greatest sides ever to play the greatest game, I have no doubt that they would all recognise Henry Shefflin because he has always been media friendly but overall they would know more rugby players. That hurts. I’ve even heard of clubs getting rugby players in as celebrities to present end of year medals. Foot, meet Mr. Gun. Fire!
I played on a Cork side filled with big characters who seldom minded talking to the media. People had their opinions on us, they loved us or hated us but they knew the characters. The Rock, Corcoran, the twins Ben and Jerry, Sean Óg, John Gah, Joe Deane, Setanta when he was with us. They were big recognisable characters. They played with some fellas who preferred to keep themselves to themselves and that was grand but the game needs faces and stories that people can identify with.
Interesting times. Interesting times. Sometime soon we need to get back to basics. We have reached the stage where it is just so much easier for teams to give zero access (or limited access that sees the player getting a few bob and the media outlet mentioning some product that the player is wearing in exchange for that limited access) In that environment of zero access and co-operation standards are bound to fall and the space devoted to quality coverage of the GAA in the media will fall away.
There is a big picture. A sport with recognisable characters and personalities brings people through the gates and sponsors into the ring. It lifts the sport. You look at television these days and the only GAA players featuring on quality ads are the Gooch and Henry who have been open and talkative for many years. That’s good for Henry and the Gooch but it is good for the game too.
Imagine now that you are a publisher or an advertiser and looking to do a national project with a high profile current GAA player. Take Henry, the Gooch, Paul Galvin and maybe a few more out of the equation. How many instantly recognisable faces are you left to choose from?
This has been a great and interesting summer but some of the fun has been replaced by paranoia and bitterness. We in the GAA owe it to the games we love and to the paying customers and the next generation to do better, and the media owes it to its own ethics to try harder to be trusted.
We should be smarter than this. Media can be interesting. And not necessarily a curse. Just ask Drico or Paulie or ROG or Jonny or Simon
