Consistency the first casualty in online GAA

LOCKER ROOM:The old-style lynchings that characterise the blogs and chatrooms are colourful proof of how hard it is to be objective in GAA debates, writes Tom Humphries

SO TO the tale of the tape. Having watched them play dodgems many times now, I don't believe Collie Moran brought any malicious intent to his collision with Dermot Bannon. If anything, the slo-mo suggests to me that Dermot, in his determination to hold on to the ball and brace for a challenge pushed off his left foot strongly with his last step before impact, thus making the jolt all the harder.

Unfortunately for a fine young player, he ended up with a broken collarbone. Not his fault. Nor Collie Moran's. But that's just one opinion. Not shared by the folk who matter. And most of these things are about people's opinions and inconsistencies.

As the essayist and poet Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

Take the air. In the wake of Colliegate, the lads on the Reservoir Dubs website were operating at such altitudinous heights of indignation the thin air was souping my brain even as I waded through the responses. There was much criticism of the judicial practices of Croke Park but I thought Esmonde1 most succinctly captured the prevailing view of the system and the complicit, yellow, running-dog media.

"They have to write something," noted Es. "It's really pissing me off that they picked on a player who always seemed available to them and gave them a few comments when he could. The CCCC now seems to be a PR reactionary body there to feed these bloodthirsty, morally bereft wild dogs of a press gang when they are baying for a sacrificial lamb for the altar of gutter journalism."

Ah, Esmonde1. A good point made, one hopes, with devastating use of irony. I enjoy a good sniff through the chatrooms, bracing myself like a harmless baby seal for the odd clubbing which often accompanies any mention of my own name but otherwise guiltily enjoying the spectacle of the old-style lynchings that get handed out to the unworthy and the unwary by the unnamed.

There is as little consistency to be found online as there is in the mainstream media or the courtrooms of the GAA. I know of one intercounty hurling prospect who dementedly drove himself back into obscurity through reading about his weaknesses as savagely described by nameless contributors on a hurling website.

Charlie Redmond had a go at the Dubs in a newspaper column a few weeks ago. He has since become the Lord Haw Haw of the Res Dubs site. Paul Galvin got a good kicking from the disciplinary nabobs the following week. Mass hilarity on all but the Kerry websites but special pummellings for Dara Ó Cinnéide and Pat Spillane for being perceived to be not as objective as, say, Charlie Redmond in talking about their own.

That's human nature! Seeing the media discussed on Reservoir Dubs (and elsewhere) is an intriguing exercise in the shoe being on the other foot. Often in the frenzied enthusiasm to give a hack a good kicking the facts get mislaid and you see things written about yourself or friends or colleagues which are so blatantly untrue you feel like acquiring a nom de chat and entering the fray yourself. It's the nearest thing to what it must feel like to be at the wrong end of a media lynching.

(The irony is chatrooms and blogs are increasingly influential media. A resource for the terminally lazy to harvest "facts" and rumours and a loose barometer of public opinion. Liveline is no longer the nation's sole civic forum for cranks.

Imagine the smiles out RTÉ way last week as page after page after page of web response, including that of Esmonde1, showed up while poor old TV3, who broadcast the game live and ignored Moran/Bannon, are forgotten about entirely.)

If several separate points appear to have become conflated in the Colliegate fuss the overarching theme, though, is that consistency in all things is impossible.

Firstly the talent. So you want to be hard-hitting? Well don't recruit as analysts a group who haven't long finished playing. The GAA is an amateur and voluntary organisation and any county player of recent vintage will have a web of friendships and acquaintances which will be at its most tangled and dense in his own homeplace.

As a Kerryman commented to me about Ó Cinnéide's upbeat contribution regarding the Kingdom, it is better for the lads to let Dara down than for Dara to let the lads down. Just look at the stomped body of poor Charlie in the Res Dubs room to see what he means.

For all the intent behind the Starship Enterprise set, The Sunday Game cannot afford to lose that comfortable feel which goes along with the theme music and the bit of slagging between panellists. Trying to mix that familiarity with tough analysis is difficult to the point of being impossible.

There will always be inconsistencies. You have to just play it as it lies.

The GAA is different from professional soccer. It is amateur. Up close and personal. Robust analysis of the kind done by Giles and Dunphy on Manchester United can't ever sit right with all the GAA public all of the time.

And the morally bereft wild dogs of the press gang. Does our ungodly howling unduly influence the eternally vigilant guardians of the GAA's morals? Possibly! And so what? It is not a media problem so much as it is a GAA problem and even then it is not really a GAA problem.

In Lausanne at the Court of Arbitration for Sport some years ago the legal rep for an Irish swimmer accused of a doping offence argued (among other things) that as the swimming authorities had been "out to get" his client the entire process was tainted with unfairness.

Monsieur Morand, the impeccably calm counsel for CAS, pointed out that if you choose to pocket an apple from a shop with CCTV and security guards rather than from a busy market stall and you get caught you have still committed the same offence.

The GAA are entitled to be as influenced as they like by what they see on The Sunday Game. Players just need to bear in mind that the modern intercounty championship match offers as many moments of privacy as the Big Brother house.

Life is a patchy weave of inconsistencies and zany influences. Ideally the players and the media and the people who administer the games would all be hermetically sealed off from each other and would thus operate in an atmosphere of detached and clinical impartiality. Every game would merit the same attention, every player the same coverage, every foul the same punishment. Every suspension would have the same weight, and so on.

Inconsistency is the music of chance, though. The GAA has determined there was intent in Croke Park. In other words that Dermot Bannon's broken collarbone was the result of a deliberate and malicious act. You don't have to agree but if you go along with this logic for a minute the perp received a one-month ban, which will cover one match, for this foul deed. Paul Galvin, meanwhile, gets six months (the entire championship season of his captaincy) for assaulting a notebook in a fit of foolishness?

I like Collie Moran. As Esmonde1 points out, he is one of the few Dublin players who will stop and talk about the game and when he does so he is pleasant company. But I like to think that if I felt he had broken Bannon's collarbone deliberately Collie's media accessibility would not be an issue.

I like Galvin and know him better. He is one of the most compelling and fascinating characters in the game. He has been good to me with his time and watching Kerry without him is like watching Lear without the storm.

It's hard to be objective about either man. Easier for me to be objective about a Down footballer I have never met.

Funny all us wild dogs have the same struggle. Some time in the near future I'll probably do a column urging the GAA to get tough and get serious about discipline. I'll really mean for them to get tough except for with people I know, like or admire.

We're all the same - just have to live with the uneven way that life unfolds.