Game on for RTÉ
claims made about the Sky deal – don’t worry we’re not going to rehash all that again, not yet anyway – the idea that Sky will force RTÉ to up their game is the most enticing.
There was nothing necessarily wrong with RTÉ’s coverage of the championship. It was slick, it was well presented, if a little staid and safe. Take, for instance, when Joe Brolly took flight after Tyrone’s win over Monaghan in the quarter-final. Michael Lester’s instinct was the rein him in, not let him off.
The one thing RTÉ must not do when faced with the Sky threat is to become safe and bland for fear of upsetting anybody, most of all the denizens of Croke Park. If Sky go down the “best league in the world” route with their coverage, then forthright criticism
could be RTÉ’s biggest selling point.
For all our sakes, hopefully they won’t take Aidan O’Shea’s criticism of RTÉ’s coverage of gaelic football to heart.
“It’s unbelievable,” he said.
“We love to talk down Gaelic football, which is amazing because you’ll never see a hurling person talk down their sport, which is great from their point of view.”
You can kinda see where he’s coming from, but by the same token if a game is bad a game is bad, some suit in a studio saying it was an absolute cracker isn’t going to change the fact. People are smart enough to realise as much.
From watching Sky’s coverage of other sports – and don’t get us wrong here it’s absolutely top class – we can assume a lot of their focus will be on what technological advances they can bring to coverage of the games.
Touch-screen, in-depth analysis, breaking down a play to its composite parts, showing us things we don’t normally see. Really digging into the nitty gritty. It could be an absolutely fantastic addition to our understanding and knowledge of the game. Unless we’re mistaken RTÉ won’t be able to bring those type of resources to bear. How they react, what strategies they employ, will determine how successful they are in convincing both the GAA and its membership as well as the the general pub l ic whether they deserve to keep showing the games “every single Sunday.” BOOSTED by a textbook start allowed Rockchapel clinically despatch the challenge of Mayfield to the opening round of the County Intermediate Football Championship at a breezy Castlemagner last Sunday.
A devastating opening yielded two goals inside 70 seconds that allowed