YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS?
Michael Ryan’s vow of silence (and hasty climbdown) was a farcical double fault that highlighted GAA’s disregard for fans and sponsors!
IT IS weeks like this which renew our faith in humanity. There was a traumatic 48 hours for our profession where we were left traumatised behind a Tipperary wall of silence with no-one to talk to, feeling utterly bereft, unloved and uncertain of what the future held for us, but then the floodgates of kindness opened.
The letters of comfort, the bouquets of flowers and the 10am Mass offerings meant so much in ensuring that, even though our dictaphones were empty, our hearts were bursting.
There are just too many acts of kindness to personally acknowledge but a particular shout-out to the thoughtful reader who forwarded a signed copy of Jim Gavin’s acclaimed post match interview box set — The Process Unplugged. There is a place for you, dear friend, in insomniac heaven.
I won’t sugar it; those were a couple of difficult, melancholic-filled days when we were left to reminisce about happier times in the post-match press huddle, when every cliché was treated like a precious gem.
‘We might have gone 70 minutes without conceding a score but we would be very disappointed about that sideline cut we conceded in the 64th minute so we won’t be getting carried away…
‘To be honest, we have no preference as to whether it is Kilkenny or Kabul who win the other semi-final because they are both hurling strongholds… ‘Ye all wrote us off… The pay might be poor, but how do you put a price on the privilege of bringing such pearls of wisdom to a mass audience.
It set us thinking about our three all-time top post match press conferences.
At number three is the AFL’s Kevin Sheedy in the aftermath of the 2006 Croke Park bloodbath and his bewildered look as he scanned the Croke Park press room.
‘Just how many bloody papers are there in this country?’ he bitched.
In at number two was the day Billy Morgan, his back pressed against the Croke Park tunnel wall, snatched a reporter’s dictaphone and disappeared it down his tracksuit bottoms.
But number one comes from moons ago in the days when the Cork footballers could rout Waterford. Along with an older battle weary colleague whose cynicism had reached the stage where it could no longer be housed in silence, we cornered the losing manager.
Far from being cowed by the result, he launched into a rousing citation of his players who had just been beaten by 30 points expressing his extreme pride in them as true sons of the land.
My colleague took to sniggering, then giggling and was about to upgrade to a full on belly-laugh when he was interrupted by his subject. ‘Are you laughing at me,’ enquired the Waterford manager.
‘Are you being serious,’ dead-panned my man in response, and in that moment he displaced Con Houlihan as our journalistic god. Anyhow, overwhelmed by the public outrage that had greeted his silence, Michael Ryan with one phone call to Tipperary FM on Tuesday turned a fourweek media ban into a 48-hour one. It will forever be our loaves and fishes moment. There is, however, a serious side to that post-match farce at the Gaelic Grounds last Sunday when somehow Ryan believed it made perfect sense not to engage with the public until the competition had run its course. The GAA will argue, as they did this week, that it is an unfair comparison as Ryan and his inter-county colleagues are under no contractual obligation to front-up to the media, as they are amateurs. But the GAA is big business because they chose to make it big business. We assume when they sit down to strike multi-million euro media rights deals, they don’t advise media executives that access to team bosses will be on a wing and a prayer.
And we presume when the GAA signs up multi-strand sponsors for its championships, they don’t advise them that those logo backdrop screens for interviews may, on occasions, not be deployed as there may be no one available to put before them.
After all, these men are amateurs, don’t you know?
There should be a duty on every team manager to engage, if not for the sake of their own public, then for the benefit of those who pay the GAA hard cash which trickles back down to the county they are charged with looking after.
Amateurs may play the games, but promotion does not work unless it is done professionally.
But this conversation needs to run far deeper than promotional obligations.
That should only be one element in a charter to reign in managers, some of whom have long since lost the run of themselves.
The power they wield has been the biggest aggravating factor in the issue which is slowly killing the GAA – the club fixture crisis. That power continues to find expression in all sorts of areas.
From monastic-like player charters which are not good for mind or body, to driving a hole through the GAA rulebook by dressing up training camps as sun holidays, by peddling dummy teams in displays of naked contempt to their supporters and anything else you are having yourself.
Their silence is not the issue. They need hard talking – backed up by severe penalties for those who offend – to ensure they finally get around to doing some listening.