All-Ireland Sunday deserves the Super Bowl treatment

The gospel is spreading. It was revealed earlier this week that today’s All-Ireland football final will be the first to be shown live by a French broadcaster.

Sportall, a digital sports channel, acquired the rights after covering the two semifinals. We just hope that there aren’t lads polishing up on their Leaving Cert French so they can translate any Gallic tweets praising this strange game of Gaelic football as a form of affirmation. Who knows where this might lead?

Given how flamboyant and thrilling their national football and rugby teams have been down the years, imagine what might transpire if Gaelic caught on in France.

In a country that has produced the likes of Eric Cantona, Serge Blanco, Zinedine Zidane and Antoine Dupont, there’s surely a prospective David Clifford or Michael Murphy lurking somewhere.

Most of us won’t have access to the French broadcast but, for the past couple of years, there has been a genuine choice as to where you can watch the All-Ireland.

A combination of ‘X’ now being a cesspit and the novelty wearing off means that the endless retweets of amazed and astounded English people watching their first hurling match is no longer a thing, and the Beeb’s coverage has begun to stand on its own two feet.

There was always a confidence in their football coverage, as they had been doing the Ulster Championship for years, and in the likes of Oisín McConville and Murphy, until he was coaxed back into the Donegal fold, they had incisive analysts of the modern game. They have always felt less need to explain Gaelic to any first-time viewers in England or Wales.

The Beeb’s coverage of last week’s hurling final did get off to a rocky start, delving into a bit of cliché. There was traditional music for the intro and drone shots of Ireland’s green and rugged landscape, with Limerick’s Séamus Flanagan providing the narration of how this is hurling and this is Ireland.

‘Fast, raw and beautiful. No contracts, just pride,’ the Shannonside forward intoned. ‘These aren’t just pitches. They are battlegrounds. This is who we are. This is hurling.’ All a tad twee, maybe, but no more of a rocky start than RTÉ’s coverage which had Joanne Cantwell, Liam Sheedy, Anthony Daly and Dónal Óg Cusack standing beside the Michael Cusack statue just inside the stadium.

‘I see him coming to life and coming down off the plinth and using that stick on some of the bluffers who are meant to be promoting hurling but let’s park that for the day,’ Dónal Óg suggested to a mystified Cantwell and the watching Irish public.

Last week was a lesson that, for all the analysis and anticipation ahead of the All-Ireland final, it can transpire in a way nobody can foresee. Using a seventh player in defence is hardly a revolutionary tactic but Liam Cahill’s decision to deploy Bryan O’Mara as a sweeper in front of the Tipp full-back line seemed to befuddle the Cork players and management.

Even at half-time, there was still the feel from the RTÉ punditry team that you will never win Liam MacCarthy with a sweeper. Little did they – or any of us – know. And that’s the thing about this day of days. Everything you know may be wrong. There’s nothing like All-Ireland final Sunday.

From early on, the sense of occasion around Dorset Street. Drumcondra and the Royal Canal makes you feel that you are part of something special. And that’s pronounced even more for football, as the game is more widely played.

Every youngster who touches leather as a Gaelic player can dream of being part of this day, in a way that’s just not possible with the hurling. I am lucky enough to be seeing my county in a fourth All-Ireland final this afternoon. Not everyone can say that but, with football at least, every county has the capacity to dream.

I just feel more should be done to convey just how special the day is. The final itself will be only 70 minutes of action on the pitch, but it is about much more than that. It is about the feverish anticipation, the frenzy over tickets, the absurd pre-match rumours – in the hours before last week’s throw-in, the story that there was sickness in the Tipperary camp drifted through the taverns of Drumcondra.

But the thing is that the television coverage doesn’t really capture any of that.

The broadcast of All-Ireland final day should befit a day and event of such national importance. As a rule, we probably should stop looking towards the States for inspiration in anything, but they do know how to do television correctly. And their annual coverage of Super Bowl Sunday should act as the template for an All-Ireland final.

From early morning, different talking heads analyse and dissect what could possibly happen in the game. Much of it doesn’t come to pass, but that doesn’t matter. It is just mirroring conversations taking place across America that day. In Australia, coverage of the AFL Grand Final runs along similar lines.

In this part of the world, television coverage of the FA Cup final used to fall into the same groove. The 1985 FA Cup final was the first one I remember clearly, and I remember lying on my sitting room floor, from before noon, flicking from Saint & Greavsie on UTV to Bob Wilson on the Beeb, the excitement as they showed the buses coming in.

The FA Cup final was once an event of national significance, and the morning-to-night television coverage was simply a reflection of that. The way the broadcast has contracted underlines how the significance of English football’s showpiece day has dwindled.

But, as Gaelic football’s landmark day continues to grow in importance, television coverage doesn’t really reflect that. Why not begin early in the morning with a review of what people are saying in the day’s newspapers – maybe even these pages! Why not a proper review of the season, an in-depth look at the paths Donegal and Kerry have taken to Croke Park.

And, yeah, there could even be room for a twee, clichéd piece to camera about how the two western seaboard counties have more similarities than differences – you could even throw in some drone footage of the rugged North Atlantic landscape, if you wanted.

A day such as this, and a game as eagerly-anticipated as this one, deserves more than coverage going to air an hour and 15 minutes before throw-in. It needs something more. The best part of this day is the anticipation, and that needs more time to be captured fully. Something to bear in mind, going forward.

And, if you are not one of the 82,300 going to Croke Park, come three o’clock, you can take your pick between Peter Canavan and Tomás Ó Sé on RTÉ or Oisín McConville and Philly McMahon on the Beeb. At least, there’s a genuine choice of broadcast, as befits such an important day.