The Gael is pining for old-fashioned colour

LOCKER ROOM:The causes of the recent collapse in attendances aren't as obvious as is often made out

LET ME say one thing about The Gael. He’s a difficult sort to pin down. A tricky cove. Capable on the one hand of improvising a spectacle as unlikely as SluddenGate, which in the native imagination at least partially obscured the entire World Cup.

The Gael himself was quite taken up with discussion and speculation about Sludden coursing and whether it is ethical and fair. His cousins in sport, those who get their nourishment at houses of soccer or places where rugby is practised, viewed the Sluddenectomy business as a confirmation of the worth they had always suspected The Gael being capable of.

For a week The Gael could talk of nothing but the Sluddenisation of his sport, the rights and the wrongs of it and the Corinthian ideal as it translates to Nobber and its hinterlands. And then this week, when presented with a groaning smorgasbord of Gaelic treats, a banquet of good games and interesting matches, The Gael generally turned up his Celtic nose and said, no, thanks very much.

In Croke Park on Saturday people had to reach out their hands to make contact with other fans. In Clones yesterday, God help us, there were gaps on the terraces. And Saturday night’s replay in Semple drew just 22,673 souls.

The causes of this collapse aren’t as obvious as is often made out. The first reason usually given for the absence of The Gael from his place on the crumbling terraces is economic. Yet if the elasticity of demand for tickets to sporting events were price-related Gaelic Games would fare well being comparatively cheap and good value entertainment, especially if there is a SluddenFest at the end of a game or a shemozzle in the middle of it.

Nope, the reasons for The Gael’s disdainful attitude are many and various. For a start, take Croke Park. The novelty has worn off the place as a destination to be seen at regardless of what is happening there. Lansdowne Road (it is now and always has been Lansdowne, we don’t have to bow to the tyranny of money all the time, do we?) has gone to the trouble of getting a roof which looks like a Pringles crisp and a sparkling glass edifice which makes it look lovely and inviting, and for a year or two attendances there will be swelled by the grandees who find it to be a suitable backdrop while bigging themselves up.

There are other reasons at work too. The Gael is a creature of habit and the GAA has become a slave of TV companies. Take Clones, where they had a two o’clock throw-in. The entire civilised word knows that if you want to get parking in the same county as the Paris of the North on the day of a 2pm throw-in you had best approach the outskirts at dawn and hide out in the Busted Sofa till five-to-two. The Gael has his club activity (be it GAA or its sister game of golf) on a Sunday morning and isn’t always prepared to give this up to attend the pullers’-and-draggers’ day out.

In Croke Park on Saturday we had an oddly lonesome experience. Those Dubs who habitually complain about the county footballers being put under pressure by bloody media hype will have noticed that in a summer when there has been no hype some 50,000 of their fair-weather confederates appear to have gone missing. That’s a fair swelling in the ranks of the vanished.

As for Munster? Well, if you aspire to have a social life or at least a passing relationship with Arthur J’s dark restorative, it is a big ask to be told to go to Semple Stadium on a wet Saturday night with the prospect of facing into exiting traffic as late as 10pm while sitting in your car sogging wet. Especially when you can watch it all on television. On the night that was in it, a crowd of over 22,000 wasn’t bad. And for both teams it will swell.

One feels, too, that The Gael is a little sick of and alienated by the carry on of insurance companies. Being told again and again that trespassing on the pitch will cause one to rot in hell forever or to trigger Plan B is a little tiresome. People who used to feel at home in GAA grounds feel more and more that they are just customers. Most of my acquaintance would be happy to waive their rights to sue should they trespass in a time of joy and be trampled by the herd or be mistaken for somebody else and be wantonly Sluddenised.

Ditto the helmets business, which is part of a process of (inadvertently perhaps) removing the character and personality of players from the game. In Thurles the excitement of the proceedings was diminished somewhat by the fact some of the great recognisable faces were hidden behind their micro burkas.

This is a problem which ice hockey in the US has suffered from for many years. People can’t see the players and don’t identify with them. The NHL, though, is aggressive about getting players to put their faces in the media.

Which brings us to a tune this column has been banging out for some time: the remove between players and audience. Times are hard and the market is competitive. Saturday night is a good taking off point for this argument.

Remember that remarkable day in 2004, perhaps the greatest Munster final ever played? Cork were trying the novel tactic of filling their half forward line with McCarthys. Garvan, Timmy and Nially. Freakishly it was the little heralded Garvan who scored the early goal which lit the touch paper.

And the game rose into the sky then for us to gaze in wonder. John Mullane’s look of despair when shown the red card by Sean McMahon. Paul Flynn’s dancing free. Ken McGrath plucking that late ball from the sky, and Dan the Man was scoring goals back then.

The point is this. Look at the characters from that day who have endured and were with us in some form or other on Saturday. For Waterford, the Prendergasts, Declan, and Seamus. Eoin Murphy. Tony Browne. Ken McGrath. Eoin Kelly. Dan Shanahan. Brick Walsh. John Mullane. Eoin McGrath.

And for Cork: Donal Og Cusack; Brian Murphy; Sean Og O hAilpin. Ronan Curran. John Gardiner. Tom Kenny. John O’Connor. Niall McCarthy and Ben O’Connor.

Toss in the ever-fascinating Davy Fitz. You had a cast of characters we know and identify with. Through the years these guys have developed profiles which make them easy and compulsive to follow. They are distinctive figures whom we have followed through thick and thin, through heartbreak and controversy, through strikes and victories.

You always travel to a Munster final hoping for a classic which will fatten the legend of the fixture. More often than not you settle for something interesting and honest which holds your interest until the end. So it was yesterday.

There is an ease and a thrill to being in their audience when they play. We know them because as men and teams they have opened themselves up to us, talked and given us a real flavour of their personalities and the chemistry of their teams. Waterford and Cork will bring good crowds to the remainder of their games because we love the story and the narrative which they provide, they draw the neutral in, we have a relationship with those players and teams.

In Dublin, by contrast, there are (sadly) perhaps seven or eight thousand people who feel they have a relationship with the county hurlers. Part of the battle is getting out there and selling the players through media.

Sadly the game has been diminished by paranoid managers and by sponsors who pay a thousand a shot for players to sit against a backdrop of logos and mutter banalities. They are selling product but not the game.

It was a disappointing weekend in many way. And it shouldn’t have been. The GAA needs to rewind the clock a little and stop trying to homogenise the games with every cold-blooded pro sport we see on Sky. The Gael is pining.