Sky may be catalyst GAA needs for real change
Its opening game is Kilkenny-Offaly, a game you couldn’t get live on RTÉ last summer either. As it turned out that was a pretty decent contest but it hardly will be this year, not with Kilkenny looking to strike down upon everyone with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempted to poison and destroy their 2013, while Offaly have done nothing to rebut Ger Loughnane’s comments about the size of their legs and bums being fit only to flirt with Division 2.
A week after that then is Wexford-Dublin, a fixture RTÉ has probably televised enough over the last five years.
Then the following week it’s the turn of Connacht football, with Sligo from Division 3 playing Galway, who only avoided dropping to the same division by virtue of their head-to-head home win over Armagh. The kids will be heading in their droves to the pubs for that one, all right.
A week after that then is their last provincial championship fixture, an Ulster semi-final featuring either Armagh or Cavan — both passing each other from Division 2 to Division 3 — against either Monaghan, Tyrone or Down. That could be tasty. But would a league game featuring Cavan have got a look in on Setanta or TG4 the last two months?
Suffice to say you could hardly call any of Sky’s four provincial championship games ‘box office’.
All six provincial finals are exclusive to RTÉ. So is every game in the most attractive provincial championship of them all — Munster hurling. In Leinster, RTÉ still has the big one in Kilkenny-Galway. In Ulster football it has Tyrone-Down, the winner against Monaghan, and Derry-Donegal. Every Mayo game in their provincial championship will be shown by the national broadcaster as well.
In fact, other than a qualifier featuring Tyrone, maybe the Kilkenny-Tipperary qualifier and the much-discussed two All-Ireland football quarter-finals, there’s no meaningful televised game from last year that you’d miss this year if you weren’t able to access Sky.
Last year there were four All-Ireland round four football qualifiers and three of them weren’t televised live.
One of those included a gripping game between Cork and Galway in Croke Park, featuring an astonishing performance and goal from Micheal Meehan.
We’re talking about a last-12 game in the All-Ireland series; by process of elimination, one of the 10 most important football games of the year. Yet it wasn’t available on free-to-air TV. Who was up in arms about that?
At least with Sky in 2014, its equivalent will, though that’ll be about as box office as it will get on Sky prior to those gold-ticket All-Ireland football quarter-finals.
So, sorry if we’re a bit underwhelmed and unimpressed by all the fear and loathing that abounded last week.
We massively see the upside to Sky getting to broadcast and promote Gaelic Games. We’re excited about what its coverage will be like. But as for their exclusive schedule? Put it this way; TV3’s was a lot stronger last year.
The reality is it won’t be until well into July, if not August, before Sky gets its teeth into a game that will have the rest of us genuinely excited too.
It should have more to work with a lot earlier than that. But then that’s how our championships are structured.
We have a National League almost every week with top games. The weekend before last you had Dublin and Mayo produce another shootout and the next day Cork and Tyrone serve up another thrilling draw — 3-14 to 2-17; 2-14 to 0-20; who wouldn’t want the world to see games like that? But in May and June those teams will play nothing like each other and outside of Ulster no one else will either.
Instead, Sky will be broadcasting Sligo and Galway to the world.
Sky has made its reputation out of being able to promote Hull v Norwich just as easily as getting all hyped up about a United v Chelsea ‘Super Sunday’.
But it will be pushed harder than you think when the first two months of its championship coverage won’t feature a glimpse of the Dubs or Kerry or Cork or Mayo, teams we’ve seen routinely over the National League.
Yesterday, Paul Galvin tweeted on the anomaly and madness of Kerry now not having a competitive game for 11 weeks — and just how competitive that game will be is debatable.
You look at the drama from Omagh last Sunday, two top teams gunning it out for the play-offs.
Dublin now playing Cork this Sunday. What a schedule of games Jim Gavin’s men have had in just 14 days. And compare that then to their schedule of games in the Leinster championship, supposedly a more prestigious competition.
It doesn’t make much sense, and some day Sky will cop it and maybe help the GAA cop it too.
