It's frustrating covering the GAA if you're a contemporary sports website. Here you have two fervently-followed, endlessly-discussed sports, yet coverage of them largely remains stuck in the aertel era. RTE's production values are great - especially in hurling - but the GAA really could be doing more to promote its athletes and its games. Why aren't videos of the best goals, best tackles and best saves online every Monday morning? When we were all struggling to catch up with the glut of qualifiers back in July, the GAA should have been doing loads more in terms of content creation to let us know that these games are actually worth being played.
Which is not to say that the fans are absolved. So many of the best football gifs, memes and photoshops are done by computer-savvy fans who have a bit of spare time and a funny idea. This most evident in the hours after the Champions League final, when the John Terry's crashing of the Chelsea victory celebrations went from clever idea to ubiquitous internet phenomenon to infuriatingly familiar trend in about 24 hours. Well, it's been a heartening week for those of us hoping to see GAA supporters catch up with their football-supporting brethren. All it took was the rather bizarre display of Lar Corbett in marking Tommy Walsh last Sunday and all of a sudden, a meme was born. A lot of it was driven by the technically-spotty, if regularly funny Facebook site Kilkenny Memes, but over the week, we've seen a few brilliant Corbett/Walsh photoshops. My favourite is the Lar Corbett at Tommy Walsh's wedding photo because of its brilliant concept and top-drawer technical execution, though the 'Lar Stalking The Wrong Tommy Walsh' which was posted by Joseph Halpin last night deserves some merit as well. Someone even bothered to make a vaudeville-themed Lar-stalking-Tommy video. There's no commercial dictum driving this, just people on their computers taking the idea of Lar Corbett relentlessly following Tommy Walsh to its comedic limit. There's not a whole lot to work with this meme - you can photoshop a celebrating John Terry onto the Moon Landing or some Junior B trophy presentation - but how much can you get out of Lar following Tommy around?
Quite a bit, it seems. Hopefully this trend continues through September as GAA fans continue to be meme generators.
Photo via Irish Times
