Now back to the real business

Diarmuid O'Flynn

The All-Ireland semi-finals fill the championship horizon, with Wexford battling against Cork before Tipperary and Kilkenny step into the Croke Park ring tomorrow.

The latter three can rightly claim to be the marquee names in hurling, the podium finishers in the list of All-Ireland titles won, while Wexford are supplying the romantic interest, with every chance of upstaging the others.

This is the stuff that the GAA is sculpted from, that childhood memories are shaped by, a marketing masterpiece.

Or at least it should have been.

In a week when they've railed about the manner in which a bookmaker has tried to piggyback on the success of the hurling championship, the continued failure by the GAA to market its own product is an absolute scandal.

Liam Sheedy is a guy who's played at the top level for Tipperary, winning an All-Ireland with them in 2001. He will be involved again this Sunday as a selector, attempting to topple reigning champions Kilkenny.

As commentator with Tipp FM for last Sunday's drawn Cork/Wexford game, he has this to say: "Definitely, we saw it again last weekend, we're playing the best game in the world. We'd all love to be still hurling, but it's great to be involved at any level. Hopefully we'll get two games like that this weekend also."

Of course Liam won't give a damn if Sunday's contest is a dour, low-scoring, bad-tempered, free-ridden affair, as long as his team comes out the other end with a win, but that's not the point. The fact is that in the lead-up to this weekend, hurling fans are salivating at the prospect of two terrific games. Among themselves they talk, discuss, argue, pronounce, predict and prognosticate. Will Wexford recover in time from last Sunday? Will their older warriors have the legs again? Will Cork come out of the blocks in better shape this time? Do they really have the potential the experts seem to think they have, or is Munster overblown? Is Sunday's game the real All-Ireland final? Are these two that far ahead of the rest?

Anywhere you go in hurling country, even encroaching into gaelic football/rugby/soccer territory, these two games are being discussed. Radio, TV, newspapers, it's all in there, crossing over occasionally even into the mainstream news. Yet in all of this, where is the GAA's own promotion?

'Tinkers' was what straight-talking Wexford captain Paul Codd said the GAA would be if, as was threatened, they suspended the players who took a reported €750 each for sporting the name of that bookmaking firm on their hurleys last Sunday. Wrong, Paul. As I recall, tinkers were a wizard breed, took a piece of nothing and made something of it. The GAA are the opposite, take something of absolute brilliance and make nothing of it.

"Amateur game, amateur game" we hear the same bleating tune over and over. Amateur alright, amateur in the way it's run at the very top.

There's something else happening this weekend, something none of us can have missed. The Premiership. Look at how that's promoted, look at how it's sold. To my admittedly biased eye, soccer isn't a patch on hurling as a spectacle, but hurling isn't a patch on soccer in the way it's packaged.

Even championship sponsors Guinness have taken their eye off the ball.

Where are the colourful TV ads this week, blasting news of these games to all and sundry? How much did it cost for that superb ad where they had the English actor lining up a fictitious game-deciding 21? How much would it have cost to have had the real-life game-tying goal by Rory McCarthy for Wexford last Sunday played over and over again? How much for the ten goals scored the last time Tipperary and Kilkenny met in competitive action, this year's National League final? That's what we should have been seeing on television all week.

Listen, we're going to see two brilliant games, two high-scoring games. Like it or not, the new ball has changed the game of hurling. Previously a team had to work through the opposition midfield maybe, the half-back line definitely, but now it's almost straight to the red-zone, the inside forwards. Tipp's Eoin Kelly is one of the most lethal, one of those who should benefit most, even if he is one of those against the new ball.

"I don't think it's a good ball for hurling, and I'm not alone there. There's a rubber inside, and it takes a fierce bounce. I could see Brendan Cummins taking a free from his own 21, the ball landing just inside the other 21 and bouncing over the bar, if no-one manages to get to it." Wouldn't that be something?

Last time Cork and Wexford met, they shared 5-37 and the spoils; last time Tipp and Kilkenny met, the aggregate score was 10-27.

We won't see that again, but go to Croke Park this weekend, or tune in on the telly, and you WILL see superb non-stop end-to-end action in the greatest field-game there is.

Even if the body charged with running the show won't bother its barney to advertise that fact to the world.