Let me put you in the picture... telly balance is not right
I’M not so sure that less is more when it comes to the sparsity of live football games on TV in these early weeks of the Championship.
The new hurling format means that the small ball code is being beamed into our living rooms on Sunday afternoons and though football will come to the fore later in the summer, I’m not so sure they’ve struck the right balance.
I don’t have a problem with hurling being showcased more – when all things are considered it generally provides better entertainment.
Take a few gripping All-ireland finals out of it in recent years and the football Championship has been a hard watch for the most part.
And with the GAA sticking with the arrangement of 45 live games despite vastly different formats this year, football looks to be the biggest loser. It’s making the football fraternity out there uneasy as they’re not getting their fix. There’s a 75% reduction in the number of provincial games shown prior to the finals.
There are eight games this week but none are live on TV.
And over the coming three weeks there are just three live games.
So, out of four weekends in which 23 football Championship games will be played, only three will be broadcast.
There’s a flip side, however, in that there were 16,000 in Healy Park last Sunday for the Tyrone versus Monaghan game.
If it was on TV, I doubt there’d have been any more than 12,000.
I still don’t think that justifies it though. A by-product of the broadcasting schedule is that weaker counties get even less exposure with the big guns set to dominate the coverage to an even greater extent. There is little or no coverage of Division Three and Division Four during the spring and now the same counties are restricted to highlights packages in the summer. They’ve clearly put all their eggs in the ‘Super 8’ basket in a bid to reignite football on television.
I think that will be a huge success but it’s a shame the public didn’t get to see a superb game in Omagh last Sunday along the way.
While hurling deserves and needs the added exposure, I don’t believe that football should have suffered to this extent as a result.
Older folk can’t get out to matches the way they once could and unless their county gets to the latter stages they can forget about seeing them play live.
Increased entrance fees haven’t helped either and the season ticket scheme needs to be reviewed as well in my opinion. Another problem is that this weekend, from last night right through until Monday, there are 32 inter-county games on at various level, including the newly-created under-20 grade.
You have 12 senior Championship games today and tomorrow but another 20 either side of it, which is overkill.
You’ll have weekends later in the summer when there’s very little on and given that under-20 panels don’t overlap with senior, that would have been an ideal time to play those games.
But the starkness of the football coverage in the early part of the summer is summed up by the fact that there will just be seven live games on TV up to July 1.
They have got the balance completely wrong and it needs to be reviewed for next year as this is promotional suicide.
Giving football a back seat is not the answer.