Far from being “just a laugh”, the manner in which Paddy Power has made eejits of Tonga’s rugby players is dead-eyed opportunism of the worst kind, argues Barry Glendenning.
You’ve got to love Paddy Power. Not content with persuading Tonga centre Epeli Taione to change his name by deed poll to that of their company and subsequently basking in the oceans of free publicity generated by the tawdry stunt, the Irish bookmaking firm were set to make gobshites of the entire Tongan squad against England tonight by sending them out to play the most important rugby match of their lives with green hair.
“In Tonga, green is the colour of new beginnings and we also wanted to tap into the whole ‘luck of the Irish’ thing,” tooralooed the firm’s public face, Paddy Power (as opposed to the Tongan rugby player of the same name) yesterday, displaying an impressive grasp of the island kingdom’s culture, but a staggering ignorance of his own country’s recent travails. “It’s just a bit of fun, really.”
Hmm. The more cynical among us might argue that it’s a classic case of dead-eyed opportunism at the expense of a poverty-stricken rugby team willing to do anything, no matter how demeaning, to please the sponsors that handed them a five-figure sum when it became apparent that penury would preclude them from participating in the Rugby World Cup.
It’s worth noting that Paddy Power make somewhere in the region of 50m profit per annum, so a five-figure sponsorship deal, while generous, is probably the kind of chump-change they keep in petty cash. Nevertheless, when I asked him exactly how much of a dig-out his company had given the Tongans, Power was not prepared to divulge whether it was at the 10,000 or 99,999 end of the scale. Whatever the figure, the bookie had more than got their money’s worth in free column inches long before they sent an Irish barber to Tonga HQ with a big bucket of green hair dye and a publicist by the name of Adam Perrin in tow.
“It’s just a laugh and we hope people don’t take it too seriously,” said Perrin, getting in his retaliation against cynical curmudgeons like yours truly early doors. Of course what Perrin doesn’t know is that much of this curmudgeon’s cynicism can be traced back to a career slump spent working for one of Paddy Power’s high street rivals. Many lessons were learned during this depressing period, the main one being that major high street bookmakers don’t do giggles. Instead, they prefer to focus solely on the deadly serious business of attracting as many punters as possible and relieving of them of all their money.
In the bookmaking industry, Paddy Power have long been peerless when it comes to serious self-promotion masquerading as matey high jinx. Whether it’s offering football fans outside Wembley free hamburgers or erecting controversial billboards spoofing Leonardo da Vinci’s last supper, the Irish firm has never been shy when it comes to clambering aboard the bandwagon du jour.
To be fair, their generally harmless antics are the kind of lame-assed japery you’d expect from hucksters who have long promoted themselves as the showbiz bookie with a self-styled “ironic Irish humour”. But in attempting to make a freak show of a Tonga team that was only the bounce of a ball away from beating South Africa last weekend - the IRB has since interceded and put a stop to their self-serving gallop - they went too far.
“We didn’t force them to dye their hair green,” said Paddy Power yesterday in one of the more surreal telephone conversations I’ve ever had. When I inquired if it was his firm’s idea, he claimed not to know. “I think it was a mutual decision,” he said, leaving me to conclude correctly or incorrectly that it may have been more mutual on the part of Paddy Power than the Tongans.
If Paddy Power really want to support Tongan rugby, they should pour some of their massive profits into developing the game on the Pacific island. Sadly, that probably wouldn’t garner the requisite publicity, so it’s likely to be, in bookies’ parlance, a non-runner.
Taking the low-rent, high-yield option of sponsoring a team they presumed would be minnows in the same pool as the team representing their target market under the pretext of generating a bit of craic serves only to show that no matter how many millions of pounds profit Paddy Power make each year, they’ll never, ever be able to buy class.
Barry Glendenning will be losing money hand over fist during tonight’s Tonga v England match on a well-known betting exchange. He suggests the punters among you do the same
