Michael Moynihan: There’s a lot to be said for saying a lot

HEADS UP: Ian Power after riding Master McShee to victory in the the Paddy Power Handicap Hurdle at Leopardstown yesterday. Picture: Healy Racing

A question for you this morning. What’s your preferred platform for discussing your sport of choice?

Is it via Twitter? Is it Slack? Would you pontificate on LinkedIn? Are you part of a dedicated sports WhatsApp group? Do you FaceTime your pals when you want to dissect a game?

I ask because someone made a very good point to me recently: what if someone doesn’t use any of those outlets?

What if their preferred option is a chat over a pint, or after Mass, or at work, or via some other outlet which is now closed to them because of the lockdown?

The health benefits of sport are never knowingly understated, but the mental health benefits of discussing sport have hardly received the same level of airplay.

Whether that discussion takes the form of the harmless, performative venting which goes back and forth between people as they try to identify themselves as members of a particular tribe, or the detailed breakdown of technicalities beloved of those who give their lives to a particular sport, or whether your cup of tea is the phatic middle-class lubrication of fellowship, or the swapping of tips and insider information for the purposes of personal enrichment ... there’s a lot to be said for saying a lot.

The venues for such discussion are now fairly thin on the ground, due to the general responsibility to maintain social distancing.

This responsibility, of course, outweighs your burning desire to offload your sporting opinions, but the lack of a forum in which to offload same is a fair void in many people’s lives.

For many people, a sports event only becomes bedded into their consciousness when and if they get to talk to their friends about it — whether that’s just after the event, with all and sundry bathing in the warm afterglow of a communal experience, or a couple of days later, when pundits’ and commentators’ evaluations can themselves be weighed and evaluated in turn.

The problem for the last few months, of course, is that not only can you not get to the sports event in the first place, there are fewer and fewer opportunities available to chat about those events in person with other people.

Here I have to confess to a small regret.

For many years in this corner of the paper, I have pointed out that meaningless waffle about ye and us and them and that crowd and so on has taken the place of men talking about what they really feel. This is what a friend of mine describes as “your annual column where you want us all to cry with each other”. (That’s next week’s column, actually.)

What I should have acknowledged all along is that talking about your handicap or the Premier League or the county U20s was, of course, the only way in which a lot of people can reveal how they really feel. A bit like that Star Trek — The Next Generation episode where aliens can only communicate in metaphors (though with less talk about terrible administrators, am I right?).

This does not mean that seeing your mates in order to castigate the young lad from the club down the road for missing those frees is in some way a replacement for a full course of cognitive behavioural therapy, but the loss is still very real.

Whether your Christmas plans included Munster versus Leinster, the puc fada at your local GAA club, the Christmas horse racing, or the NFL Red Zone, those plans surely involved discussing all those events as much as witnessing them in the first place.

In time, normality will return, and so will your in-person sports discussions.

They’ll be welcome when they do.

Players are not alone in deserving some praise

Last Wednesday evening — that would be December 23 — I was at the Munster U20 hurling final between Tipperary and Cork in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

As another attendee said, to be at a provincial hurling final 36 hours before Christmas morning was a surreal experience in a year of surreal experiences.

Thanks, however, to all those who made it possible for those games to be played in the middle of a global pandemic. Doing so with skill and good humour at the venues themselves was duly noted and appreciated. Enjoy the break.

Mining for the positives

It’s striking to me that the ‘year like no other’ has seen sports suffering existential crises which aren’t directly related to the pandemic.

The concussion issue in rugby isn’t related to the coronavirus at all, for instance. The legal cases being taken by high-profile players such as former Rugby World Cup winner Steve Thompson are in their infancy, and it’s anybody’s guess as to where those will go and what they will uncover.

For instance, the fact that World Rugby chairman Bill Beamont himself retired from rugby on medical advice almost 40 years ago has been flagged by some as a tacit admission of the dangers of concussion.

In soccer, the challenge is more localised in Ireland.

The title of Mark Tighe and Paul Rowan’s bestselling book tells you everything you need to know. Champagne Football: John Delaney and the Betrayal of Irish Football: The Inside Story exposed a culture at the top of the FAI which could charitably be described as out of control, and which could accurately be described as a staggering disgrace.

Corporate governance is not as sexy as an account of someone’s 50th birthday party, complete with James Bond theme — but as a headache, it lasts much longer. The FAI’s ability to do its business properly was seriously questioned by the revelations in Champagne Football: does anyone think that the long hangover from the coronavirus will help or hinder its ability to get back on track?

In GAA terms, despite the defiant noises being made by Dubliners everywhere, the issue of competitive balance is a live one. The question of whether Dublin need to win 10 All-Irelands in a row before we see a significant intervention no longer seems outlandish, for instance (there are other questions, but this seems the most pressing).

Perhaps the coronavirus bears some responsibility here after all. The increased time for reflection in the last 10 or so months has allowed more focus to fall upon these issues, perhaps. It’s not what even the most positive among us could call a silver lining, but those are all subjects which are going to have to be addressed at some stage. Are we further along that path now than we would be otherwise have been, as a result of the pandemic?

The joy of meeting an old friend at Christmas

I had a look around on Christmas Eve for something to read over the holidays (pardon the exaggeration) and came up short until I stumbled across an old friend in the three-for-€12 section of the great Vibes and Scribes in Cork.

I first read The Name of the Rose a long, long time ago, and just seeing the new edition I found a few days ago was enough to bring me back in time, which is something only a special book can do.

I became a big fan of its writer, Umberto Eco, and his essays. I didn’t manage any of his other subsequent novels, mostly because in The Name of the Rose, he came up with a classic first time out.

Forget the movie with Sean Connery, the book’s a treat.

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