NFL may be Marmite but Dublin’s first taste goes down a treat
Wide receiver DK Metcalf #4 of Pittsburgh Steelers celebrates his side making an interception. Pic: Seb Daly/Sportsfile
It started early Sunday morning with the sight of a guy in a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey filling his tank at a petrol station near Kill on the N6.
There was the cyclist in a George Kittle San Francisco 49ers shirt pedalling along the Navan Road and, after that, the woman in the Minnesota Vikings colours taking a photo of the church on Iona Road.
This was all before we got close to Croke Park. Surreal doesn’t describe it.
Ireland is well accustomed to the role of host to the wider world.
The pitch – apologies, the field - used for the first ever NFL regular-season game on this island was laid straight after Oasis had played the second of their summer concerts at GAA HQ, so this was one Marmite global behemoth giving way to another at the home of our indigenous sports.
There are reasons not to like this latest visit.
Not close-minded, idealised and skewed reasons borne of a ‘no foreign sports in Croke Park’ variety so much as a merited wariness of a sport and a business that has been platformed for the US military in the latter’s efforts to normalise its role in everyday society and more besides.
The NFL is a multi-billion-dollar industry run by a small and powerful cabal. Team owners have habitually strong-armed local authorities to cough up millions for stadia or risk losing their franchises to other ‘markets’.
The NFL is rampant, rapacious capitalism made flesh, and it is following a long-standing American tradition in extending this reach abroad.
But try telling that to any of the 74,000 people on Dublin’s northside.
Cognitive dissonance is stitched into the experience of consuming sport on any sort of wider stage.
The World Cup in Qatar in 2022 was the perfect case in point. Most here won’t have cared for moral or geopolitical qualms; others will vehemently disagree with them. Some will struggle for balance between the enjoyment of the spectacle and a troubled conscience.
Dave Zirin, an author and journalist who drills deep into the links between politics and sport, warned us about how the NFL was here to plant a flag.
What we got was a 40-yard-long Stars and Stripes stretched over the field as the Star Spangled Banner was twanged out by country and western singer Robert Mizzell.
Amhrán na bhFiann was delivered by Lyra, otherwise known as Laura McNamara, wearing an American football-themed dress with the sort of shoulder pads that could have earned her a tryout with the Green Bay Packers. Everything here was a little bit of America stitched into the Irish frame.
K9 sniffer dogs patrolled the entrances into the Hogan Stand. ATG surface guards, the barriers that block rogue vehicles, created a ring around the stadium.
Even the Gardai’s baseball caps, some of them paired with FBI-style rainjackets, all blurred into a takeover of a ground where a flimsy wristband usually makes up the height of security.
That extended into the interior.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, talking in Dublin on Saturday, explained how a 10% share of American fans is the norm for International Games around the world, and how the figure for this particular stop was up around the 30% marker.
You could see that and feel it in an atmosphere that leaned closer to the Stateside experience than London or Sao Paolo.
In truth, it worked on an entertainment level as a mix of Irishness and Americana. The entire stadium belted out ‘Zombie’ and the ‘Wild Rover’ as Steelers fans twirled their famous Terrible Towels.
Chicago Bears superfan Bill Murray struck a gloriously ‘Groundhog Day’ note of churlishness when telling Irish TV that he was rooting against both teams.
Galway band CLADA rattled out a succession of high-intensity traditional tunes from a lit-up corner of a seated, but not quite full, Hill 16 into which the Vikings attacked in the first and third quarters.
Now there’s a sentence no-one saw being written until now. This was modern realsportpolitik as packaged for the masses.
It beggars belief that the NFL will have spent this much time in building so many interpersonal and logistical ties with Croke Park, the GAA, Dublin City Council and the Irish government not to make use of them again down the line.
Game day hadn’t even dawned when Goodell was expressing with certainty that “we’ll be back,” but there are more worlds yet to be conquered.
He gave notice of the next staging posts in declaring how the league will move on from a planned debut in Australia next year by making landfall in Asia for the first time after it.
The Middle East, the magnetic centre for modern sport’s challenged skewed compass, is being mentioned. This is how it is. Like it or love it.
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