Punters still get with the programme

At some point this week, in domiciles all around Monaghan, people will remember the glossy publication they clenched tightly in Clones yesterday and rescue it from whatever car, dustbin or pocket they last left it after a day of unfettered celebration.

The match day programme has been a staple of our diet for time immemorial and evidence of the importance which we continue attach to them is to be found in drawers, bedrooms, attics and shed all over the country.

Not all are worth the status of keepsake. Trot along to a January fixture and you may just get handed a four-page printout with little more than two team sheets on them, but yesterday’s offering at the Ulster final was an example of just how an old idea has been modernised.

The Ulster final programme ran to 80 pages and, though many fans rightly fume over the cost of efforts with little in the way of interest or value, none could have done so on that occasion.

“The bottom line is that if the product is good and the price is right then people will buy it,” said Ryan Feeney of the Ulster Council. “We have information on the Ulster Championship, on clubs, on development and all that is coming to us from the same people who are attending the games.”

Designs, prices and even methods of distribution differ according to who is responsible for the product but a general rule of thumb when printing programmes seems to be one for every three paying punters.

That probably increases for All-Ireland finals and the like while the list of other factors determining the size of a print run can include the weather forecast, the counties involved and any other number of hunches.

An exact science it isn’t and yet, in another way, it is. Eighty pages of facts and figures — the All-Ireland final programmes run to 96 — offers a frightening scope for factual errors and members of the public are rarely slow to point out such inaccuracies.

Match programmes, it seems, continue to be held dear to our heart even as the costs have risen, from 6p for the 1955 Dublin and Kerry football final, to £1 for the same decider in 1982 and through to the €5 the latest version will cost this September.

“We would deem that to be good value,” said the GAA’s head of media relations Alan Milton. “There is a substantial amount of reading in that, in both languages, and it is produced to an exceptionally high standard.”

Milton remains convinced of the high demand for the printed word for years to come but the GAA has also embraced technology by making their match programmes available on mobile tablets and the Ulster Council is looking to follow suit.

“We’re very excited by the prospect,” said Milton. “People anywhere in the world can sit down and watch a game with their match programme which is fantastic because, along with posters, it is our oldest form of communication with our members.”