On The Record »

• The GAA and marketing razzmatazz

  April 17, 2012 @ 10:07 am | by Jim Carroll

  According to Séan Moran’s report in the paper at the weekend, the GAA plan to unveil a major marketing and promotional campaign in the coming months. The organisation know they face serious competition for both ticket-buyers and media coverage this summer with the European Championships and the Olympic Games also vying for attention. To counteract this, they’re planning “the most comprehensive marketing plan ever undertaken”, per Director General Páraic Duffy, to promote the games. To illustrate his point, Duffy urged county teams to provide their line-ups for weekend matches early in the week. Right…

  Perhaps what the GAA need right now is a lad to go around shouting “boo this man!” to encourage fans to boo an opposition player when he steps up to take a free. That’s one of the many crowd-pleasing innovations which a couple of US professional basketball sides have introduced to the NBA in recent years. While watching the (terrible) Washington Wizards playing the (equally terrible) Detroit Pistons in DC last month, you couldn’t avoid this fellow during the first quarter from where I was sitting. He’d emerge behind the net, roar his head off to get Wizard fans worked up and scarper off into the stand. It didn’t really go down well with the Pistons’ fans around me. The boo lad wasn’t around for the rest of the night, which is just as well, as the Wizards inevitably threw away a decent lead as the clock counted down and the boos might well have been directed at the home team’s dismal failure to close out the game.

  When it comes to marketing and promotion razzmatazz, the NBA truly have all bases covered. While the TV coverage usually manages to focus on the action on the court (except if one of the players manages to land amongst the courtside seats), it’s a totally different matter when you’ve paid your dollars and are sitting in the arena. There’s some class of distraction to fill every lull in the action for fear an audience of adults and kids will get bored. T-shirt giveaways, DJs, rampaging mascots, ridiculous sponsor tie-ins, getting the crowd to stand up until the Wizards score (it took a while): you name it and a NBA team have tried it out for size. It’s as if the team owners and marketeers don’t trust the highly paid talent on the boards to provide the entertainment so they have to step up and add some unique selling points to a humdrum Monday night game between two also-rans. We paid our money and we’ve taken our chances. Surely that should be enough?

  But no, it’s not. There’s a need to add a rattle to the proceedings and that’s where the marketing and promotion come into the equation. The United States is the home of this way of talking and walking, so it’s no surprise that their sports have become cluttered with these dubious and over-bearing add-ons. No doubt, many in the audience feel these shenanigans add value for money and provide some family-friendly entertainment, but you begin to wonder if you’re here for the players throwing hoops or the Mickey Mouse palaver.

  It’s highly unlikely that the GAA will go down this road. For a start, I don’t think the fans who go to games week in and week out, the ones who keep the GAA in clover, have much appetite for such tomfoolery. It’s bad enough that we’ve already seen pop groups playing at half-time at Croker during the early stages of the league campaigns to build a buzz. Yet there’s sure to be some marketing jackass who start whispering sweet nothings into the ears of the powers-that-be and before you know it, the authorised boo boy will be heading to Clones or Killarney. Perish the thought. That would never happen, right?

• José Mourinho and the cult of the manager

  May 4, 2011 @ 9:53 am | by Jim Carroll

  There was one man missing from the Camp Nou last night and, strangely enough, people seemed to miss José Mourinho. The Barcelona fans didn’t get to jeer him, the TV cameras didn’t get to focus on his frown and the Real Madrid fans didn’t have to compete for attention with him. The game was a million times better than the mess at the Bernabéu last week, but that wouldn’t have been difficult as the two teams seemed more willing to play football rather than act like prima-donna eejits while kicking lumps out of each other. Yes, there was still some of the latter but there was a whole lot less of the former. The best team on the night and over the two legs won and progress to London for the final.

  But the absence of Mourinho will still provide headlines. We get to imagine the (one-time) special one, sitting in his hotel room, watching the game on the box (probably shouting at the analysis provided by the Spanish/Catalan Mark Lawrenson) and communicating with his assistants on the touchline via his iPad. Above all his peers, Mourinho is the one who has most astutely played the cult of the manager game for his own advantage.

  Of course, the cult of the manager is something which applies left, right and centre. You can see it in how so much of the coverage about Dublin’s fantastic win against Kilkenny at the weekend, for instance, concentrates as much on Anthony Daly’s management as anything else in the county which has brought hurling to the fore. Daly has done a great job as the boss, but he’s also had the fortune to come into the job when there’s a fine bunch of players to work with for once. Liverpool’s season will be probably seen as the season of two managers with fans wondering what would have been the outcome had Kenny Dalglish been in charge from the get-go instead of the hapless Roy Hodgson, especially given the good end to the season which Dalglish is overseeing.

  It’s not a new phenomenon. Sports managers have long enjoyed – or endured – the limelight because they’re the ones giving the orders and making the final decisions. While it’s down to the players on the pitch to win or lose, it’s the manager who is as likely to get it in the neck if it all goes horribly wrong.

  What’s rarely explored is how the players themselves really regard their superstar managers. Are those players who are at the peak of their career willing to take orders from and respect managers who may not have been great players in their own day? I remember talking last year to a former international who’d played for Inter Milan and he talked about how he felt Rafael Benitez wouldn’t last long at the club because he didn’t think the manager really got the mindset of the players. Sure, success breeds success and, as Mourinho has shown, good managers can win trophies but when things start to slide, players are as likely as anyone else to not want to blame themselves and look for scapegoats. Superstar managers are always top of that list.

  At the end of this season, our friend Mourinho will have one piece of silverware (well, one slightly squashed piece of silverware) and a severly bruised ego thanks to those encounters with Pep Guardiola and Barcelona (especially the 5-0 defeat last year, the one which probably rankles the most). He was brought to the Bernabéu to win things, to beat Barcelona and to play the beautiful game that Real seem to believe is their due. Other superstar managers were given the same orders and were despatched with indecent haste when they failed to deliver. It remains to be seen if the galactico in the dugout will be spared the same fate or if he’ll spend the summer looking for a new gig. Despite what many think after his antics in this series of games – and Eamon Dunphy was fairly fortright on the radio this morning that there’s no chance he’ll end up at Old Trafford – there will always be clubs ready to welcome the cult of Mourinho. After all, he gets headlines, fills stadiums and – as long as he doesn’t have to face Barcelona – wins things.

• Glad to be GAA – from Galvinised to The Club

  January 6, 2011 @ 9:42 am | by Jim Carroll

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a GAA player in possession of some spare cash and looking for some decent casual clobber must be in want of a pair of bootleg jeans (usually from Jack & Jones). Someone obviously forgot to send that memo to Paul Galvin or else he just doesn’t read the Brontes because he thinks they’re dissing him.

  Kerry football’s most illustrious skinny jeans advocate was the subject of Galvinised on the telly over Christmas. Those strides were just one of many firsts on a TV show about a Kerry GAA player. You never saw Eoin Liston dealing with tabloid reports linking him with a presenting gig on TV3′s Xpose, going on shopping trips to such High Street style emporiums as Top Shop and River Island, passing on The Sunday Game for The City on MTV or highstepping around Manhattan in search of Jay-Z’s club. The fact that Galvin only once said “yerra” on camera, though, was a significant first when it comes to Kerry football lads and their engagement with the media. You can build on things like that.

  Galvinised tracked the player’s progress through 2010 and it was quickly apparent that the show’s producers were hoping he’d produce the form which made him Gaelic Player of the Year in 2009 or, better still, some of the antics which mean that he’s legally entitled to be called “the infamous Galvin” on some sports pages. We got very little of the former and a lash of the latter. Kerry didn’t have a great season and, when he wasn’t suspended, Galvin stropped around the pitch and occasionally conducted some indepth investigation of a Cork player’s dental work. By the end of the show, Galvin had left his steady job as a schoolteacher and was waiting to find out what came next. Meanwhile, the world kept turning.

  Galvin wandering through the show like someone who just didn’t give a damn about anything or anyone. The problem, though, is that we still have no idea just why he doesn’t give a damn. Unlike Keane or Cantona, two obvious precedents for such outsider behaviour and a pair Galvin may well have studied, you never got the sense that there was anything more to what you saw showponying across the screen. There was no evidence to back up a demonic drive or a fierce hunger to compete and win.

  Sure, he’s a dedicated follower of fashion and sure, he’s a fierce man for the skinny jeans, but, really, so what? Is that all it takes to be an outsider or a maverick or a bit of a header in the GAA these days? Why didn’t we hear a peep from any of Galvin’s county or club team-mates? Was their non-participation supposed to amplify the image the programme-makers wanted to convey of a lone wolf on the prowl, a tortured genius locked into his own world? All surface and no depth, Galvinised told us absolutely nothing that we didn’t already know about the subject before we turned on the telly.

  By contrast, The Club probably says more about the trials, tribulations and occasional triumphs of a local GAA club than any TV show could ever capture. Certainly, you’d never get this level of intensity in an episode of Celebrity Bainisteoir and they’d also edit out all the good bits. I’m sure I was not the only one gripped by Christy O’Connor’s passionate, extraordinary and brutally honest account of what happened to St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield in 2009.

  It’s a decade on from when the Co Clare club won the All-Ireland club hurling championship and a lot has changed on and off the pitch. Many of the old guard from that era are still hurling and still passionately believe that there’s one more hey-day in them, but the results show the club are no longer the kingpins they once were in the county. Meanwhile, two deaths in the parish impact hugely on the team and could either cast a shadow over the year or act as a means to inspire them into putting a decent run together. Then, there’s the various administrative wranglings over new management teams and attempts to put a coherent under-age policy together to ensure there’s a bright future for the club. There’s never a dull moment here.

  The senior team’s veteran keeper (and a sports journalist by trade), O’Connor brings the reader right into the heart of the action. No punches are pulled as O’Connor covers those mundane issues which every GAA club in the country knows about – everything from players losing the head and going off on drinking sessions before big games to clandestine strategy pow-wows before AGMs and committee meetings – as well as the big-hearted dramas, great victories and heartbreaking losses on match-day. The fact that one of the deaths which dominates the narrative is that of O’Connor’s baby daughter, who lived for just five minutes after her birth, makes the whole story even more poignant.

  Again and again, O’Connor writes about how getting involved with a club like Doora-Barefield can consume and take over your life. Be it as a player or one of the hurley-carriers on the sideline, the club is at the heart of the world from winter right through the long days of summer. What’s interesting is how someone like O’Connor, a man who has probably been involved with teams since he was a young lad, begins to get frustrated with others who lack his level of commitments. It’s telling too how a divide begins to emerge between the older and younger members of the senior panel, with many other players opting for football over hurling especially when a dual club like Doora-Barefield are on a winning streak in the big ball game. Then, there’s all the non-sporting hassles and stresses of living in modern Ireland – O’Connor is very good on the social changes around the club’s hinterland – which impact on how much time a person can devote to the club and also on how that club relates to the local community. A fantastic, must-read book – and a reminder that there’s more to the GAA than Kerry fellas in tight jeans.

• Allez Roche Allez!

  July 21, 2009 @ 7:07 pm | by Jim Carroll

  Another excellent performance by Nicolas Roche in his debut Tour de France. After two previous Top 10 finishes (including the runner-up spot at the weekend), Roche came in fourth today, six seconds behind Mikel Astarloza, after what was a tough day in the mountains and a dramatic 10km final sprint. Roche is now 30th overall and sixth in the green jersey points race.

• Aussie football… No, no, stop, come back, it’s not that bad

  November 6, 2007 @ 9:12 am | by Jim Carroll

  Read this late last night when I finally got around to the sports supplement from yesterday’s paper after spending the day transcribing interview tapes. That’s the worst part of this job, believe you me.

  Anway, it’s Mary Hannigan’s review of a BBC Northern Ireland sports show called Season Ticket which looked at a young Down footballer called Martin Clarke who now kicks the oval ball for Collingwood.

  It sounds like a great story and a great TV show, chiefly because it’s a fantastic piece of writing. It nearly makes you want to watch some Aussie football. I said “nearly”.