Fans switch off as league suffers personality bypass
By the time everyone clicked through the turnstiles, HQ’s bean counters had registered a crowd of 24,941 for what was a fairly attractive bill of fare and yet it was an attendance that represented a drop of almost 4,000 on the numbers who had turned up at the same venue 10 weeks earlier when Dublin and Kildare were again among the star attractions on the day the league opened its doors.
That seems, well, just plain wrong.
You would think the numbers of people watching a Dublin side that romped through the last few months of the campaign would build rather than dissolve as the campaign grew legs. But, then, maybe those sorts of declining numbers say a lot about our attitude to the league.
Not just ours, as in punters, but those of teams which insist on leading it on like a half-wanted love interest and a GAA hierarchy which continues to fiddle while a competition that is theoretically their second most important burns brightly every February before fading away into irrelevance come the approach to summer.
Dublin’s numbers for the latest spring series seem to sum this up obligingly. Their crowd figures for the four group games read, in chronological order: 28,693; 21,156; 20,000; 10,825. Even when double bills are taken into account, it’s as if we can’t wait for the inter-county stuff to start before we realise that, you know what, we can hold out another six months, thank you very much.
Maybe I’ve overlooked something obvious here but, try as I might, I can’t think of another competition anywhere in the world that becomes less important to a winning team the further it progresses.
Maybe the Europa League, but even that and the League Cup in England assume a thin veneer of desirability for those clubs still involved as they funnel towards the end but not our National Leagues. There’s a whole heap of blame to be passed around here, but the inability to shed a disastrous image problem amongst the hearts and minds of Joe Public has been to the fore in condemning the league to a kind of sporting purgatory between the bookmarks of hardcore competition and the status of challenge match fluff.
It isn’t the first sporting entity to have laboured under an unfavourable rep, of course, but anyone who believes that it is a situation we have always put up with and always will could do worse than take in the events at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre this next two weeks and think back to the transformation snooker managed in the not so distant past.
For decades it wasn’t so much seen as a sport as a social ill. It was, in fact, little better than the Fagin of the games world, luringimpressionable young boys (mostly) into its smoky dens of iniquity and belching penniless, pale and no-good urchins back out onto the country’s street corners.
That all changed in the 1970s and ’80s thanks in no small part to colour TV and personalities like Alex Higgins. So much so that, as Martin Kelner records in his book Sit Down and Cheer: A History of Sport on TV, one BBC executive felt able to declare that it had become even bigger than football.
See, anything is possible.
No-one is making those claims for snooker now but, as Kelner put it, sport has always been sold on personalities — “from the Matthews final to Botham’s Ashes to Jonny Wilkinson’s World Cup” — and men like Barry Hearn and Clive Everton transformed snooker via the stardust of Higgins, Jimmy White and even the metronomic Steve Davis.
Gaelic games has never wanted for characters, of course, but it struck last Sunday having sat through another stultifying Dublin press conference that those personalities are being lost to the general public thanks to a widening distrust of the media among today’s players and coaches.
This may seem like a mere trifle and, come championship, it will be to most, but it marks a lost opportunity for the league which cannot trade so effortlessly on the raw emotion generated by the championship and thus needs all the help it can get if it is to escape from the doghouse.
