Michael Moynihan: Ronan Glynn’s comments a classic error in managing the message

Dr Ronan Glynn, deputy chief medical officer, during a press briefing at Government Buildings. Photo: Julien Behal Photography/PA

Here’s one I didn’t see coming.

Last week we had yet another briefing, during which Deputy CMO Dr Ronan Glynn said: “If every individual can do just that little bit more over the next few weeks we will stop another wave.”

Paul Hosford of this parish pointed out that this was the equivalent to “shouting ‘lift it’ at your team when you’re down 3-0.”

He’s right.

It’s a sorry state of affairs when the most debased level of human discourse in existence, the random word salad we get from sports figures, is on a par with expert advice on how to survive a once-in-a-century pandemic.

You’d expect the latter would be a little better. More informed. More focused.

After all, most coaching types would probably acknowledge that they’re post-encouragement, that they’ve reached some location out beyond the land of cheery non sequiturs.

If you’ve spent any time on a sideline, even if it’s watching under-tens trying to work out if they need to change what direction they’re playing after half-time, then you notice that standards have risen when it comes to managerial input.

Vagueness is out. Detail is in.

Roaring at players to drive it on, or even to come on to f—k, is really the province of the spectator now.

The anguished dad or anxious grandparent can maybe get away with some variation of ‘be better at what it is that you’re doing right now’, but not someone who’s present in an official capacity.

The coach can’t get away with that kind of nonsense, because players want something specific they can apply to the situation in front of them. Even those under-tens.

What’s worrying is that Ronan Glynn’s comments can also be filed under one of the classic errors.

When a coach produces a version of “if every individual can do just that little bit more” in the dressing-room, then he or she acknowledges a profound truth.

Not every individual has been doing their best all along.

The effect then is to underline this fact and to bring it home to those who are trying everything that they’re being left down by some of their teammates.

Jock Stein was fond of saying that management consisted of keeping the players who didn’t like you away from those who hadn’t made up their minds yet: asking every player to work a little harder reinforces the message that some players aren’t working as hard as they can but also makes up every player’s mind pretty fast about the person giving that message.

Glynn has a couple of options that I can see.

He could take his lead from the usual scenario in which these kinds of comments are delivered, which involves a harassed-looking individual in a team tracksuit top being braced by hacks posing one of the most basic questions in sportswriting (“What did you say to them at half-time?”).

The better coaches usually say that they left it to the players themselves to come up with an answer, which would be a risky enough approach after an NHL game/PRO14/Airtricity League game, let alone a medical professional in a national lockdown.

However, the alternative is to adopt the persona of a player sent to face the press pack after a particularly disappointing display.

When braced with one of the other basic questions in sportswriting (“What happened out there?”), Glynn could then offer a simple answer.

Ask the gaffer.

Will a traditional broadcaster step in to fill void left by eir?

It appears that eir Sport is going to leave the sports broadcasting sector, largely because of financial losses sustained during the pandemic.

It didn’t bid for broadcast rights for this season’s Airtricity League, while its exit from sports broadcasting also has implications for PRO14 rugby and inter county GAA coverage.

And for the rights-holders in those sports. It means one less suitor when those deals come up for renewal, which is never good news for governing bodies in sport.

Croke Park will also be looking at eir Sport’s role as a sponsor of the All-Ireland football championship, a deal that runs through to the 2022 season.

An interesting comparison might be the broadcasting deal agreed last week for American football, with CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN and Amazon collectively agreeing a deal with the NFL worth about $110 billion (approximately €92.5 billion) over 11 years, nearly doubling the value of its previous contracts.

This is not to make some kind of point about the size of the sums on offer in Irish broadcasting rights in comparison (a best guess for the RTÉ/Sky deal signed five years ago would be around the €55m mark).

What’s interesting is that the rights holders in the US are in the main traditional TV networks with the exception of Amazon.

All the organisations concerned are making the noises one would expect about the migration to streaming platforms, but the power of NFL games for those traditional TV networks can’t be understated.

The top three TV programmes in America in 2019-20 were NFL games on CBS, Fox and ESPN, after all.

Which leads me back to eir Sport’s departure from the Irish market. Will there be another entry to replace them?

And if so, will it be a traditional broadcaster or a streaming service trying to get ahead of those traditional broadcasters?

Sport never stops, but neither does gambling

Presumably the fact that Cheltenham was on last week explains why there seemed to be gambling ads everywhere. I say ‘seemed’ because if anything the promotion of gambling is constant, and doesn’t peak around particular events.

There’s one particularly striking TV spot which shows an entire family having great fun watching the racing, complete with granny pretending to whip her horse to victory. It’s a pretty obvious attempt to paint gambling as the kind of fun everyone can have together with no harm done to anybody.

I was reminded of this by the sudden shutdown last week of Football Index, described in British outlets as a betting firm regulated by the Gambling Commission “but its website and business model mirrored a market-making platform for derivatives trading.”

For all that mirroring, a report sent to the Gambling Commission said the site “has led to unparalleled levels of irresponsible gambling behaviour from 10,000s of users misled into believing they are investing rather than gambling, with little or no consideration that all of their money is at risk”.

The reckoning with gambling approacheth ever closer.

Yuri the spacer

I’d seen good reviews of Beyond: The Astonishing True Story of the First Human to Leave our Planet and Journey Into Space (catchy) by Stephen Walker and was thinking it was a possible until I stumbled across this throwaway fact about Yuri Gagarin in one of those reviews.

As a small child growing up near Moscow Gagarin saw invading Nazis occupied his house during the Second World War: He and his family lived in a tiny hovel out the back. One morning Yuri came out to see his brother Boris had been hanged from a tree by one of those Nazis: He ran back into the hovel to get his mother, who cut Boris down just in time.

Sounds like the kind of chap who wouldn’t be stressed by the prospect of a rocket to space.

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