A minnow still swimming with the big fish

SPORT ON TV: Keith Duggan talks to Niall Cogley, the new head of RTÉ television sport, about the challenges he faces in competitive and straitened times

Sport will eat itself. Aren't we already approaching endgame, with the global television coverage of our athletic pastimes a 24/7 player-cam, live and exclusive, pay-per-view, in your face, lifelong monster?

"Unquestionably TV is saving sports," noted the maverick US commentator Howard Cosell in a simpler age, "although I am not sure sports is worth saving."

Sentimentalists commonly refer to a mythical golden age of sports on television, perhaps in those few years immediately before the advent of the remote control, when you had to shift butt and push buttons to hear David Coleman say things like, "for those of you watching who haven't TV sets, live commentary is on Radio Two".

Moving pictures were nothing new, but mass availability was still a wondrous concept, not fully absorbed even by those in the midst of the production. Now, we have reached saturation point and still we buy it.

"Show me the Money" was the loveable refrain of the most popular sports-related movie of the past decade, Jerry Maguire. That is the climate and will be ever more: greenbacks for live sport.

It is in this environment that Niall Cogley now finds himself as the "new broom" out in Montrose, the incoming head of television sport at RTÉ.

You will forgive Cogley for not climbing the famous mast out in Donnybrook to proclaim his vision for broadcasting in the new millennium. Oh, he has ambitions all right, but they are founded on old department fundamentals and the fresh wave of hard economic realities that have swept through the national broadcaster in recent months.

"I won't say the corridors are littered, but there have been casualties outside the sports department, so the fact that we are able to continue planning for the coverage of 800 to 900 hours of sport is, I think, a healthy reflection. I don't know how the sports department is perceived in RTÉ, but there would probably have been less traffic here than in other departments. Maybe people see that, for all our mistakes and peccadilloes, we do a reasonably good job here and are left reasonably alone for that.

"In the past, heads have rolled over the refusal to compromise RTÉ sport in terms of its financial requirements. So I suppose we feel fortunate to still be planning for properties like the World Cup and the All-Ireland at a time when the grim reaper's axe seems to be falling all round the place."

RTÉ sports has a core staff of around 35. Traditionally, they have perceived their competition as being the BBC and ITV and have performed well in the ratings.

"ITV generally go with a big marketing campaign which sees them do well in the first week and then fizzle out. The BBC is more cerebral and we see them as our core competition. But we look at their resources and just laugh. And the BBC is more efficient now, there is no indulgence anymore. But equally, they look at the schedules we attempt and are utterly wide-eyed.

"For instance, we had five people in Holland and Belgium for the three weeks of Euro 2000 and we broadcast every game live. And we think, we guesstimated, that the BBC spent around £6-£10 million sterling on their team. And they covered only half the games."

It will be the same this summer in Japan and Korea, where the BBC has already begun interviewing for interpreters and chauffeurs.

"They will go out and set up a base camp. We will maybe have 15 people out there in total. But our two lads (commentators George Hamilton and Darragh Moloney) will get off a plane and, we hope, make their way to the stadium. They will do five to seven consecutive match commentaries and then have a rest day."

Maybe it is in the Irish psyche to expect our own national sports network to line up against the global renown of Auntie and the corporate muscle of ITV and still be in the shakedown for medals. At some stage, that precedent was established and has to be maintained. The average sports fan with a few tins and an evening off cares nothing for budgets, contracts or scale. She just wants pictures and voices and a final score.

"Any federation or sports association who has done business with us leaves thinking we got away with it," says Cogley. "They go away thinking, Jesus, I can't go back saying this is the best deal I could cut. They still do. And it's not that we are hard-nosed, it's just we have no more money. They tell us what they want, we offer a sum, and always, always, they say no. So we wind up doing concessions - extra previews, stuff like that. That is why it sometimes appears as if we devote our schedule to the big sports. It's not that we necessarily want to, but that is what gets us the contract."

RTÉ bashing is a fruitful hobby for many media commentators, but the sports output has generally been given an honourable pardon. There have, though, been notable exceptions, from the loss of the Champions League to broadcast rookies TV3, to the absence of RTÉ cameras at coveted sports events with Irish angles.

"TV3's appearance on the landscape is a healthy development," says Cogley. "They offer an alternative and lessen the burden on us to cover everything. You don't like winter, buy a coat. TV3 is here to stay, no point wishing otherwise. They have money; they will bid for certain sports events. The question for us in that context is: 'What would we like them to bid for?'

"But there have been events - the gold medals in the rowing, the athletics championships - that we have had to take decisions about and it hurt us not to be there. We have taken criticism for that and rightly so."

But isn't further erosion inevitable? When Cogley looks at the falling pillars of the once-peerless BBC sports calendar, doesn't he shiver? TV sport is no place for the romantic; it is an accountant's paradise. The bottom line is that Sky Sports can spend more money on any two Premiership games (about £5.5 million per game) than RTÉ does on a year of sports coverage.

Surely time and hard cash will gobble the Irish broadcaster up? Cogley doesn't subscribe to Sky, but he thinks it's terrific. If he wants to see something, he will go to the pub to watch it.

"But last summer, I was in my local for one of the Lions Tests with a friend who remarked, 'Sky has everything'. And it rankled with me, I couldn't let it go. Sky is very good, imaginative and innovative, but they don't have everything. The Premiership, a bit of Six Nations, golf, yes. But it so happened that that weekend we had 17 hours of live sports - two provincial finals, the French Grand Prix, Irish Open and the Derby. And it struck me that maybe we don't do a great job in marketing ourselves, maybe we take it for granted that people know we are covering all these things."

Which leads to the conclusion: maybe right now is the golden age. Perhaps we have never had it so good.

Niall Cogley can't predict what way TV rights will go in the future. Traditionally, their relationship with the sports bodies has been a strength, but avarice might squeeze them out. He reckons pay-per-view has long been inevitable, maybe even on dear old Radio Teilifís Éireann. He can't say for sure that RTÉ's jewels - the World Cup, the GAA, Formula One - won't be stripped away.

"But I'm not pessimistic. RTÉ has always had a financial situation and hasn't there always been a threat? From day one, it was Sky, but we are still here. And then it was the Internet and we are still here. You know, people are still constructing living rooms around the box in the corner. And some sports federations are revising in favour of the terrestrial stations - the IOC for example. We have already bought the rights to the 2008 Olympics."

When Cogley was a kid, he watched sports like the rest of us. Loved Bill McLaren. He has pedigree, of course - his father Fred is a well-known commentator with RTÉ and his grandfather, Mitchell, was sports editor at the Irish Independent.

"Years ago, when I was a young producer, I was at theIrish Open and turned on the radio when I went back to the hotel. John Bowman was doing an interview with my grandfather that I didn't know was being broadcast. And my grandfather was reminiscing about trying to persuade the general editor to give the entire back page to the All-Ireland final and about how the editor wanted to go to 'Croke Field'.

"It was a much earlier time, of course, but it struck me that the principles are the same. Trying to get space to show an event.

"All that we are trying to do, albeit in a more immediate way, is trying to tell a story. Because when the viewer finally turns off the TV, all they really wants to know is, 'Who won'."