LOCKERROOM:In a world of Premiership overkill our hockey finals couldn't get a live TV slot. Shame on us all

SOUND THE clarions. Strong response to last week’s fearless attack on the potato crisp people. The populace may not be quite ready to rise up like a bunch of disgruntled Greek taxpayers against the sexist tyranny of the Hunky Dorys marketing monkeys but lots of people are willing to urge muggins here on to a broader campaign. Lots of cunning plans. One Blackadder. We shall go forth.

Several correspondents made reference to that survey of English teenage girls which showed that while not all of them wanted to grow up to be Wags a sufficiently worrying number aspire to nothing more than a fine pair of stilettos and the inconstant devotion of a millionaire footballer, invariably one with an IQ to match the shoe size of the stilettos.

All this plus people drawing our attention to the British general election. We felt briefly as if we were working in the grown-up part of the newspaper. There was an amusing moment on Saturday’s tea-time edition of Newsnight when the monumentally fascinating Paxman (this is great. When is Fintan O’Toole on holidays?) turned his attention to the fact the only coverage of women during the electoral race concerned wives of the leaders and what they were wearing. All those generations of bright and fiery women who had fought to kick down the doors and then nobody stepping forward to pick up the sword, just a placid generation sidling off to the cosmetic counter.

I’m sure a lot of it has to do with the decline in women’s sports. We lament how the virtual extinction of the Christian Brothers, for instance, had such a harmful effect on the coaching of Gaelic games at school level but girls’ sports have been hit harder by the changes in the teaching profession and at club level in all sorts of sports, it is tough enough to get coaches to look after any teams.

Fathers having aspirations and ambitions about fulfilling themselves vicariously through their sons tend to be easy recruits when it comes to helping with boys’ teams. Girls get left behind, they don’t get coaches, their games don’t get covered, their funding suffers hideously. And if Wags are the most prominent sports-related role models we can offer our daughters who have we to blame?

(Point taken, by the way, that an annual Women in Sport Award doesn’t absolve anybody from narrowness of coverage and attention when it comes to sport.) Yesterday this column, for the first time in its life, knowingly went to a women’s hockey game. Thanks to Helen Johnston for suggesting the expedition. The All-Ireland Senior Cup final out in Belfield between Loreto and Railway Union was as fine an afternoon of entertainment as we could have wished for.

Confession first. For those who play ice hockey in America what was taking place yesterday in Belfield is field hockey. For those of us who try to coach camogie what was going on was effing hockey, the game that seems to have a polar magnetic effect on camogie players, especially southsiders.

That I have a generally positive attitude toward hockey isn’t in any way to do with knowing anything about it, I just like and admire Dave Metcalfe’s enthusiastically eloquent reports on RTÉ Radio.

I thought sometimes he was overdoing it. Had to be. But he is not. It’s easy to see the attraction of hockey. In a world where not a sparrow can fall within a 20-mile radius of a Premier League ground without extensively banal analysis of the deleterious effects on wind flow currents at the stadium the national hockey final couldn’t get a live slot on domestic TV yesterday. Yet hockey has it sussed in terms of presentation, atmosphere and excitement. Other sports could learn a lot.

The sun shone defiantly, the music got people dancing and the game had drama and a cliffhanging finish which it is worth tuning in to see tonight on the TV. Admission was a fiver (both women’s and men’s national senior finals for that) and everybody was very friendly. Nobody said jolly hockey sticks. The women were remarkable athletes. All good.

You wouldn’t have to know much about hockey to see Loreto’s Nikki Symmons would be the first name on to any team sheet in just about any sport. Just that presence and ferocious competitiveness. (Nikki or Nicci is a big hockey name. There were four of them playing yesterday. Nikki Evans of Railway Union was eye-catchingly impressive as well.) Railway Union’s Emma Smyth and Jean McDonell and Loreto’s Nikki Keegan (told you) all did things which made you long for an instant replay.

The pace was breakneck and the game had a discernible tactical pattern, with both sides probing for an opening but defences generally on top. Apart from the scores the goalkeepers at either end weren’t unduly troubled. Loreto were good value for their half-time lead but Union looked a more aggressive outfit in the second half. Into extra-time and the golden goal. Nail-biting all of a sudden. Then a penalty shoot-out. Is it always this good?

(Comparisons with camogie? A fiver into Belfield and a free programme as opposed to €15 into the All-Ireland Under-16B and C finals in St Peregrine’s on Saturday where programmes were €3 each. Crazy. And everything ran like clockwork. Being in Belfield, couldn’t help remembering a couple of years ago when Dave Billings in the UCD sports centre kindly lent us a pitch near the centre for an Under-14 Leinster championship game between Dublin and Kilkenny. The Leinster Council forgot to appoint a referee but had the neck to complain Belfield lacked facilities for a gate to be taken up!

The hockey women don’t have to wear those hideous “skorts” dished out to camogie girls as hockey penance. Nothing more depressing than seeing the mentor to an underage county camogie team handing out “skorts” at the beginning of the season and having to apologise because the girls on the benches are the fifth team to have gone forth in these precise skorts. If your son’s county team was handed out last year’s county shorts imagine the uproar!)

Anyway, Loreto are off to Rome this month to play for the European Club Champions Trophy. Coverage will be minuscule if non existent, for which we are all to blame and for which we are all at a loss. Loreto were selling a souvenir programme to fund the Rome adventure yesterday and what struck home leafing through the pages was a little of the flavour which the game had left.

In the player profiles so many serious athletes spoke about winning the Irish Hockey League last year. There was that unique sense that sport gives of setting out to do something collectively and achieving it. In this case without hubris or spite or dementia of the ego.

And if more girls could be exposed to that instead of the sad ludicrousness of Waggery or the flaccid “fun” of the Hunky Dorys campaign the world would be a brighter, more stimulating place.