This GAAGO fiasco dominated discussion on the Premier Sports Radio show in the country on Tipp MWR this morning.
Andy Lacey who is in his 80’s now but was a top man in his time and was a huge ally of Babs Krating when the Tipperary Supporters Club was set up over 35 years ago, was apoplectic that a Tipp v Cork Munster Championship game could be shoehorned in at 7pm on a Saturday night on an online streaming service.
Its absolutely bonkers stuff when you think about it.
More people will be watching Munster v Glasgow in gods know what competition tonight than cork v Tipperary which is meant to be one of the Crown Jewels in the hurling crown.
The U20 football All Ireland semi finals will have 10x the viewership on TG4 than the hurling from Croke Park and Cork.
Wexford were shit most of the time anyway so what’s the problem exactly?
That’s not true.
It’s hilarious to see posters slag off rugby when the gaa is doing the exact same shit as rugby did which ruined it.
There’s way too many games.
Nobody knows when the games are on.
When rugby was at its most popular the season was simple. You’d the two early European games in early October. The autumn international and then the back to the back games in Christmas which were always great and would attract a huge crowd and get new people interested.
The Heineken cup group stage ended in January. Into the six nations and a weeks break and you’d the 1/4 finals.
It was absolutely simple to follow and brilliant to watch. Now nobody’s knows when the games are on or how to follow the pools or what Chanel the games are on.
They’re going the exact same route with the gaa.
Utterly destroying it for no reason.
Yes it is.
I find even the fixtures page on the GAA website is poorly enough laid out. They seem more interested in displaying massive county crests on the page than in giving you the fixtures in easy to digest form.
RTE’s GAA fixtures page is a joke. You have to open a different page for the fixtures in each provincial championship and then the fixtures for non-provincial championship games are on a different page again.
Time windows in the year and regular time slots in terms of time of day are everything.
Ye Olde Heineken Cup got that just right. In its early years it was a case study in how to properly promote a sporting competition. Then it lost the run of itself. Giving exclusive UK rights to Sky in 2003 was the first retrograde step. Then RTE lost Irish rights in 2006, a massive step backwards for the competition in this country.
But at least a lot of people did have Sky, there was only one pay TV sports network, people weren’t particularly confused. Then the competition rebranded in 2014. Nobody knew what it was any more. And then it went to BT. Few people have BT or even know what it is. A rebranded competition, out of sight, out of mind.
The seeds of the Heineken Cup’s destruction were sown with the those decisions in 2003 and 2006 and exacerbated by every decision since. Only with the passage of time can you fully examine how decisions taken years previously do long term damage.
The PDC World Darts Championship* is the other sporting competition of the last 20-30 years which is a case study in how to build something. It was built mainly on one thing - identifying a time window where it could create a niche for itself. Provide endless coverage in that time window and dominate it. That time window was Christmas. Now, for a lot of people, Christmas is darts.
The GAA was the summer. The GAA was September. Once the inter-county season ended, that was the end of the summer. Con Houlihan always said, “the night of the All-Ireland football final is the first night of winter”. Now the inter-county season is a spring blitz. To give up that competitive advantage is suicide.
*Even if it’s a fake World Championship.
You’d be emotional reading that.
I just don’t understand why the gaa have done this.
It has nothing to do with helping the clubs because this will finish off the clubs over time. Limerick v Clare and Clare v tipp are the games that enthral kids but now they’ve disappeared.
They’ve totally overestimated the strength of their product. 12k at Galway v Kilkenny in Nowlan Is simply shocking.
Rugby starting to bring the games back to terrestrial TV as well now and the GAA with a much tinier market going the opposite direction
Massive undertaking underway involving people in different counties & countries trying to get GAAGO activated on my 80-year father’s laptop. If the GAA cared one iota about the older generation then they’d have games promotion officers calling to their homes to help set it up. We’ll have some job trying to get a working stream on the laptop, never mind casting this evening’s games to his telly. Trying to explain pop up blockers to him here now. This split season is beyond cruel.
I’ve just given my own father a crash course on the iPad there as I’m off to Cork on the piss for the evening and wont be around if and when things go wrong…
I’ve warned about pop ups, pause buttons, buffering etc but being realistic there is absolutely zero chance of this working out without a hitch and I’m in for an unmerciful bollocking tomorrow.
But this is what the split season zealots wanted of course.
Similar experience with my own father. An avid GAA man. The stress that streaming a match now causes him is genuinely not good for him. Cruel is the word.
The church has collapsed in this country but the holier than thou attitude is alive and well and has shifted to items like this. The ‘fior Gael’s’ demanded that we give up everything that was built in the previous 120 years. The fior gaels wanted us all to know just how much they cared about Paudie the junior B plodder.
What we’ve got is this absolute mess. Tinkering for tinkering sake has caused permanent damage. People lose interest when a competition is constantly changed. The constant change tells us that it’s not actually a serious competition and maybe no longer even worthwhile.
The self sabotage here is staggering.
I think sending them down a bag of penknives is the way to go myself
My trying to convince my dad to go to the pub to watch it as he’s chronic broadband. He won’t entertain it so far.
Are they on today? Christ there’s very little talk about them. The U21 football never quite captured the imagination in the same way as the hurling due to scheduling but it was still a competition which piqued most GAA Gaels interests. This year it should be BOX OFFICE with Sligo, Kildare and Down in the final 4. But not a peep about it in the media.
I’m glad my auld lad is up here this evening and I can have the match on for him. I’ve tickets for him for the next two championship games. He tried watching second half with my sister casting it off the fucking phone with their shit internet for the first game. As he said himself, not every match has to be on telly. There are other solutions - I really enjoyed the Clare FM commentary last weekend, for instance. But there needs to be better options for how older rural folk can access matches that are broadcast.
Don’t let Anybody tell you this was about helping the clubs out. If they wanted to help the clubs they’d to reduce the inter county season and put manners on the inter county managers. Instead they gave the managers Carte Blanche and expanded an already bloated season.
How many season ending injuries have we had thanks to the mini blitz ?
There are several pathological psychological mindsets involved in this fiasco.
The idea of “fairness” - an ideology borrowed from nouveau American ideas of parenting. This all started with the removal of knockout in 1997. The children cried “It’s not fair that players train all winter for one game”. The over-tolerant parents gave in. “OK, OK, you can have more games. You can have more ice cream.” That was the start of the problem. Life is not fair. The GAA was never supposed to be fair. Suddenly everybody wanted ”fairness”, ie. more games. And the delicate eco-system began to unbalance. The gas thing was that as soon as the qualifiers came in, players in various counties decided they didn’t want more games, and left panels left, right and centre.
The idea of “pureness”, an ideology borrowed from far right politics. “To hell with what anybody else thinks, the only people we should care about are the club players!” Literal slogans were produced which borrowed from cult like fascism. “Of One Belief”. Absolute nutters. “Event junkies” were vilified. The GAA NEEDS event junkies. Munster finals and Ulster finals All-Ireland finals became what they were precisely because of event junkies. Event junkies have always existed. They are the lifeblood of spectator sport.
The zeal of the convert. The GAA spent over 100 years thinking all change was bad. Then it suddenly converted to the following idea:
The idea that change is always good, borrowed from Silicon Valley accelerationist nutcases. Burn it down! Technology! No more physical tickets! No cash! Online only! Cast to television! 77 year old Johnny in Ahascragh who’s hobbling around on a walking stick can now simply cast to television! Johnny is scared.
The idea that perfection was attainable. It isn’t. Once you go fucking around, find out, as they say on Twitter nowadays.
The idea that Twitter could come up with a perfect solution. Idiots who believed in the wisdom of crowds. Crowds are fucking idiots, especially Twitter crowds, especially Twitter crowds led by demagogues.
The total lack of understanding of the Irish psyche. The reality is, we don’t want rationality. We want chaos and absurdity. “The club will be where it should be in July and August, at the centre of Irish life”, said the Of One Beliefers. The club players said they wanted to go on holidays and the inter-county players said they’d prefer to play in Chicago and go on the booze rather than go back to their clubs.
The idea that “so and so said this, so that ends the debate.” Some club player said it suits him. So fuck away the traditions of the GAA on the say so of some 22 year old thicko who idolises Conor McGregor and writes entirely thru txtspk.
The idea that instead of tackling the causes of a problem, you tackle the symptoms. “The gaps between the strong counties and the weak counties are getting ever wider. Instead of trying to make the weaker counties more competitive and check the dominance of the strong counties, let’s get rid of the weaker counties, let’s silo them amongst each other, and dress it up as progress!”
The idea of pissing off your customers, borrowed from Michael O’Leary. “We’re so strong that we can do whatever we want! Not happy? Well, feck off! We don’t need you!”
So now we have a bizarre alliance of backward looking Fíor Gael purists and Elon O’Musk style burn it down accelerationist cultists, and they’re bringing us the pig which is GAA Brexit.
And we’re supposed to bow down at their altar. Feck off.
Am i reading this right, if we abort the split season and return to the old time frame then GAAGO will work for people?