The Sunday Game negativity

After 8 months of waiting, it's here. 3.15pm on 17th May, the first Sunday Game of the 2015 Championship. Michael Lyster sets the scene and introduces his guests. And then it goes wrong.

The very first words out of Colm O'Rourke's mouth were to bemoan the state of the game, saying that we'd be lucky to get about 2 good games this summer. Next up was Joe Brolly, who more-or-less backed him up. To be fair to the oft-maligned Pat Spillane, he tried to introduce some positive vibes, but the negative tone for the year had already been set. Talk about buzz-kill.

I contrast this with how SKY handle the start of the Premiership or Heineken Cup rugby, or the phenomenal sales job that all the US networks do to promote their national sports. Just about any sport, really. I mean, could you imagine the BBC starting their Olympic or World Cup coverage by saying 'We'll be lucky to get a couple of exciting moments this year'?

Despite being handed the country's biggest sporting cash cow on a plate, RTE do nothing to promote or market gaelic games. They treat our sports as lesser citizens on the news, and criticise it at every turn on their programmes. It's about time the GAA put it to RTE and their flagship Sunday afternoon show that there needs to be less moaning and much more enthusiasm about the entertainment on view. It's not 1990 - there many other options out there.

Very poor comment from Brolly prior to todays start in Cavan. Appalling in fact. Time for him to go in all fairness.

Last year he had a cut off O'Rourke's financial woes at the outset as well. No call for that cheap-shot sledging.

Boxtyeater wrote:Very poor comment from Brolly prior to todays start in Cavan. Appalling in fact. Time for him to go in all fairness.

Last year he had a cut off O'Rourke's financial woes at the outset as well. No call for that cheap-shot sledging.

And this on the same day in which he criticises sledging in the Sunday Independent - pot/kettle/black.

In any other workplace, he'd be gone for that. His 'apology', which had plenty of sniggering, mock gravity ('Martin Morrissey') yet failed to contain the word 'sorry', was almost as bad.

No doubt RTE will let him off with a slap on the wrist as 'no harm was intended', but he really should be gone. It's akin to his 'Big Joe Kernan could sell ugly women to the eskimoes' statement of several years ago. An arrogant boy who will at some point insult the wrong person or peoples.

I'm getting pretty tired of the hyper-negativity from RTÉ and other media outlets. Kieran McGeeney rightly pointed out this week that, in any given year, there are good games and bad games. Football does need looked at in certain aspects but isn't as bad as some people claim.

Pat Spillane and, especially, Colm O'Rourke were scathing about Down v Derry. O'Rourke actually criticised Down's defence who held Derry to 3 points in the 2nd half with 14 men! Okay Colm, 1991 was 24 years ago - get over it!

Early_Ball_In wrote:I
Pat Spillane and, especially, Colm O'Rourke were scathing about Down v Derry. O'Rourke actually criticised Down's defence who held Derry to 3 points in the 2nd half with 14 men! Okay Colm, 1991 was 24 years ago - get over it!

And before the game he said that he wouldn't play Eoin Bradley, who was brilliant, as he had only recently returned to the fold following the end of the soccer season.

A poison from within. Can't add to the points already made (contrast with the hurling ... contrast with SKY sports). RTE don't seem to give a shoite about this.

The match may have ended in a draw, but Mayo gave the Dubs a real pasting on TSG in the evening. Kevin McStay played an absolute blinder, going for the blue jugular in a lethally softly-spoken way, while poor Ciaran Whelan fumbled for some combination of words to make himself look credible without hanging his mates, though ultimately failed on both counts.

Because he was so strident in his attack on Tyrone, calling for public apologies and tacitly agreeing with talk of 'bad smells', Whelan knew that he had to offer some criticism of the Dubs. To ignore the skulduggery would have been to ruin his supposed reputation as a straight-down-the-middle analyst, and so he highlighted it all, making reference to just about everything bad that the Dubs did. However, in also throwing in phrases like 'it's not in his nature', or 'he'll feel very foolish tomorrow', and in failing to mention anything to do with public apologies, Whelan still came across to many people as mealy-mouthed and hypocritical, as he had gone nowhere near as far as he had with Tyrone. Thereby, in committing to neither the party line nor the truth, he neither helped the Dubs nor his own reputation.

McStay, on the other hand, had taken no part in the Tyrone attack 3 weeks earlier, and was thus under no pressure to be true to any recently stated beliefs. And he revelled in this freedom, quoting rules like 'or intention to head-butt' and highlighted with glee every dirty act committed by a boy in blue. He even had the bare-faced cheek to state that Colm Boyle's dive was a stone-wall penalty! McStay used all his experience to heap the pressure onto both the CHC and Eddie Kinsella and, to be fair to him, he did it brilliantly.