The GAA is a series of compromises devolved to a kind of delicate absurdity.
A quick glance: the Leinster champions play on the edge of the Atlantic; a couple of Ulster sides have to win twice as many games as the Kerry footballers to make it to Croke Park; the Kerry hurlers have to win a playoff to be promoted whereas a Leinster team go straight up from the same competition; Portlaoise is adequate to host the Dubs once Laois aren't playing; one championship has 12 quarter-finals while the other has two.
This weekend gave us another: the highlights show as long as Apocalypse Now which left viewers bemoaning the paucity of highlights.
At this juncture of the summer, The Sunday Game is deeply unsatisfactory.
That's not solely RTE's fault. It's unrealistic to expect every game each weekend to receive the multi-camera, HD treatment afforded to Sunday's live offering. The budget isn't there, and even the most ardent Gael might object to licence fee being directed to long, lingering close-ups of John Evans costing hundreds of euro per second. So while the single-camera highlights package isn't ideal, on a weekend featuring 12 games with the further complication of many RTE's cameras spending Saturday splayed across count centres in all pockets of the countries, it's a reality.
They are also hamstrung by an unusually busy schedule of concurrent games, and given that the GAA is unlike other sports in deriving the bulk of its income from gate receipts rather than broadcast money, it's right that games are not moved to facilitate TV.
But if they can't control the quality, The Sunday Game can do something about the quantity.
At the moment, the show is trying to do too much: offering the definitive highlights package along with the definitive discussion on said highlights. But even when they allow the show stretch into Monday morning, they are achieving neither.
Here comes a quintessentially GAA contradiction: many highlights packages of non-live games are too short to be properly analysed because they are shortened so as to allow time for the analysis which is undermined by how short the highlights packages are.
To mangle an old aphorism: to understand the works of Flann O'Brien, you must first understand the GAA.
Carlow/Kildare got 40 seconds more action than it did chat; reports from the three other Leinster games got a total of ten minutes (some of this included an interview with Jim Gavin) and eight minutes of chat.
The quality of the discussion at the moment does not deserve that kind of action/chat ratio. Colm Cooper and Sean Cavanagh were last weekend's bromide-extollers-in-chief: 'There's great work being done in Carlow...Steven Poacher'; 'Pearse Park in Longford is a tough place to go'; 'Are Wicklow really benefitting from that game against Dublin?'
(They mercifully stopped short of a discussion on the tiering of the football championship).
This writer has a degree of sympathy for Cooper and Cavanagh - if they are going off a three-minute highlight package, with another seven games to talk about too, what else are they meant to say about how Longford beat Meath?
If they want to retain the highlights rights to the championship, RTE should look at the Match of the Day model. It's been some time since anything of interest was said on the Lineker-fronted flagship show but that doesn't really matter: it remains a truly superb highlights show, mainly because jokes about Alan Shearer being bald are sparse relative to the volume of action they broadcast.
Match of the Day 2, meanwhile, brings much more considered and incisive analysis to the fewer games on a Sunday, mainly because guests have the time and space to properly analyse games. Why not extend the action on The Sunday Game, and migrate the agenda-setting chat to a Monday review show, which will make said chat more informed, considered and consequentially much better?
A tiered football championship will come about much quicker if weaker counties games are properly promoted and discussed, rather than their games simply being used as a proxy to talk about segregating the competitions and moan about why it hasn't happened yet. Pat Spillane fulminated last week that the GAA is ignoring the smaller counties, and while it mght be true, giving him space to say this instead of showing more of said smaller counties is contributing to exactly that problem.
There has already been much talk of the decline of Gaelic football on The Sunday Game, and it will likely continue throughout the summer.
The reality is the sport is healthy, vibrant and alive all over the country, and The Sunday Game is missing it.
