Stale bread and cheap circuses
Occasionally when working in the sports entertainment industry, you find yourself rolling towards an overwhelming question. Will Buckley has been a sports writer for over 15 years; readers of the Guardian and Observer will be familiar with his work. It's even possible a much wider group of people got to hear about his debut novel, written, we're told, without irony in a "semi-autobiographical" manner. Called The Man Who Hated Football, it was released last year to a sniffy enough response from the sporting press.
The central treatise of the book was that grown men should never cry about football, no matter what. That your mood can be dependent on the results of a football team, and that entire weeks can disappear – lost on the whims of your star striker – is recidivist and slightly sinister, he argued. The members of this team present themselves at the bar with a mouth full of bling, tell the barman he'll earn in a lifetime what they are picking up in a minute and they get Cristal, while you're scuttling, pinned and wriggling. The book is notable for the belief that football is a great placebo for the masses, "something ineffectual that the fans mistakenly believe to be authentic".
It's hardly original material, but it's certainly genuine and probably true. I was reminded of Buckley's work in the midst of the rabble-rousing around the Ryder Cup. How embarrassed the people who put all the work into getting the Ryder Cup for Ireland must be. The Revenue Commissioners are going to target Kildare for the months before and after to ensure that they get their cut, while the locals slap the hog on the arse and roll in the Yankee greenback. Tales of houses being rented for €20,000 a week can be dismissed as apocryphal but the government's meddling in the television rights deal is unfortunately too public to ignore.
Business is predicated on the belief that two sides can interact with authority. The rights for the tournament were sold on the basis that they could legally be traded. A deal was done and everyone was happy. A lightbulb went off in government buildings, the politicians realised they had a handy point-scoring opportunity and they started to squeal. This government has been squealing about sport for a long time now. Squealing about how much they've invested in sport since they came to power and how nothing had happened before that. Squealing about how they've kept the main events on the television. Squealing about how they've funded this golden age of Irish sport. It's a pity it's all piss and bluster.
Isn't it a bit weird that they're so concentrated on the television coverage, but won't properly fund research into the relationship between sports funding and child obesity? Isn't it a bit strange that they want us all glued to our screens rather than actually going to events? Bertie Ahern is almost as nakedly jingoistic as his mentor Charlie Haughey when it comes to milking the sporting arena for political gain. His recent television and radio interviews about his love of sport are all part of rehabilitating his reputation to the sports-going public who booed him every single time he showed up at events for over a year. Giving the crowd free stuff is a good way to keep them schtum. Of course the likelihood is that any politician who wants to go the Ryder Cup will go and eat nice food in the clubhouse. The rest of us can watch from home.
Bread and circus is such a lazy cliché, an idea that's so patronising and dull it could just be right. Unfortunately, it's worse than that in this case. What the government's policy on free-to-air events does is hamstring everyone involved in providing coverage and developing games in this country. It undervalues the product and means that advertisers get subsidised rates for access to some of the biggest television events in the country. The FAI lost out catastrophically when their deal with Sky was overturned by the Minister for Communications.
Of course the government can be forgiven for not doing anything before now – it's only recently they learned that the Ryder Cup was coming to Ireland in the first place. At least we know the lads are busy with important matters.