At least 1.2 million people in this country like sport enough to take the time to sit down and watch it. That much is clear when you take into account the number of people who tuned in to watch Ireland take on France in the World Cup Pool D decider in October.
At 1.2 million, it was the highest recorded audience in TV3 history and the most watched sporting event in Ireland in 2015. According to some very interesting figures obtained by the Irish Times, the win over France edged the quarter final defeat against Argentina into second place with 1.1 million viewers.
Now, the question we have for a significant proportion of that 1.2 million people is 'what the hell were you doing on the evening of October 8th that you missed out on the pinnacle of Irish sport in 2015?'
Granted, it's no surprise to see the Rugby World Cup dominate the top ten most watched events of 2015 but we can't get our head around the fact that Ireland's win over Germany at the Aviva Stadium was only the 16th most watched sporting event in Ireland last year with 663,000 viewers.
The top three places are all occupied by Ireland at the Rugby World Cup while the All-Ireland football final between Dublin and Kerry breaks up the rugby hegemony and sneaks in at fourth place with 882,000 viewers. With the second leg of Ireland vs Bosnia making it in to the list at fifth, it would suggest that some of the nation did catch on this football malarky eventually but that 16th place for the Germany game and that goal still seems very low.
Of course, we shouldn't really be surprised. Our shock is purely dictated by a retrospective looking back on events. A large portion of the general public would obviously have been expecting us to get spanked by the world champions but even still, sixteenth place seems very low considering it was the World Cup winners coming to Dublin for our biggest game of the year.
Okay we'll stop complaining now. Those of us who saw it know how special it was, we don't need viewer figures to prove that.
