In today’s Locker Room column, Tom Humphries tries to explain the empty seats that have marred every big football or hurling match this season. The problem is most obvious at Croker during Dublin matches, but is hardly isolated. Empty seats were noticeable during both the Munster Hurling Final (and replay) and the Ulster Football Final, two perennial sell-outs.
The recession is the easy explanation, which Humphries rubbishes. I agree - Croker was packed all summer last year, when recession talk was relentless. Instead, he offers the following flimsy excuses for the public indifference:
• The lustre being removed from the Croke Park experience
• Scheduling miscues
• Overbearing crowd control procedures
• Hurling helmets (on this, we also agree. There is nothing more antithetical to hurling than Mullane’s face behind bars.)
Humphries claims to see into the soul of the Gael, but the problems are much deeper than he will admit. The over-riding reason people are staying home or going to pubs to watch GAA is that, this season anyway, the product is crap.
When Dublin was massacred by Kerry on the August Bank Holiday Monday last year, there was a collective realisation around the capital: ‘We won’t be fooled again’. It will take an All-Ireland semi-final to get Dubs deluding themselves again.
More generally, both football and especially hurling seem to be in transitional moments, between stars, between styles of play. Kerry is Kerry and Kilkenny is Kilkenny. Beyond that, punters are offered flashes of greatness (Monaghan against Armagh, Meath’s 5 goals) in between long spells of mediocrity. The biggest talking point has been a refereeing decision and its aftermath. There has been two months of matches. Every interesting storyline is one of rapid decline: Dublin's, Mayo's, Tipp's. Sligo's ascendancy is already over. Waterford kindle a sentimental interest, but everyone knows their moment passed when they lost to Limerick in 2007. It was impossible not to watch the Munster final series without feeling some pang of nostalgia for the skill and intensity of the epic matches the two counties played only 3 years ago.
Beyond the die-hards, interest in the game is like a contagion. It relies on germ carriers. But there hasn’t that germ this season, that moment that lights up the summer.
Hurling seems especially stuck in a rut. The Canning revolution will not come. Tipp are still debating that penalty. One of them will be gone by next Monday. Humphries points to the familiar faces in the Munster replay as a positive, but to me, it gets to the heart of the problem. As great as is it to see Tony Browne defying the hourglass, who among us believes that this vintage of Waterford or Cork could stick with a motivated Kilkenny? Their own supporters know this. That is why they stay home, not because of the thought og arriving in Bantry, soaked, at 11pm night. We want nothing more than to lose ourselves in the mad reverie of sports belief.
But this economy has taught to finally cop on to value. Half of Roscommon will be in Croker in a few week’s time, but across the country the mood is much closer to indifference than depression, which may be a far more dangerous thing.
