SIDELINE CUT:WHETHER EAMON Ryan is absolutely right or dangerously deluded in his ambition to return Munster and Leinster to the plain people of Ireland, he has thrown light on one undeniable fact. Ireland has become Sky-ified.
It is easy to understand the frustration of the IRFU this week. Just as they unveiled the splendour of the new stadium, Minister Ryan came crashing into their subconscious, bicycling his way down the leafy streets of Lansdowne with a well-meaning plan which provoked an uncharacteristically doom-laden response from the IRFU’s chief executive Philip Browne.
The Green Party have not enjoyed a strong public profile since their move to power and the quick response of many people has been to interpret Ryan as a sort of Neville Chamberlain of the telecommunications era, naively making promises and predictions without any real clue about the consequences.
But until the Minister’s intervention, nobody really stopped to consider just how commanding a role Sky play in Irish rugby – and Irish life. There is something profoundly bleak about the admission that if Sky are removed from the financial equation, then everything the IRFU have built up for the past decade will quickly collapse.
The financial rights and wrongs of the debate are hard to establish. The IRFU insist that returning the Heineken Cup to terrestrial television would cost the sport €10 million per year, a loss that would quickly lead to the departure of leading players, the loss of competitiveness within the province and a lack of funding for club development. It is a startling scenario. The Minister is not convinced the change need cost the IRFU anything at all. It is a debate that will have to be thrashed out.
For a few seasons now, a television advert has been running prior to big rugby games. It features an elderly man walking around the ruins of a stadium and talking about the lost glory days of a competition that is plainly meant to be the Heineken Cup. Who knows what the hell this advert is about? Are we to assume the competition is going to collapse over the next couple of decades? Is it some kind of oblique comment on the impending hazards of global warming?
Or is it a clunky attempt to create heritage and instant tradition for a competition which, for all of the great games it has produced, has yet to outgrow the nagging sense of being “manufactured” specifically for television?
Irish rugby has bloomed in the 15 years since professionalism in a way that nobody could have predicted. That has been down to smart strategic planning by the IRFU and by the emergence of a half dozen extraordinarily good rugby players and an out-and-out genius of the game in Brian O’Driscoll.
It is common to see Ireland’s leading professionals referred to as the “golden generation”. Implicit in the cliché is the understanding that once this group retires, they are not going to be replaced.
How many games have Munster and Ireland won because of Ronan O’Gara’s unlimited nerve at kicking penalties or conversions? How do you accurately weigh the worth of Paul O’Connell to his teams? How many people realise that Irish rugby may have to wait 50 years to produce another O’Driscoll?
Ireland teams began winning as never before, the players were modest, decent lads and the games they starred in became big spectator sports even in counties where rugby remains little more than a posh mystery.
There is nothing wrong with Ryan’s wish to ensure these games are shown on the television screens “in poorer houses as well as rich”. But it makes the assumption that a Sky Sports subscription – a prerequisite for anyone who really wants to follow the Premier League – does not feature in the houses where money is always a struggle. It also makes the assumption that rugby has made a serious impression on the socially deprived urban ghettos and hopeless suburbs which have mushroomed across Ireland. It is doubtful either is true.
Sky, though, is everywhere. You can see the big, ugly dishes on so many houses. For publicans, Sky subscription has become an almost obligatory cost. They have to show the matches. (Is there anything more soul destroying than walking into an Irish pub on a sunny Saturday to find Andy Gray shouting at you?)
The wonder is the Vintner’s Association, faced with a declining pub culture, have not protested more loudly.
Ryan is right in this way. Sky force people into pubs. (It should be noted here that some citizens are probably quite happy to be so forced. If Leinster or Munster are playing on Friday night and there is no Sky Sport in the house, then it becomes no less than a call to patriotic action to head down to the local and blow the suds off a few).
Sky dictate the scheduling of games. Sky organise people’s weekends. Since soccer went to Sky, generations of Irish people have sat drinking fizzy water with a dash of blackcurrant because they want to see their team. The same goes now with rugby. But following Munster, Leinster and Ireland became a highly popular – and highly bourgeois – past-time during the fast years.
It has spawned a generation of guys and gals with collars up all across the land. And even now, those games offer a good excuse to kick-start a Saturday party early. The truth is the new generation of television rugby fans are only too happy to nurse the iced ciders and cheer on the goys.
Sky rule the roost. Maybe Ryan feels there is something depressing about that. If so, he is right. There is something depressing about Sky in general. It is too loud, too flash, too English and too heartlessly commercial. For all of the money they pump into the presentation of the sports they own, they still manage to cheapen them.
Of course, we can’t roll back the years to when Fred Cogley was the voice of rugby and RTÉ were the only show in town. Nothing can come of these proposals. But there is something shocking too about the thought that should Irish rugby pull the plug on Sky – or vice versa – there will be nothing left but a snowy screen.
