Relentless guff about passion in sports all mouth and no trousers

TV VIEW:WHEN IT comes to sport, it is in the ad writers' manual that passion has to be mentioned: and mentioned a lot. Passion is everywhere in sport, apparently. To be sporty is to be passionate: a veritable Byron unleashed into the tempestuous, bright red boudoir of human emotion. But passion's very ubiquity is turning it stale.

You can’t turn on a radio now, or watch the intro to a sports programme on the telly without being bombarded by this insistence on passion. Even the merest parish clash has to be injected with the suggestion that lives are at stake, or at the very least, the losers will be off to an apothecary for some hemlock such is the depth of their despair. And you know what? Sometimes it just ain’t so.

Now the evidence is in the viewing figures that plenty people around the globe look at racing cars and feel very passionate indeed. And there is a sexy vibe to Formula One with all that money, thrust and brrmm-brrmm. But the Beeb’s attempts to inject passion at the German Grand Prix were doomed by the reality that it would often be more informative for Jake Humphrey to point his microphone at the cars rather than drivers who, outside of driving, are remarkable largely only for their boredom quotient.

Not that the Beeb is short of access. At one stage during Saturday’s practice, Jake walked straight into the Mercedes garage and squeezed past a mechanic whose first instinct to tell the intruder to get his arse out the door noticeably disappeared at the sight of the all-important camera. In a sport built on television coverage, a camera gets you everywhere and everyone. Even Michael Schumacher is playing ball these days, a sure sign his comeback isn’t going well.

Drivers were falling over themselves to fulfil their media obligations. And the interminable tales of brake pressure and ‘point three seconds through the bends’ duly mingled with a blizzard of incessant on-screen displays of information about winds speed, track temperature and humidity.

The overall effect was curiously mind-numbing, as everyone went through the motions. And it’s all bogus: acres of stats and unlimited access is all very well, but sport is about personalities or it’s about nothing at all. And if anyone on the starting grid had anything to say even slightly distinguishable from focus, tyre pressure, and even more focus, they were hiding it well.

In fact the only refreshing bum-note came in a clip from the 1982 Hockenheim Grand Prix when Eliseo Salazar crashed into the back of Nelson Piquet. The latter got out and tried to punch his rival, hardly a bright move considering Salazar still had his helmet on. But even that tiny slice of human frailty felt like a warm bubble of sincerity floating free of a sucking ooze of slick bullshit.

Cycling’s problem is the all-too-human impulse towards cheating means it has been hard to get too worked up about this year’s Tour De France, although it did allow James Richardson on Eurosport a nice line on the eve of Saturday’s time trial – “Whatever the French word for denouement is, that’s what we’ve got coming up.”

Alberto Contador duly extended his lead over Andy Schleck but even though there is a general feeling among those supposed to know this Tour – or “Chewer” in Seán Kelly’s South Tipperary twang – has been relatively clean, cycling’s tawdry reputation for drug abuse is going to need a lot more time to recover.

But for real passion, you need the GAA. If Formula One is just titillating, then the flowers of Irish manhood have eyes that look into your soul and pull at your heart-strings.

“With your PASSION, no one can stop you,” breathes the Vodafone sponsorship ad in its tantalising, meaningless way. “Super Valu – real local PASSION,” squeaks Super Valu in a more accessible girl-next-door kind of invitation.

All of which meant Saturday night’s Cork-Limerick qualifier seemed even more of an anti-climax. Painting a veneer of mock-epic, swords and sandals, top-half nudey grandiosity on to Gaelic football matches can’t disguise the lumpen, freckled, socks-around-the-ankles reality.

Cork and Limerick spent 65 minutes hopping off each other in “hold me back, I’ll kill him” posturing that competed for time with any number of sly digs, niggles and elbows that were, of course, accidental.

It was an exercise in tedium that suddenly burst into a satisfying finale when Alan O’Connor managed to give a Limerick player a push so obvious even the ref couldn’t ignore it. The underdogs scored the penalty, and another point, which took the game to extra-time.

“Charles Dickens wrote a book, The Tale Of Two Cities,” Pat Spillane informed us. “T’was the best of times and the worst of times. A dreadful match – but the best of times were the last five minutes.”

Oh, Pat, how wonderful it must be to be sated so quickly. But that’s the GAA for you – all PASSION.