The man with his eye on the ball

BUSY times for the RTÉ sports department in Montrose. Crucial times too. The Premiership is back in its stride, the World Athletics Championships begin in Osaka on Friday, while the hurling and football championships begin to reach their annual crescendo.

When the final whistle blows at Croke Park on September 16, the curtain won’t just be closing on the senior inter-county season. It will also signal the end of RTÉ’s three-year championship rights deal with the GAA.

Setanta have been loitering around, though whether that is with intent remains to be seen. Either way, the Donnybrook operation is no longer the only shop window from which Croke Park can display its wares.

Talks on a new deal between the GAA and RTÉ have already and the station’s Group Head of Sport Glen Killane is optimistic about their chances of retaining the blue riband events of the Irish sporting calendar.

“We will be doing everything to ensure that the GAA championships stay free-to-air,” says Killane. “We are confident, but not cocky, going into the negotiations. Every year we move up a notch and improve our coverage. The production values and quality of our coverage are getting better.

“We have invested heavily in a statistics package. We have a number of people working on stats at every match, but we have taken a low-key approach to it. We’re conscious of not over-hyping it. We haven’t gone the Sky route where they can be sometimes over-egged.

“We have brought in new talent in Joanne Cantwell, Evanne Ní Chuilinn, Dara Ó Cinnéide and Anthony Daly. They have brought a freshness to our coverage. It certainly stands head and shoulders with anything else on this island and shoulder to shoulder, if not ahead of, anything in the UK.”

The impact of Setanta’s arrival has already been felt by RTÉ who have now lost the rights to live Premiership matches, the Rugby World Cup (with TV3 winning the terrestrial rights) and Formula One to the new player.

But Killane is confident that RTE can continue to punch its weight.

“We have been living with Sky for 12 or 13 years and they have been buying up some Irish rights. There just seems to be a bit more publicity about (Setanta). We’re not going to win everything, but our portfolio is still extremely strong.”

He admits that they are no longer the “big player in the market” when it comes to finance, but is confident they are still the market leaders in content and quality.

Appointed Group Head of Sport last October, part of Killane’s brief is to bring RTÉ’s sports coverage — TV, radio and internet — together into one homogenous unit.

The result is that you can now listen to, say, Marty Morrissey commentate on a match before reading his analysis of it online within hours of the final whistle. The internet is changing the way people consume the media and sport, and its growing role was conspicuous last summer when the first Irish live match webcast featured the replayed Munster football final between Cork and Kerry.

The webcast generated 10,000 hits, a figure Killane considers to be a huge success given the relatively low broadband penetration in Ireland and the fact it wasn’t available beyond these shores. RTÉ.ie’s GAA Championship website has generated over five million page impressions since its launch in May, while almost 120,000 streams of the live video coverage have been accessed.

GAA has always been central to RTÉ’s technological advances. The first live commentary for any sport in the world was a GAA match on 2RN, and the possibility of RTE going digital (way, way) down the line opens up the possibility of a sports channel.

“DTT is happening. There has been no decision yet as to the individual channels. But it is something we would definitely look at because we have a lot of really good product. We could certainly be making more use of the archive, which is particularly strong in GAA terms.

“Anything is possible with DTT. It presents a number of channels, not just RTÉ, with exciting opportunities. We had a high definition trial for the Leinster hurling final this summer which was a huge success. It was another first for GAA, a first match HD broadcast.”

If the net and DTT are the cherries on top then there is no escaping the fact that live matches and The Sunday Game continue to be the bread and butter, and production values have undoubtedly improved year on year.

The department has 50 to 70 people out on the field on any Sunday between reporters, cameramen, production staff and others, not to mention those holding the fort back in D4.

While the live matches are hard to fault, The Sunday Game has had a rocky ride. Critics have complained about some of the more controversial remarks made by its analysts, but most of the ire seems to be aimed at Mr Spillane. A lightning rod for controversial statements down the years himself, Leinster Council chairman Liam O’Neill recently described his presenting style as akin to someone bellowing into a wind.

“Pat will always attract criticism, just for being Pat. Some of it has been unfair. He has come on hugely in the last three years, and he brings something special to it. He has worked extremely hard on getting it right. You always look at what people are saying and make your own judgements but, looking at it from a very cold TV point of view, we have had a 12% increase in viewing figures this year, which isn’t to say it couldn’t be improved.

“The introduction of people like Dara Ó Cinnéide, Anthony Daly, Anthony Tohill, they are all doing superb jobs. There will always be controversy over The Sunday Game because it is only a couple of hours after the match. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but we are broadly happy with it.”

The irony is that the gripes could be viewed as a back-handled compliment. The Sunday Game is one of those programmes that everyone feels proprietorial about it. Killane knows that better than anyone. He was executive producer of the show when the old theme tune was axed back in 2004, a decision he freely admits to having a hand in.

“It’s important to note why we did it. It was a Bavarian lederhosen type of music from James Last that had been around since 1979. We needed to make a statement that we were taking a new direction with the Sunday Game.

It needed an injection of modernity and to make a break with the past. Liam Mulvihill said publicly that it was the right thing to do. The theme tune was holding us back. I don’t have any great grá for the piece of music that replaced it. We knew it wasn’t going to be popular, but we didn’t quite expect the death threats. I did get a few, and apparently there was a campaign going to kill me, but I can live with that.”

Other changes have met with wider acceptance, like Des Cahill’s ‘Road to Croker’ magazine programme which, after the hit and miss ‘Breaking Ball’ and ‘Park Live’ shows, seems to have struck the right chord.

The ‘Road to Croker’ is an oasis in the GAA desert that is the midweek programming schedules. Is there not a case for the GAA and RTÉ knocking heads and coming up with Monday night or Wednesday night action?

“We’ve explored these issues with the GAA. There is a bottleneck at weekends and there are concerns over club matches, for instance. I can see where the GAA are coming from.

“We would be open to it. Under the current contract the GAA has limited us to three live matches a weekend. We would take seven if we could, every weekend, but they rightly have concerns about over saturation.

“I would argue that the Premier League has overegged the amount of live matches available.

“There is a certain ennui out there, and a lackadaisical approach to the live matches on the satellite channels. The GAA want to preserve their games, keep the championship special. We respect that.”