Whatever way the championship unfolds from how on we can say with some confidence that we have a team, and a competitive one. What happened in Ennis could have been a mixture of beginner’s luck and Clare defensive misfortune but the swaying nature of the game on Saturday evening proved that this is a Tipp outfit of many aspects and will prove a handful for any opposition. Imperfections will be pointed out but that very room for improvement is encouraging. The next day is, of course, at home to Limerick – a win there and Tipp are through. It is a game Limerick will approach with trepidation at this stage.
At this point we begin to see the peaks of the various permutations of the round-robin emerge. If Limerick lose to Tipp and Cork beat Clare, it would mean a Limerick exit assuming Clare have beaten Waterford. This is not exactly a me-beating-Roger Federer-at-tennis scenario. Limerick will have their fill of it against Tipp – indeed it is a real reversal of roles from the traditional situation. Over the years it has often been Tipp facing a hungry and expectant Limerick. Now we have a wounded green animal who is going to have to dress the wounds and then have the misfortune to face young tyranny in Alan Tynan, Jake Morris, and Gearóid O’Connor, not to mention old glory in Noel McGrath and Séamus Callanan who looked very sharp in his brief showing last weekend. Sales of timber to rise.
The decision to put the Cork-Tipp game behind a paywall is very modern thinking. Dónal Óg Cusack will have strained hamstrings from trying to straddle both sides of the argument where he said he supported GAAGO but didn’t want that particular match on it. However, his broad point is worthy of examination. One of the arguments in favour of GAAGO is that paying for viewing sport is an established practice. In boxing it has been routine for decades. Rugby and soccer are behind pay walls all the time. But all these sports are also professional as in they pay their players. Television is necessary in order to fund the sports at the level required. Rugby would not exist as a professional sport without television. What is the imperative in the GAA to try to raise funds in this manner?
Whatever that urge is it has to be judged beside the promotional value of free to air television. Dónal Óg Cusack mentioned a nephew who knew the whole Liverpool squad. Forget Liverpool – fruit does not get any more low-hanging than that. In the 1970s ‘You’ll never walk alone’ was sung in Croke Park. That’s old-hat. Young lads now know the Paris St Germain squad because they are on television probably more often through the year than their county’s hurlers. Not only more often, but more visibly too.
That great old gravy train, the European Champions’ League, knows the value of free-to-air television. As does the World Cup. As does the Six Nations Rugby and its World Cup. English club soccer is in fact a very niche product. This is a country 1.5 times the size of Ireland with eleven times its population with a former Empire that plundered the world. That size and density of population opens up options not available elsewhere. Just because that country and its sports can mobilise a massive population for pay for play does not mean it works for a small population like Ireland and a marginalised sport like hurling.
It is also an extremely discriminatory decision. Younger people will tend to be the match-goers. It becomes an irrelevance at that stage how internet-fluent they are. According to the CSO nearly a quarter of over-60s have never used the internet. A study from Trinity College a couple of years ago showed – as if we needed clear evidence – that internet usage and access decrease with age. Old dogs will not be taught new tricks easily, and certainly new tricks they have no day-to-day requirement to learn. But it is a shame that someone who might have seen Paddy Kenny or Jimmy Kennedy back in the day in 1949 or ’50 throwing down the gauntlet to Cork in the Munster championship, cannot in 2023 after all the technological progress that has been made watch the modern-day equivalents in action. For the sake of a grubby few quid?
The GAA is in a more precarious position than it might imagine. It has been said that the Leinster Football championship has been run into the ground by Dublin. Well, the Munster version is not exactly the Grand National either. The Leinster hurling championship is at this stage serving largely to protect Kilkenny and Galway for the latter stages of the All-Ireland championship. The split-season imposed on top of an inter-county championship with more games than ever in less time is putting massive pressure on time for games and the associated publicity. Radical change is knocking on the door as much of this cannot go on. Quite where it will lead is uncertain but the idea that hiding games like Limerick-Clare and Tipp-Cork away in some experiment in modernity makes no sense.
