SKY’S SMALL SPUDS

GAA 10 brilliant

NO GOOD can come from the purchase by the GAA of that 50-acre farm.

Outside of drugs, Garda analysis has shown that the two other turf wars out there that prompt civil disobedience to morph into criminality are those fought over farmland and the television remote.

As if it was not enough for the GAA to be stuck in the middle of one, this week it went and stuck its wellington boots right into the middle of the other.

We just know how this is going to roll on the wireless.

‘Joe,’ moans the caller, ‘my 85-yearold father gave his life to the GAA and I think it is an absolute outrage that he has to go to the shop to buy a bag of spuds when there is a farm up there in Dublin and all it is growing is grass.

‘All he wants is a small strip, Joe, just enough to set one ridge of Kerr Pinks to see him through the winter. Did I tell you, Joe, that all he has is the pension….’

Mad, yeah, but no closer to the lunacy this week of an on-line petition calling for the incoming Director General to pull the plug on putting games behind the pay-per-view wall after its latest deal with Sky concludes in 2021.

The notion that the GAA should have its policy influenced by a poll which asks the taxing question of the nation if it would like something more for free is a little shy on the credibility front.

It’s a bit like asking the Late Late audience if they could refrain from hollering ever time Tubs hands them a basket of facial creams.

But it is the forced hysteria which grates more than anything.

The petition, which is co-authored by Paul Rouse, Diarmuid Lyng, Joe Brolly and Michael Duignan (pictured below with GAA boss Paráic Duffy) − the latter pair both on RTÉ’s payroll − states that ‘grassroots men and women who have given their lives to the GAA are being cut off from their own games.’

Ah, come here. RTÉ show 31 live Championship games every summer, while Sky gets to show just 14 exclusively.

On top of that, TG4 − which will broadcast 35 games in the next two months alone and

Micheal Clifford

provides extensive coverage of all levels in the GAA − is the closest to an indigenous-based sports channel you will find. In contrast, the reality is that Sky is picking up the dregs − two All-Ireland football quarter-finals were the only ‘plum’ fixtures it could show exclusively up to now − so what are people actually ‘cut off’ from? Those that push the line that this is Sky’s opening play in a game-plan that ultimately would see them ‘own’ GAA coverage are heavy on hysteria and light on reason. Even in the event of the GAA bosses losing their strategic and principled marbles − no one is going to argue the point that if all games were locked behind a pay wall it would be nothing less than act of promotional selfsabotage − where is the global market that would justify such an investment by a multi-national media giant? It doesn’t exist. What the GAA and Sky have right now is a contract that serves both of their strategic needs.

Sky sees the value of investing in a market in which it is the leader − it is estimated that it has 40% of the Irish TV digital box market − during the summer when, with no Premiership to peddle, it is at its most vulnerable.

The GAA can see promotional value by association with a global brand which reaches parts that RTÉ and TV3 never will.

For example, in Britain, footage of games with the Sky logo is the promotional tool of choice when Game Development Officers go into schools to sell the GAA. Underage recruitment is at an all-time high and last week, seven of the team that started against Carlow in the Allianz League were London-born.

That is hardly all down to the GAA’s Sky deal, but it is not hurting.

And, above all, it keeps a GAA TV rights market too small to be healthy with its eye on its game and its hand in its purse.

This idea that the GAA doesn’t need the cash is peculiar at a time when the biggest single challenge is coming up with the funds to ensure that some measure of balance is returned to the inter-county playing fields.

That is a mess of the GAA’s own making, but, even if with Dublin’s agreement, ‘equalisation’ of central funding is achieved it won’t be enough, so every extra red cent will be needed.

Far from the GAA TV rights market becoming too inflationary for its own good, it is more likely is that it will become deflationary.

Right now, if the Leinster football championship was auctioned off as an entity of its own it is likely hospital radio would be the only bidders.

If GAA folk are feeling ‘cut off’ it is not because of the action they are missing but because too much of what they have been watching has felt like an action replay.