It's good to talk - or might be if we could

Locker Room: Feet up on desk. Cigar lit. Time for a chat. No fancy talk now, just plain dealing. Take the scales from your eyes. A few facts of life to stiffen your drink.

Listen, I read the websites. I haunt the chatrooms as discreetly as a brothel creeper with a career in politics. I see more than I let on. This is a little delicate, but I have gotten to know the esteem in which the ordinary working Joe holds the modern sports reporter. I have read the testimonials sent in by grown men. Often those men are so overcome with emotion that they can't stick their name on to the posting.

The love of journalists is truly the love that dare not speak its name. (By the way, what is a glipe? More to the point, what's a "big effin glipe?" I feel so out of touch with the people.) I know we are the literati and the glitterati. Frankly, it's embarrassing. We don't set out to be anybody's idols. We're just doin' our job. The adulation sits uneasily on our shoulders.

It was especially heartening to drift into one or two of the Armagh chat rooms last week, where the county's defeat to Kerry was being discussed in terms of a graciousness which put me in mind of Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan back in 1994.

Even amidst all that sober-minded analysis, people were sparing some thoughts for the big guys. On one site the admiration for Pat Spillane was so great and fervent that there was a petition going to have Pat gelded. For free.

The same site had a generous tribute to Eamon Sweeney of the Sunday Independent. The site moderator had invoked the Special Powers Act and had deleted a posting of some of Eamon's work lest it have the effect on young minds that DH Lawrence might once have had upon your servant.

It was suggested also that a colleague, a well known writer with the Irish News, had the ability to speak out of parts of his body other than his mouth. Honestly! You guys! Stop! We are only human.

It's not just Armagh either. Generally, trawling these sites and dark discussion rooms, one baulks in embarrassment and modesty when one overhears the warm words reserved for us humble quill bearers, or - as the ordinary punter calls us - twats.

I'm hear to ask you to pause the next time you see a guy dashing to a phone and calling the sports editor and screaming "Hold the back page!" When you see that guy - handsome, devil-may-care - that guy wearing a trilby with a tag in the ribbon that says Press (or Twat), when you see him, pause and realise that his life isn't all glamour and whiskey sours with the fast set.

The guys on the websites (btw: listen, be honest here, am I really as funny as your mother's funeral? Cripes what happened there!), you groupies, you fans - whatever you'd call yourselves - you seem to have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick. Of course the money in this racket is fabulous, and, natch, every dame is crazy for a guy who can talk sports all night. But some days are plain tough.

It's only when you have a good day you remember how it used to be back in the golden era. Take last Saturday. Ah, what a day for nostalgia that was. Kerry had beaten Armagh, and we got the express lift down from the press box and traipsed around to the dressingrooms on the far side of the ground under the Cusack.

Now, normally of an afternoon we stand outside the winners' dressingroom in a forlorn huddle until somebody comes out and washes us away with a water cannon and some disinfectant. Last Saturday, though, Seán Walsh, the Kerry chairman (and my nominee for next president of the GAA), came out and swung the door open and said, "D'ye want to go in, lads?"

Did we want to go in? Christ! Does a fish want water? It had been years since we had spoken to a GAA player in the flesh, let alone seen one naked and wet. Still, we hung back in case it was a trap, but then our excitement got the better of us and we poured in.

The players didn't exactly throw us a surprise party, but (apart from the odd merry slap on the bare backside) we didn't interfere with them too much either. We asked our dumb questions. They gave patient and enlightened answers. Nobody died. Nobody caught anything from us that penicillin won't cure. The fabric of society suffered no decay.

On Monday, everybody was able to read the thoughts of the Kerry players in the papers. We got a good flavour of Kieran Donaghy's warm, open personality. A little idea of how Jack O'Connor is feeling after a rollercoaster season. A sense of Séamus Moynihan's journey through this summer.

That all seems like a small good thing for the GAA and for those who follow it - although I do know from reading those posts that a lot of people would much prefer if that space had been filled with the opinion of a highly paid "twat". (It needs to be said here that before Kerry's dramatic gesture of glasnost last week, Armagh and Tyrone were virtually the only football counties in the entire country conducting their press relations with any level of maturity and wisdom. Come back soon boys. We're big effin glipes and we miss you.)

Since then we have returned to service as usual. Nobody talks. Everybody mutters out the side of their mouths about either being "built up in the media" or being "written off by the media". Kilkenny hurlers have a beautiful system in place. You can't call anybody on the team or your house might explode. Instead, you must call a man who will get you five minutes talk-time with a guy who plays Junior B for Inistioge. Just don't ask him anything about Sunday.

Soon we are to go to the Kilkenny press night. Always the same caper. We eat. We go into a room where the hurlers have eaten. Somebody call the cops! An entire hurling panel seems to have disappeared. Lordy, will we ever learn?

The Dubs have a more mystifying system, sort of a Buddhist thing going on which you have to respect. It's not that they can't talk or they won't talk, they just don't feel right now is a good time to talk. The Zen isn't right. The karma is bad.

Last Thursday, Boyle Sports made the karma just right for Ray Cosgrove and the media were invited to feed off Ray's thoughts for 15 minutes. We were glad for Ray and hoped he wouldn't be struck by lightning. He wasn't, but it all went quiet again anyway.

You can see how wrong it all feels when you watch Pillar Caffrey give his two-minute debriefing sessions to us after a match. Even when surrounded by us, some of the biggest swinging twats in the whole media world, you can see that Pillar finds the ordeal truly harrowing. He would much prefer to have his brief thoughts on the game scratched out onto his backside with an old rusty nail and then displayed on O'Connell Bridge for the rest of the weekend. That's not practical, though, for a man who works shifts.

Laois are slightly more open but deadly predictable. If Micko sees a game which resembles in grimness and casualties, say, the Battle of the Somme or Guernica, he will always pronounce it a good game of football. And always we will write it down, or at least alter the pre-prepared box which says "good game of football? Yes/No".

Yesterday it came down to Micko or Mickey Moran for the last semi final-spot.

Mickey is a nice man but seems weighed down with disappointment with the world; he carries so much melancholy around he's like a character out of a Garcia Marquez novel.

The Cork hurlers are fine fellas and appear in public as regularly and as dazzlingly as Halley's Comet. Our gripe is with their press nights, which involve the same three players every year, and with the press kit, which tantalisingly gives you the names of the players who haven't appeared. You know it's a bad night when the press get all that mileage and still complain.

Anyway, that's what we are calling you in here to talk about. Sweet as it is to be loved and cherished by the Gael, we galoots of the Fourth Estate would just like to talk like regular folk. The odd interview before a game. Some quotes afterwards. It's gotten so bad and frustrating that there has been discussion recently about just photoshopping the names of sponsors off jerseys in media pictures for a month or so. Just to see if anyone at the money end would sit up and take notice.

You see - and excuse me while I redden this old stogie again - it's not that we're the world's most intriguing conversationalists or that we don't know that we should write preview material which stresses that both sides are precisely equal in ability and potential and heck knows who could win the big game. No, it's just that the stars increasingly live in a bubble.

The bubble is insulated by sponsors and paranoid team mentors and hangers on. The players grow apart from their clubs and grow away all the more from the people who watch them.

Think of the weekend's three big games. Take out the guys who've been around a long, long time, Jayo, the Lohans, Sheff, etc. How much do we know about the rest of them? What sense have we of the personality or flavour of these players or their teams?

Something needs to be done. Specifically, something, somewhere by somebody.

Law: Coverage goes where the coverage is wanted. Munster rugby players speak. Irish rugby players speak. Even the soccer guys are runny at the mouth compared to the Gael. Derval O'Rourke speaks. Tiger Bloody Woods speaks after a round. Everyone speaks. It's natural.

So desist from your ardent worship. Yes, we journalists are the great figures of our time, but we're not getting the goods. We're not getting near the goods. Pray for the invention of mixed zones or press conferences, or a return to the grand tradition of just throwing the dressingroom open and letting us pile in on naked players. Anything.

There's nothing to fear but our cliches.