KERRY’s All-Ireland final media day was a rare thing on the inter-county circuit this year – inasmuch as they held one in the first place, and it was one of the few to deserve to be there. to assist.
In an in-depth interview with Jack O’Connor, Kerry’s manager, appearing in tomorrow’s edition, he spoke to print and broadcast media for around four hours at the Gleneagle Hotel, Killarney last week.
During this time, O’Connor did more than 20 interviews, including a dozen for radio or television. In hindsight, some media outlets should have doubled down, if only to spare Kerry’s manager’s larynx for practice that week.
O’Connor says he was suitably drained afterwards.
Shane Ryan, Tadgh Morley, Mike Quirke and Diarmuid Murphy were also available for interview. The media event probably lasted longer than it should have, but O’Connor knows the terrain better than anyone.
He comes from a different generation when players weren’t collectively running a mile from a tape recorder.
They interacted with reporters, told their stories, made their families proud, and probably still have the faded newspaper clippings tucked away in a cardboard box in the attic.
Thus, the physical archives endure. They stir up emotions like when we open an old family photo album, filled with rough and blurry Polaroids from our childhood playing in the street or on vacation.
With most parts of the inter-county landscape now firmly anti-media – it’s hard to draw any other conclusion – it was refreshing to hear O’Connor offer an alternative perspective, that your house won’t crumble when you will talk to the press.
“We don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Jack said. “There aren’t really any trade secrets. What are you trying to hide? These actors and the people involved are smart people. They won’t say anything stupid.
“It’s not about gritting your teeth and putting your life on hold for six months to try and win an All-Ireland. We have to enjoy it as we go. I think talking to people and speaking up is part of.
To extend O’Connor’s analogy, it would seem that the vast majority of cross-county teams did just that: grit their teeth, put their lives on hold, and watch the media with deep suspicion.
Much of this smacks of collective insecurity. At a time when one-on-one interviews are on the verge of extinction and in danger of being replaced by innocuous social media sound bites, a few things come to mind.
The great teams Tyrone and Armagh of the ‘Noughties’ were two of the most high-profile and successful teams you would come across.
Many actors of that era, who enjoyed speaking with the media, now occupy a multitude of roles as commentators and paid columnists. More power for them too.
When players lose their media space, opinion and profile articles fill the void.
I remember Shane McNaughton, a former Antrim pitcher who is now carving out a successful acting career in America, saying he liked the discipline of doing media interviews as they made him think and he also felt that they were preparing him for job interviews.
What we had this year was a GPA media ban that never properly recalibrated upon dropping its ban as soon as the spending stalemate was resolved. Confusion reigned as some were unsure whether the ban was still in place or not.
Admittedly, turnaround times were tighter between games, and as a result, a do-not-do attitude prevailed when the GAA media came asking for access.
For example, Derry footballers have come and gone in the blink of an eye.
Reaching an All-Ireland semi-final was a stunning feat for Rory Gallagher’s men, but the players returned to their clubs without a trace of who they were and how they got there in their youth life.
Who was Conor McCluskey? What about Ethan Doherty? What was their story?
Now the media had access to the Derry camp, but it still looked like Chrissy McKaigue was being offered for an interview.
Fiercely articulate, affable and an independent thinker, Chrissy likely ran out of things to say to reporters during these painfully cut short events.
Consequently, there was a disconnect between the media and the players. Some teams lost, others won – but there was no empathy, no emotion expressed in the telling of their stories. Everyone has moved on.
For the media, it was a desert between games. Boring in other words.
The Wimbledon Tennis Championships have never looked so good in the local sports pages and the airtime that should have been the preserve of the GAA.
The lack of access in 2022 has also had a financial impact on the dwindling number of GAA freelancers who would be happy to sit on empty pitches and file reports on a school or college game for a pittance because that they love the game more than the modest paycheck itself.
In the not-too-distant future this dying breed will probably disappear completely – probably because of the price of diesel and not getting the weird interview that will supplement his income – and we’ll all be relying on Twitter feeds that haven’t not been published. since 2016.
In the build-up to this month’s All-Ireland semi-final between Dublin and Kerry, ex-Dub Bernard Brogan tweeted that GAA teams should be “obligated by the GAA to do media and promote the games… I haven’t heard a sausage about what will be an amazing game…”
Of course, Brogan was part of a Dublin team that rarely, if ever, interacted with the GAA media, unless it was a sponsored gig.
Last weekend on The Sunday Game, Donal Og Cusack lamented the lack of promotion for hurling in the print media and preferred an extended inter-county season.
The express basis of his research was having a cup of coffee in Ballsbridge, borrowing a newspaper to discover that the first mention of the All Ireland Hurling Final was on page 11 of the sports supplement.
Of course, it depends on where you are looking and where you are not looking. You may need to expand beyond a quick glance at a Sunday paper that you haven’t paid for.
Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to the former Cork goalkeeper that there is no meaningful access to the country’s top hurling teams, and yet the print and broadcast media still expand to promote games, largely without the central protagonists: the gamers.
So when we talk about extending the inter-county season, we will only see more desert and observed silence.
Long live the club season. It can’t be worse than what happened before.
