GAA must beef up its share of the media market

It was around teatime last Saturday evening when the old Twitter feed began to choke on messages from apoplectic colleagues in the press box at Wexford Park. Turned out Liam Dunne had made 13 personnel changes to the Wexford hurling team named during the week for the Leinster Championship hosting of the Dubs and seven positional changes besides. Incredulity reigned.

What it did was display yet again the idiocy of a policy that asks inter-county managers to show their hand anything up to four days before a game and long before the week’s training is near to being completed. Personally, I would have had no problem if Dunne had gone still further and named a few Rackards and Martin Storey in his dummy selection.

Yet, the GAA seems to have something of a bee in its bonnet about this. No less a figure than director general Paraic Duffy, a hugely impressive and capable operator, has asked the Liam Dunnes of this world to reveal their true lineups midweek as a means of publicising the association but there are far meatier issues to be addressed if the sport is to beef up its share of the media market.

Here we are in the midst of the championship season and yet a routine dissection of eight national newspapers yesterday revealed that, of 124 pages devoted to sport, the GAA was granted 24 while soccer — which is, lest we forget, more or less languishing in the tranquillity of its ‘off season’ — still managed to corner almost 38.

There is no blame to be divvied up here, no fingers are being pointed. The GAA’s top brass has consistently called for counties and, in particular, county managers, to cooperate with the media so that the association might achieve the maximum exposure for its games while those members of the Fourth Estate whose job it is to cover the sport full-time are an exceptionally capable and passionate bunch.

Some counties organise regular media events but the overall quilt is patchwork. The GAA is failing to punch its weight in this particular ring, partly because coverage has been sanitised by a succession of product launches where the same faces are wheeled out to give quotes and, more vexingly, a culture of Omerta that has spread through dressing-rooms island wide with alacrity in the last 10 years.

What that is doing is draining much of the colour from the games. The beauty of the GAA is that our heroes have always lived amongst us and yet we know less about more of them than we used to even though there are hundreds and thousands of great stories to be told and heard out there.

Just last week, London footballer Mark Gottsche and Laois hurler Cahir Healy gave two of the most enlightening interviews we are likely to bear witness to this year. The GAA and its sub-units simply has to find a way to channel more of these snapshots to the sporting public and the existing collectivised reluctance to make the media a core segment of life as an inter-county player simply has to change.

That isn’t a popular view to hold. Far from it. The party line among the vast majority in the GAA, and in the media itself, is that these hurlers and footballers are amateurs and simply can’t be told to give interviews: that it isn’t part of the package. But why isn’t it? Aren’t these guys the games’ most effective ambassadors?

No-one thinks twice about asking them to sacrifice up to five evenings a week as well as weekends for months on end, to effectively mould their entire lives around a championship campaign which works out at an average of only 3.5 games per summer per county. So why can’t we ask them to give an hour or so to promote the games, their counties and, God forbid, themselves now and again?

Think about it this way: Tyrone played the most championship games in any one All-Ireland campaign when they needed 10 to claim Sam Maguire five years ago. Had their panel been mandated to provide two players for an hour each the week before those fixtures then 20 would have had to go through it.

That isn’t even close to a full squad and it isn’t taking into account the fact that, with coaches on the roster as well, there wouldn’t even be a need for so many players anyway. And just to emphasise here: we’re talking about one hour or so. Sixty minutes or, to put into context, the amount of time it takes to play one club match.

Too much to ask? Really?

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