Big game cameras put discipline in focus
This prompted a good deal of chat about the GAA’s need to market its games, the unexpected complications to a crowded fixture list thrown up by replays and the irony of a top game not being broadcast on live TV just a few short months after a good deal of nonsense was being spouted about the scope of, well, broadcasting deals.
There are a couple of interesting angles here.
First, consider the difference in focus on a game that’s televised with the full bells-and-whistles of detailed analysis and multiple camera angles and one like last Saturday night’s replay in Tullamore, shorn of that kind of minute examination.
Certainly a player like Brian O’Sullivan of Waterford could be forgiven for harrumphing loudly at the divergence between the depth of coverage of the two games.
O’Sullivan picked up a suspension for striking Damien Cahalane against Cork in the Munster championship, something missed by the officials on the day and almost every spectator, but which became the focus of much attention on The Sunday Game.
As a consequence, the Ballygunner forward spent Saturday evening in his tracksuit in Walsh Park twiddling his thumbs rather than lining out for Waterford. O’Sullivan would have a very strong case for saying a player is at a disciplinary disadvantage if he transgresses in a game covered exhaustively compared to a sinner in one of those off-Broadway shows.
The GAA maintains a very strong and consistent line in denying its disciplinary initiatives are influenced in any way by media coverage, but there’s a strong correlation between retrospective punishments and the focus of pundits on Sunday night’s television. Forget the two-speed championship: what about the two-speed disciplinary system?
Another angle on this is the plethora of sports events that were on Saturday last, pushing Galway-Kilkenny out of the TV reckoning: the World Cup and the Derby, well established in the schedule planners’ minds, took precedence, and there are only so many sports channels available.
RTÉ may be already changing that landscape slightly, however. If you watch much BB, you’ll notice that the big sports events across the water tend to pop up on the big channel, BBC1, and it looks like the long-term plan for RTÉ is something similar: move the marquee events to the main channel.
That might not have a huge impact on your viewing habits now, other than potentially cutting the number of buttons you need to poke on the remote, but it could have implications for the amount and quality of sports coverage. Not to mention its implications for RTÉ’s second TV channel.
Finally, for all the pay-per-view talk we’ve heard in the last few weeks, what is GAAGO but pay-per-view?
Last week in these pages Dónal Óg Cusack made a strong plea for understanding when it comes to Suarez, a call that seems to have been heeded in many cases – the sense that someone who bites opponents is a person who needs help is one shared by many. In and of itself this is progress. It is not so long ago, after all, that a top professional with one of the biggest Premier League clubs saying he was depressed found his manager completely nonplussed because he couldn’t understand why an individual being well paid could possibly be depressed.
That manager’s lack of sympathy would not be acceptable these days, which shows that attitudes can change relatively quickly after all.
I mentioned Waterford’s Brian O’Sullivan elsewhere on this page, and I raise his case here again for another reason. Last week John Fogarty of this parish pointed out not only had O’Sullivan been suspended, the deadline for a possible appeal had passed by the time Waterford officials informed the forward of the sanction against him.
This was an extraordinary lapse by officials in Waterford. It’s customary for the fourth estate to criticise officials and management for defending the indefensible in disciplinary lapses, but at least in those cases a defence is being offered. The message given to O’Sullivan and his teammates is benign neglect at best, and willful disregard at worst.
When some Northern counties appeal disciplinary measures they arrive to hearings in numbers and often have a barrister in tow, all to support their player. It doesn’t necessarily sway the judges, but it shows the player in question he has full county backing, everyone’s on the same page. Waterford had too much for Laois on Saturday night and O’Sullivan’s absence wasn’t an issue, but that’s hardly the point. Winning championship games is hard enough without your own tying one hand behind your back.
The buzz-word, or buzz-term, nowadays when it comes to discussing — or to be more candid, criticising — referees is that such-and-such is “refereeing to the assessor”. This is the widespread belief that many referees in hurling and Gaelic football are not using their common sense when applying the rule-book, but applying that rule-book with too much focus on what those referee assessors are seeking when they compile their reports on officials’ performances.
It’s an attractive theory, and given the significance of assessments and evaluations in all our lives, an easy one to believe in. Could it be, though, we are also seeing players behave according to external evaluation in games?
We all know the huge emphasis on stats in the GAA now — one terrific example came to light in Lar Corbett’s autobiography, when the Tipperary hurler recalled badgering then-manager Liam Sheedy because he — Corbett — wanted to be credited with a tackle he’d put in during a relatively inconsequential pre-season game.
In doing so, Corbett was only alerting us to the weight players and management attach to the statistical breakdown after matches. It’s easy to understand the appeal of the numbers: they’re incontrovertible, empirical, black and white. If you’re not being recorded making tackles, then your work-rate just isn’t good enough.
What’s worrying, though, is whether that kind of thinking is tweaking player views. Imagine for a minute you’re a wing-forward on a football side, breaking inside the 45. The shot is at the outer margins of your range, but you see the team’s star forward making a run for your pass.
He’s being double-teamed, though, and if you lob the ball into him, he’ll be vaporised.
Now: the team could do with a score. You should really have a go for it. But it’s safer to try a pass to the team’s star forward. If he collects the ball, it’s bouquets for everyone; if he doesn’t, the black tick at the post-game debrief comes after his name, not yours.
An unlikely scenario? I’m not sure.
