Sport simply has to be consumed live for us to care
Matthews does a decent job of selling his product, mostly by lauding the skill levels of the 13-man game and stressing the lack of stop-start scrums and lineouts that can, at times, make union appear more like a poorly edited collection of short stories rather than one coherent plot, but he signs off his pitch by adding that Irish people love it when our sports come with “a bit of biff”.
A day earlier, Laois footballer Colm Begley bemoaned the lack of physicality in the International Rules Series these days and he was backed up by Geelong’s Mathew Stokes and Brisbane’s Ashley McGrath when they ruminated on the bland fare that passes for a code which used to garner capacity crowds at Croke Park on the back of a physicality that so often spilled over into rancour and downright violence.
There’s no doubt then but that Matthews is on to something.
For years our national rugby union team was famed for a manic intensity and passion that manifested itself in 60 or so minutes of physical ferocity. That taught opponents the virtues of prudence, for an hour, and the near-guarantee that profit would ultimately be forthcoming against an emotionally drained Irish selection in the last quarter.
Even our national football side’s golden era between 1988 and 1994 can be summed up by Jack Charlton’s famous assertion to ‘Put ‘Em Under Pressure’ rather than any tactical or technical innovations and this despite the fact we possessed at the time the most talented collection of footballers in our nation’s history.
And yet...
Joe Ward and Jason Quigley, two of the nine boxers we sent out to Almaty to compete in the World Amateur Championships, woke up this morning contemplating the possibility of claiming gold in their respective divisions having already secured bronze medals at the very least and the response back home has been, well, non-existent really.
The lack of live TV coverage is an obvious target here with Ireland’s Olympic team manager Patsy McGonagle speaking for more than a few people when he was quoted in one daily newspaper criticising the national broadcaster’s failure to beam pictures into our homes today when Ward and Quigley attempt to make history.
Sport simply has to be consumed live. It’s why TV rights for the Premier League and every other glitzy gig still merit astronomical bidding wars among networks even though you can watch the latest wonder goal, gaffe or galling miss on your phone within minutes of its occurrence.
Watching cold cuts of Quigley and Ward after eleven o’clock just isn’t the same. It doesn’t inject that visceral thrill that comes with watching the action as it happens but should RTÉ really be blamed for their failure to show the tournament live from Almaty?
If it really is such a big deal to us all then there has been a conspicuous lack of incredulity and incandescence to match that of McGonagle’s among an Irish sporting public that delights in our pugilistic excellence at the Olympics once every four years but then pleads indifference thereafter.
There are other culprits here too. The IABA has been guilty of a systematic failure to build on the successes of Beijing and London. One suspects that if they had been able to arrange even a handful of high-profile events at the National Stadium or the O2 this last 15 or so months there may well have been something more of a clamour to secure live pictures from the worlds in Kazakhstan.
Or maybe it’s just boxing itself.
The sight of two men or women entering a ring with the expressed purpose of inflicting physical harm on the other is understandably anathema to a fair chunk of the population even if George Foreman once intoned that boxing was the sport that all others aspire to.
Maybe Paul Gallico, the iconic American sports writer and novelist who sparred with Jack Dempsey and founded the Golden Gloves competition in the US, summed up what many clearly think about the sport when he was quoted in ‘The Ignoble Art’ which was published way back in 1956.
“I have covered boxing, promoted it, watched it, thought about it, and after long reflection I cannot find a single thing good about it from the point of view of participant or spectator.”
Email: brendan.obrien@examiner.ie
Twitter: @Rackob
