Eimear Ryan: Facing the new year with the energy of the eternal GAA optimist
NEW YEAR NEW HOPE: Tipperary’s Michael Breen and Pauric Campion with Stephen Bennett of Waterford during Tuesday night's Munster Hurling League clash. Pic: INPHO/James Crombie
One of my favourite new year activities is populating the diary. This might be my Virgo organisational tendencies coming to the fore, but there’s something about a brand-new unmarked Moleskine that you then get to scrawl all over with dates to look forward to in the new year. A big part of this operation, in the quiet early days of January, is sporting events. With two World Cups in 2023 – rugby and women’s soccer – at which Ireland have skin in the game, you’d be champing at the bit.
But for GAA people, these tournaments are not the main event. Exciting novelties, sure; something to dive into obsessively for a month or so before migrating back to the meat and drink of hurling and football. And so I’ve carefully inked into my brand-new diary all the fixtures, both league and championship, of my native county Tipperary – and with the energy of the eternal optimist, the dates for the Munster final and the All-Ireland qualifiers too. No one wants to be finished up in May; as we speak, I’m burning some sage that Tipp’s 2023 season is more successful than the last.
We know by now not to take the league too seriously, but still we’re ravenous for content; it has, after all, been July since we’ve had any intercounty action. Give us some promising new blood, give us the lads and lassies on the Allianz League Sunday couch, give us a reason to start speculating wildly about the form of the current All-Ireland champions, or whether it is even considered desirable anymore to actually attempt to win the league, given the potential for burnout early in the year.
But before the league, there’s pre-season: those January competitions that serve as a pulse-check, a way of gauging gains since training started back in November, and a chance to scope out the panel of forty before first-team decisions are made. The GPA has called for pre-season competitions to be scrapped altogether, and perhaps with good reason; on the football side in particular, fixture lists for 2023 are perilously stacked. But it’s been six months since we’ve seen any intercounty action, and so we gathered round the laptop for Tipp’s opening Munster league fixture against Waterford on a gloomy, windy Tuesday night.
The first half had all the hallmarks of an early January fixture. Puffy jackets on the sideline. Visible clouds of breath in front of the players’ faces. Tipp’s struggles with the wind, which meant they still had only a solitary point on the board after almost twenty minutes, with shot after shot dropping short or tailing off wide. But after half-time, the game exploded into life. There was a bit of bite.
A sending-off, a saved penalty. Jason Forde’s goal and his wonder-point in the 59th minute, nearly single-handedly clawing Tipp’s way back into the match. Colin Dunford, in his tenth season, looking spry and speedy and hungry. Cian O’Dwyer’s first touch for his point in the 67th minute. The luxury of being able to bring in an Austin Gleeson or a Seamus Kennedy for a bit of razzle-dazzle at the end – though it was Paudie Fitzgerald, with two points from play, a yellow card and numerous possessions in the last five minutes, who made the biggest splash from the bench.
All in all, it was a stirring opening fixture, a good way to blow off the post-Christmas cobwebs at least. A concern for Tipp will be their small spread of scorers – four – and their reliance on the freetaker, which was also a feature of last year’s Munster championship campaign, whether it was Forde or Noel McGrath standing over the placed balls.
Waterford, by contrast, had three times as many scorers. But there were bright spots for Tipp, too – Conor Bowe made good headway in the inside forwards; Alan Tynan, recently of Munster rugby, put in a hardworking shift; and debutant goalkeeper Rhys Shelly did very well to get down and smother Stephen Bennett’s penalty. All in all, I was only too happy to give Munster GAA and StreamSport.ie my ten euros to stream the game.
This year, we will all become intimately acquainted with another streaming platform: GAA Go, which recently announced its championship slate for 2023. For the last eight years, GAA Go has been a carrier for RTÉ coverage: a mechanism for people abroad, without access to RTÉ Player, to watch matches for an annual subscription. But this year, as the platform slides into the gulf left by Sky Sports, GAA Go’s offering will feature original analysis, helmed by Gráinne McElwain and featuring the punditry stylings of Paddy Andrews, Eoin Cadogan, Seamus Hickey, Michael Murphy, Marc Ó Sé and Tommy Walsh.
The rub is that it’s behind a paywall, and the platform will have exclusive coverage of four Munster championship hurling games, as well as two Saturday All-Ireland quarter-finals. This means if we want to watch, say, Limerick and Clare in the Munster championship on 29 April, it will have to be via the GAA Go website or app. An early-bird bundle is still available (€59 for the year) with individual games costing €12. You would miss the heyday of free-to-air – but with the boon of more matches comes more choice, more competing coverage and more fixture clashes. It’s either a feast or a famine these days.
Right now, when you log into GAA Go, you can see a tempting back catalogue of All-Ireland club championship matches – all of which are, unfortunately, ‘Unavailable in ROI & NI’, as the sign says. We are used to being shut out of Hulu and BBC iPlayer for regional reasons, but it seems odd that a sport whose primary audience is on this island should be unavailable to Irish eyeballs. At the end of the day, what GAA fans want out of a streaming service is a vast library to dig into – a sort of on-demand version of TG4’s GAA Gold. Let’s hope GAA Go can evolve into that over time.
