We were halfway into the Tuesday turkey roulette before someone idly wondered had we forgotten to watch the darts on Stephen’s Night. Recollections were a little hazy by now and very little of what anyone said was to be trusted. Anything could be taken down and used in evidence against you.
There had been racing from Leopardstown, football from Brentford, racing from Kempton, football from Villa Park, racing from Limerick, football from the Emirates, rugby from Thomond, more football, more racing, a bit of Match Of The Day and, to round it all off, a slice of late-night NFL. It was only after a little light Googling that we were able to confirm we hadn’t in fact missed the darts – unlike us, the Ally Pally hordes take the day after Christmas off.
It’s always a heavy week, Christmas. Whereas you spend the rest of the year consuming sport by the glass, there’s nothing for it across these few days but to hold the hose to your mouth and hope you can keep gulping. In normal times, not only would you not be watching a novice chase from Limerick at 12.19 on a Tuesday afternoon, you would be asking sharp questions of a loved one if you found out they were. Christmas ain’t normal times though. Nothing for it but to bear down and power through.
The glut of Christmas sport happens for plenty of reasons. Partly because of tradition, partly to fill television schedules, partly – and increasingly – in service of the ever-ravenous gambling industry. With the occasional exception, it serves more of a purpose as content than as sport. It is there throughout the week, like wallpaper.
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Mostly, it’s there because we’ll watch it. The Premier League came back at lunchtime on St Stephen’s Day because St Stephen’s Day football is one of the Premier League’s calling cards across the planet. And so you had the faintly sadistic sight of Rafael Varane turning out for Manchester United on Tuesday night, just nine days after a World Cup final in which he played all but the last seven minutes of extra-time.
Big-time soccer doesn’t do nuance because it doesn’t need to. There’s no war for eyeballs where football is concerned – it has already won. All it wants to do now is run up the score
Indeed, of France’s outfield players, only Kylian Mbappé and Dayot Upamecano rivalled Varane for minutes played in the tournament. But while Upamecano of Bayern Munich doesn’t restart for another three weeks, Mbappé was back on duty for PSG on Wednesday night. Hat-trick in a World Cup final on the 18th, a last-minute penalty to scrape past lowly Strasbourg on the 28th. Ho-hum. The beast must be fed.
We forget, though. We forget that the beast is us. Instinctively, most sports fans would recoil at the idea that it is because of our demands that the likes of Varane and Mbappé are being pressed back into service after such an indecently short interval. But that’s the reality. They do it because somebody somewhere has decreed that there will be an audience. That’s you and me, shaking our heads at the madness of it while catching the barman’s eye to order a last one.
Over time, feeding that audience has become the priority of all sports and all leagues. How to go about it is the question they all try to answer and it takes more effort than for some than for others. Big-time soccer doesn’t do nuance because it doesn’t need to. There’s no war for eyeballs where football is concerned – it has already won. All it wants to do now is run up the score.
For everyone else, however, it’s a constant struggle to find and hold on to their own patch of the quilt. More than any other factor, that struggle is what bends and shapes the delivery of their sport. The transformation of darts from an easily-lampooned pub-game to a multimillion pound global jamboree is always held up as the gold standard. Find your audience, feed your audience, capture the floating fan along the way. Rinse, repeat, grow.
If only it were that simple. When sport is content, the instinct of the people who run it is to provide it. But it’s a tricky balancing act – the more of it you put out there, the harder it is for people to work out what’s worth their time and what’s just schedule-filling. More games, more competitions, more teams, more participants – keep adding and adding and eventually you take away the jeopardy. It seems the less and less at stake the more and more we watch.
And so you have horse racing and greyhound racing on every day of the week, purely as fodder for televisions in betting shops and racing channels. You have a sport like cricket sliced and diced into (at last count) four different formats, with players hopping and trotting between teams and leagues and countries at a rate that it impossible for all but the most devoted fan to keep track of.
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In our own little corner of the world, rugby is going through a muddled, tortured sorting out period. The URC is what it is – functional, dependable, nothing to get too high or too low about. But anyone with even a passing interest has to be saddened by the travails of the Champions Cup, a once-monumental competition that has wound and contorted itself into a sorry, impenetrable mess.
Uniquely, they’ve managed to reduce the amount of matches it takes to play off the competition while at the same time diluting the level of jeopardy involved, with 16 of the 24 teams going through to the knock-out stages. You only need two pool wins to advance – last year five teams got through with just one. This tournament used to be the last word in do-or-die sport but nowadays one victory gets you through. How do you convince the public that every game matters when it’s so obviously not the case?
You don’t, is the obvious answer. You just keep feeding the beast empty calories and make the fairly safe bet that we’ll keep chowing it down. When there’s so much sport to feast on, nutritional value isn’t high on anyone’s agenda.
No prizes for guessing how it all plays out in the end.
