Michael Moynihan: Looking at sport through a lens. Any lens.

Supporters watch the Dublin Senior Ladies Football Final from outside the ground Picture: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile

As I pound the footpaths on my morning walk I usually enjoy a podcast just to distract me from, well, absolutely every single thing I hear on the news.

One of my new favourites is Why Are Dads, which describes itself thus: “Sarah Marshall and Alex Steed attempt to understand what the hell it means to be the grown children of dads and other dad-like figures. And, as they do with all difficult subject matter, they do so by looking through a pop culture lens.”

With the movies Dirty Dancing and Jaws as their opening theses, you could say I was all in from the word go (Brody! Quint! The god that was Jerry Orbach!).

At one point on my stroll, waiting at the bottom of a hill as a gentleman in a large car COULD NOT MAKE UP HIS MIND as to which way to turn, I was thinking that ‘looking through a lens’ is a pretty good approach to a whole bunch of topics. In fact, the Marshall-Steed approach — which sounds like an adventurous option for tracheal surgery — works particularly well in sport because it’s such a rich Freudian text.

No matter what particular activity you think about, I guarantee that it’s strewn with examples of fathers pushing their sons and daughters to achieve. To finally bring to reality the dreams that they — the fathers — had themselves as kids.

This is an ancient theme, one that goes back to the originator of highly charged family dramas.

It’s not widely known, for instance, that when Sophocles was writing Oedipus Rex all those years ago, one of his early drafts had Oedipus as a marathon-runner who rebels against his father Laius’s plans for him (“I’ll never be what you want me to be, Dad!” screams a door-slamming Oedipus in that draft. Which shows that even the greats need to revise.)

Sports can also be filtered through a political lens because the conflict is just inherent. Same with economics. Not to mention the conflict between politics and economics.

Even the terminology bears that out. Your sport is a battle, a conflict, a war, where teams are led by warriors who are just the people you’d like with you in the trenches — but it’s also a numbers game, the stats don’t lie, and the scoreboard is always right.

We have what we have and it is what it is: sport is cruel but also brings us together, often at the same time, which is equally applicable to politics and economics.

This isn’t new, of course. The lazy position to adopt is that sport is war minus the shooting, as George Orwell said many years ago, but while I am reluctant to contradict the great man, I’m more inclined to see sport as politics, in particular, with all of the accompanying, and excruciating, committee meetings.

In fact, all of the contradictions inherent in politics have a parallel in sport.

The polite niceties observed by opponents who detest each other behind it all; the brief flash of action which comes after months of painstaking preparation, with an emphasis on the ‘pain’ part of that description; and the reliance on the masses to keep the whole . . .

Well, charade is the wrong word. Maybe a supreme fiction, a la Wallace Stevens, might be a better description: a system we can all tacitly agree on in order to preserve the way we’ve already agreed to do things.

(Don’t blink: following sports means all sorts of accommodations if you take a minute to consider them.)

The above doesn’t even begin to exhaust the lenses on offer for sport, of course.

It would take a braver man than your columnist to apply the lens of sexuality to sport with the distant thunder of the sports-trans debate beginning to sound beyond the horizon, but look at your sport of choice in the context of climate change. Or tech intrusion. Or podcasting, come to that.

How does Why Are Sports sound to you?

Bradley Wiggins. I ask you.

Bradley Wiggins, eh?

No, come back. My point in mentioning the cyclist is not to engage in some fun but essentially meaningless bluster about him.

It’s not to roll my eyes at his declaration that he’s a mod (why, some of my best friends etc), nor is it to ask how his devotion to sixties cardigans sits with the British parliamentary report stating he and his team ‘crossed an ethical line’ in using banned substances in 2012 while preparing for the Tour de France, which he duly won.

I’m not mentioning him to revisit some of his deeper insights, either (after that report was published he said, “What I should have done is murder someone because then I’d have had proper rights,”).

Nor am I overly concerned with his knighthood, which came some five years before that report was issued.

No, I am here to raise two points.

Last week Wiggins he said ‘you lot won’t like that’ when claiming Sam Bennett as British, but he was speaking to Sean Kelly.

How do you know Bradley wasn’t poking Kelly about Bennett being from the Tipperary rather than the Waterford side of Carrick-on-Suir? Well?

Point two. The reflexive eye-rolling when Bennett/Cillian Murphy/Katie Taylor/Paul Mescal are claimed as British is understandable, but instead of complaining, consider this.

Why does no-one ever claim a Brit as one of their own?

I hate to say I told you so (I don’t)

I don’t like to say ‘I told you so’.

I love to say ‘I told you so’.

Therefore it is with great pleasure that I direct your attention to a column I wrote about broadcasting sports events in February last year, and specifically: “The next step would be competition from other sources, probably from another vastly powerful company such as Amazon, which of course has its own content-providing broadcast service . . .” (I went on to mention Top Gear, for which I apologise.) 

My reason for mentioning this again? News that Channel 4 is broadcasting England’s clash with Ireland in the Autumn Nations Cup (in rugby) on November 21 — on free-to-air TV.

To do so, the British broadcaster has teamed up with Amazon Prime.

The Guardian added: “With Sky’s long-standing deal to show England’s November internationals now at an end, Amazon has a timely opportunity to flex its significant financial muscle and utilise rugby as a vehicle to attract new sofa-bound subscribers at a moment when stadiums remain largely empty.”

I know, lads. I know.

A surprising boom industry

If you can take it — and I don’t know if I can myself, honestly — then there’s a new book out about Donald Trump. This is a boom industry, which surprises me — I’d have thought people saw enough of him on the news.

But Bob Woodward of Watergate fame has once again landed a big fish with Rage, an account of the presidency which has already yielded (yet another) scandal about Trump downplaying the impact of the coronavirus.

If you want something lighter, though still with a nod to the current mess, try Carl Hiaasen’s Squeeze Me.

He’s spent decades chronicling the craziness of Florida, and this volume features a python with an appetite for supporters of a rabble-rousing president.

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