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Football has lost common touch, rugby has found it

SO THE Republic of Ireland team are feeling unloved by the fans. You wonder why?

Is it the cost of tickets that also caused the IRFU to falter recently?

Is it the lack of sparkle, the superstar wilderness that apart from O’Shea, Duff, Given and captain Keane the Irish team has become. Is it manager Giovanni Trapattoni’s tactics or his cultural distance from the terrace.

Can you ever see him appearing on the Late Late Show and winning the audience in the same way as the gruff and uncomplicated Jack Charlton did? His old-world ignorance. Remember. The Egyptian midfielder from Italia ’90. Remember? “The guy with the beard, the dark lad in midfield, the little dark lad who played centre midfield, the very coloured boy and the boy who played up front.”

Sure don’t we all forget a name? But did that draw him close to us, that and his chip-shop stops, his fly fishing and willingness to let the lads have a pint.

Trap’s distance aside, have there been too many players intimating that a run with Ireland is a lucrative step up the career ladder and not the high point of a life’s ambition.

Are the musings of Jermaine “I’d love to play for England but it’s just never happened” Pennant, Stephen “that interview was a complete stitch-up” Ireland and James “I don’t know where the stories came from . . . the press jumped on it” McCarthy a taste of Irish football’s incoherent future. And all without any public censure from the FAI.

Comparisons to rugby are unfair to both sports but the current reality, something incomprehensible 15 years ago, is that the one-time elite sport maybe more popular than football.

In rugby, players express themselves clearly on the national question. Even those “British” lads from Ballymena and around Ravenhill are unequivocal about what the Irish shirt means.

Stephen Ireland arrived in Dublin last weekend for a celebrity magazine bash while his country was playing in a European qualifying match. With some effort at placatory banter the Newcastle United player declared he may change his mind on making his talent available to Trap. You feel that will hold until he changes his mind again.

Soccer’s other competitor, the GAA, is largely made up of players who have certainty and knowledge of who they are; that their worth is something which belongs to the team and is not theirs alone; that they can become part of an entity that is infinitely more rewarding and important than what they are by themselves.

The price of international tickets maybe an issue but the current stay-away may be something more pervasive and indefinable.

Next week the FAI could but won’t make a public declaration and start the rehabilitation process.

They could, but won’t, tell Pennant and Ireland that the FAI are not interested in them now nor will be interested in them in the future because their attitude reeks of a certain type of vacuous Premiership privilege, agent interference, arrogance, stupidity and little sense of where they belong, or, what is valuable. Character traits that go with the territory they may be, but also damaging and worthless to a team seeking the love of unconvinced supporters.

With Trap we can do little but unlike England’s Italian coach, Fabio Capello, he has not yet told the world that he can explain his tactics to the team in 100 words.

Tonight 26,000 will watch Munster play Leinster at Thomond Park in the Magners League, the third rung of professional rugby after International and Heineken Cup.

Next weekend over 50,000 will watch Leinster in their Heineken Cup club quarter-final against England’s Leicester.

Football has lost its common touch.

Rugby has picked it up.

The FAI might be feeling the presence of absence.

Live coverage comes with a price

FOR reasons of, how do they phrase it – “competitive sensitivity” – RTÉ don’t openly discuss such delicate matters as the amount of money they ask sports organisations to stump up for television coverage of a given event.

But the chat prior to the recent WBA Super Bantamweight World title fight in Dublin between Limerick’s Willie “Big Bang” Casey and the Cuba’s Guillermo Rigondeaux was that the organisers had paid €40,000 to have the fight televised live. We do not know if that is an accurate figure. But anecdotally, it appears to follow a trend.

The Irish hockey amateurs coughed up some years ago to have the women’s European Championships televised by RTÉ at Belfield and we suspect the recent decision to broadcast the Dublin Marathon live for the first time in 20 years has something to do with our gambling money in the coffers of the National Lottery being re-routed towards Montrose.

We would love to be told “not so” and will leave it to RTÉ to assure us they televise events according to the public interest, the status of the event and their cultural remit as opposed to handouts by generous sponsors.

Were we not treated to breathless daily updates of a girls’ underage soccer World Cup in the Caribbean last year as Katie Taylor was en route to another World Championship gold in the same parish and barely a word or image.

Organisations such as that which runs the Dublin Marathon are on a shoestring budget and the reputed fours hours of television coverage is more important to the event than its ability to make it more lucrative for local runners.

You might feel that an Irish athlete of the status of Alistair Cragg might contemplate running in the race if there was a decent financial incentive. But the estimated €250,000 a year for three years that the sponsors are pouring in will not filter down to people like Cragg.

RTÉ claim these events are expensive to cover and in these stringent times you have to believe them even if the marathon is the only race in the world that runs right past their front door.

GAA and Federer see eye to eye on Hawk-Eye

The GAA are far from implementing Hawk-Eye for their big Croke Park games but if and when they do they will probably follow the tried and trusted methods such as those used at Wimbledon.

The high-speed cameras that are used can shoot 50 frames a second and there are up to six of these placed around the court. The centre of the ball is tracked in two dimensions by the camera. Using the centre mark the Hawk-Eye technology triangulates the three dimensional position of the ball as it travels. For each rally over one billion equations can be calculated.

But some people have questioned the accuracy and used the speed of Andy Roddick’s serve as an example. The American’s fastest serve is 155mph, which compared to the only available information for driving a sliotar is considerable. Apparently someone in Cushendall, Co Antrim, measured the speed with a laser gun and came up with 105mph. Hardly laboratory approved but we’ll settle with that figure. The point is that it is very fast.

In 2008, and again in April of this year, two British scientists, Harry Collins and Robert Evans, poured cold water on the accuracy of the technology and said that it could give rise to what they termed “false transparency” especially in tennis, where the ball distorts.

Does a sliotar distort, and what if its spinning trajectory predictably hits what would be the inside of the upright high above the posts? Will it predictably bounce over or bounce out?

Collins and Evans in their paper also noted that an average of 3.6 millimetres accuracy means that there are large errors as well as smaller ones and that in poor light the system does not work as well as in clear light.

Over to the GAA then.

THE FINAL STRAW

Bonds not saved by Bell

OUR buttoned-up legal system constantly deprives us. No sports star trials like the glitzy, pillow talk US variety. OJ Simpson and Marion Jones, the list is endless and all break in a storm of publicity before joining the “Hall of Infamy”.

Recently Barry Bonds, who holds the Major League Baseball record of 762 home runs, has been in the dock. But it’s not Bonds who has turned heads, rather his, er, mistress Kimberly Bell (left).

Bell, who raged that Bonds threatened to tear out her breast implants because he had paid for them, also alleged the slugger had threatened to decapitate her.

The intrigue began when it emerged Bonds put down $60,000 (€43,000) for a house for her.

But she wanted more money and hired a lawyer to get it before giving a string of interviews, signing a book deal and posing nude for Playboy magazine.

Bell also assured the court that Bonds’ testicles had changed shape, his hair was falling out and he was impotent due to drug use, which it is claimed aided his successful home run tally.

Her motive, she said, was that her agent had allegedly absconded with all her money.

What’s there not to like?

THE GAA has been cautious about the introduction of Hawk-Eye, the predictive technology that is used in cricket and tennis to great popular acclaim. Maybe their caution is justified as there are skeptical folk that do not believe the computer that predicts where the ball will fall is entirely accurate.

The manufacturers say it has an average accuracy of 3.6 millimetres. Swiss tennis legend Roger Federer aside, most athletes involved in using the device are satisfied and you can see why.

Bowtell rapidly earning points but riches still out of reach  

REBECCA Coakley and Martina Gillen’s €15,000 grant this week from Team Ireland Golf Trust would go a long way in tennis.

Promising junior Amy Bowtell (left) is the latest Irish tennis player to make her way on to the senior WTA World Rankings. The 17-year-old from Greystones, Co Wicklow, began her adult career in January of this year, when she played in Wrexham in a €7,000 ITF event and reached the quarter-finals. The St Andrew’s College student earned €173 for her efforts, a great deal in the tuck shop, but not so much when you travel around Europe.

A few weeks later Amy travelled to Portugal and went through three rounds in Coimbra before falling in the quarter-finals to German player Kim Grajdek. Another €173 went into her bank account as well as four WTA ranking points.

In Portugal’s Val Do Lobo the round of 16 coughed up €139 before a €7,000 ITF event in Bath, England earned her €110.

Amy now holds a WTA ranking of 816 in the world after five senior professional events.

Not much you might think.

But her parents, Triona and Paul, might be quietly proud that their daughter is now the second-highest ranked Irish professional after Julia Moriarity (744).

She has won €885 in the year to date and has a win loss record of 5-3.

Easy life? Easy, glamorous life?