TV coverage comes with a warning for club players

In times past, pieces of magic may have drawn a few lines in a local paper’s match report the following week and been firmly consigned to history after that. But not anymore it seems, writes Mike Quirke.

As the winter approaches, the evenings creep in and the baseball caps turn to woolly ones. This has always been the time of the season for club championship competitions to take centre stage, but never before under as bright a spotlight as we’ve seen this year.

I’ve mentioned previously that I was involved in the management of Kerins O’Rahilly’s in Tralee. We navigated our way through some treacherous waters earlier in the season and into a semi-final of the senior county championship where we faced a South Kerry side who had claimed the title as recently as 2015. We were looking to reach the final for the first time in nine years. By the long whistle, our efforts came up short.

We lost by a single point, but in truth, we were deservedly beaten. And at any level, that’s a bitter pill to swallow.

You prepare all year, try to tick every box and be as diligent as you can be in terms of work and rest, but when guys go down with significant injuries inside the opening half hour it was always going to be a struggle for us to come out the right side of a game against a team that know how to get the job done in the crunch situations.

And I don’t mention the injuries by way of excuse; South Kerry were missing important players too. If you’re good enough, you overcome those obstacles and move on, and the better team did that on Saturday.

The Kerry senior championship can, at times, be a source of head-scratching for those outside the county looking in. Effectively, it offers every player in the county the opportunity to play senior championship with their local divisional side, regardless of their club being novice, junior or intermediate.

South Kerry would be one such division, where their squad is made up of players from the nine clubs in their divisional board. None of those clubs has senior championship status on their own so the divisional side is their representative senior county championship team.

I can recall getting to my first county championship semi-final back in the early noughties, and the game wasn’t even broadcast live on local radio. That seems like an ancient memory when one considers the fantastic live television coverage Eir Sport are now providing of club championship competitions from Kerry to Donegal and everywhere in between.

Unfortunately, the quality of fare on offer from Killarney probably won’t have done much for their ratings last weekend.

TG4 have long been the standard bearers of GAA coverage for club action, particularly on county final day, when they promoted the games and the players in a way that befitted the effort that it took for a team to reach that stage of the competition. They did it at a time when nobody cared hugely about promoting the club game.

Now, Eir Sport look like they’re pushing the boat out further again and have already shown either quarter and semi-final games from Donegal, Dublin and Kerry. With their use of local guys from the counties to do pitch-side analysis, it gives the production an even more informed feel to what is effectively a national audience.

Seeing the likes of Ryan McHugh, Diarmuid Connolly and David Moran among other county guys playing for their club instead of their county over the past few weeks, is like watching a David Attenborough documentary about animals you normally only see at the zoo, who’ve been released back out in their natural habitat in the wild.

Eir won the rights to televise up to 30 live football and hurling club championship games this season, and with the effort they are making to produce such a high-quality show, all they need now is for the standard of the games to match theirs.

While I’m completely on-board with promoting the club side of the association, and I feel this coverage is a big step in the right direction, it should also come with something of a warning for the club players.

Before, it was only the county guys who were under the scrutiny that comes with TV cameras, live analysis, social media clips and nationally televised games. Now, the ordinary Joes must adjust quickly to the higher degree of exposure.

Gooch is well used to it, but how many times has his left legged curled quick-free from the 13-metre line to the top corner of the West Kerry net been seen since Saturday evening? Or Danny O’Sullivan’s miraculous sliding goal-line clearance from a Bryan Sheehan piledriver?

In times past, both those pieces of magic may have drawn a few lines in a local paper’s match report the following week and been firmly consigned to history after that. But not anymore it seems.

For those of us knocked out, all that is left is to keep our head down, lick our wounds and try to make do with being able to watch all the animals roam freely in their jungle around the country from the comfort of our own couch.