Old games nothing like old movies

WHATEVER it is about them, they just do absolutely nothing for us. We’re sympathetic to the impulse, believe us we are. We miss sport as much as the next person. Given the job that we do it’s fair to say it took up – and still takes up – a substantial amount of bandwidth in our daily calculations.

Still even taking all that into consideration we haven’t been tempted – not once, not even for a second – to watch any of the old-school matches being replayed by various broadcasters at the moment. Even games we were at, games we know to be classics, they hold no appeal for us in reprise.

By the way if it does for you then absolutely more power to you, it just that from our point of view it’s a fairly hollow exercise. The whole point of sport is the spontaneity of it, the knowledge that just about anything can happen. It’s the element of surprise that appeals and a match from ten or fifteen years ago just can’t deliver that.

The odd thing about it is that, while we’ve been assiduously avoiding these old games, we’ve taken to watching classic movies, the majority of which we’ve seen before several times. Watching the Godfather recently for our Zoom movie club – welcome to 2020 everyone! – we remembered practically every scene, every beat along the way and it didn’t for a moment lessen our enjoyment of it.

That might seen like a contradiction to what we said about our reasons for not watching old sport, but for us it just underlines the fact that sport has a self-life. It’s not timeless like a Francis Ford Coppola or a Martin Scorsese classic and it’s not supposed to be

We’re sympathetic to the position broadcasters find themselves in, having been landed with a massive hole in their schedules, but we really do feel there’s a better way to tap into our collective desire for sports content than to regurgitate something we’d long ago digested.

The runaway success of The Last Dance on Netflix, a docu series about the career of Michael Jordan, shows how nostalgia can be made relevant. Okay, okay, we know TG4 or RTÉ don’t have the same budget as the markers of The Last Dance and nor do we expect productive values as high, but maybe instead of just playing the match in its entirety get one or two of the dramatis personae in a studio or on the line to discuss it? Context is king and without it these old games are the wood without the trees.