Timing of FAI Cup replay an error

It's fairly obvious to anybody that cares much about football that the course of one game can change your perspective on things. For me, the weekend just gone was packed with games that mattered and when the Irish Under-16s won on Friday and Celtic took the Scottish title on Saturday, I appeared to be on a bit of a roll.

Then came Sunday's Harp Lager FAI Cup final at Dalymount which, having been eagerly anticipated by everyone I talked to last week, has been dismissed as one of the worst games produced by the competition in recent years by the most of the same people over the past couple of days.

Had it been better, those of us in the press box might have bounded down the stairs of the stand afterwards and gleefully set about interviewing the participants for the following day's papers. We would have looked forward to another week of producing previews and relished the prospect of heading up to Phibsboro to see them go to it all over again.

Unfortunately, however, the game was several rungs lower on the ladder than forgettable and the thought of going through the same sort of ordeal again this weekend had clearly filled the 20 or so reporters squeezed into the Bohemians board room after the game with a fair amount of despair.

The questioning of those managers and players who wandered in reflected the disappointment. Representatives of both clubs were asked a variety of questions, the true meaning of which was "in the name of God lads, could yiz not have finished it today for we all have holidays to go on?"

A draw, though, was inevitable. It had been since back before Christmas when, somewhere in the FAI, a decision was made to allow Paul McGrath's testimonial to go ahead the Sunday after the day allotted to the final. That decision, combined with the fact that the English FA Cup final is on this Saturday afternoon severely narrowed the options on the replay front and, if we have learned anything from observing the FAI over the years it is that, once the people who run the game year embark on a gamble of this sort, they could only ever end up on the losing end of it.

What we are faced with as a result is a situation in which the showpiece game of the season has been a tremendous disappointment and the replay, even if it manages to make up for it, will only be seen by a fraction of the audience.

The game will surely lose out as many Dubliners opt to take in the game at Wembley in the afternoon while the situation for people travelling from Cork, and City fans clearly made up the majority of the crowd on Sunday, is far more offputting with those who do make the journey obliged to stay in Dublin on Saturday night or drive through the night to get home again.

Another concern for Saturday is media coverage and how much space a game, effectively taking on the Arsenal versus Newcastle United game, can realistically hope to attract.

Even in a 50/50 situation the logistics of media organisations would ensure that the game on earlier would be better covered. And that's before we get around to considering the extent of the difference in kick-off times which is such that a large proportion of the Sunday papers will already be printed by the time the replay ends - Cork readers of at least one of the Irish papers may be perplexed to find a rather large photograph in the space reserved for the match report in later editions.

Having long since established their willingness to rejig their schedule to facilitate the game here (something they are not always given credit for), RTE radio have already confirmed that they will broadcast live commentary on the game but some other stations do not even have sports bulletins on Saturday evenings and so the game may be largely ignored.

As for the television, well at the time of writing I am not sure what the plans are with regard to the game, but it would be a rather pleasant surprise if Tim O'Connor turns out to be willing and able to persuade those above him in the Montrose chain of command that it is worth dumping the Saturday evening schedule of one of the channels in order to facilitate the screening of the game.

All in all then, the timing of the replay is an error which could have been avoided months ago had adequate consideration been given to the requirements of the competition when the request came in for a date for McGrath's testimonial - a game which, even given the limited availability of players for these sort of occasions, could have been played on a wide variety of other dates.

But when club and FAI officials from around the country get together in a couple of weeks for the association's a.g.m. and reflect on how poorly the game was covered, they are likely to see it differently. The media, they'll doubtless tell each other (as some of them tell the people who cover the game all the time) let them down and with that they'll move swiftly on to item 16 on the agenda, setting a date for the 1999 cup final.