Series in danger of going under

I can remember back in the late 1970s ambling up to Croke Park one winter day to see an Australian Rules team play the oul Dubs. The game was touted as a mere curiosity and didn't trail the word International or Compromise after it. Cruel and Unusual would have been more fitting adjectives anyway. The Aussies happily cuffed and bumped their way around the place like the Kelly Gang on steroids. The Dubs left with their dignity if not their persons just about intact. We went home and said we'd just been to a fight.

All these years on and all this hype later the International Rules series still has a lot of persuading to do if it is to convince the world that it has a future beyond being a highlights reel of spectacular dust-ups and ugly tackles.

The concept has problems. Which is natural. It also has a poorly defined goal. Which is worrying. If we iron out all the problems, so what? Where are we going anyway?

Firstly, only one side of the playing equation is strictly amateur, but part of the core compromise appears to be that both sides behave that way from time to time. Usually that's the home team, although the handling of the Graham Geraghty incident last time out and the brouhaha with Paddy Clarke this time ran contrary to that trend. Generally, though, the host nation takes the entire business less seriously than the visitors.

The reason is obvious and depressingly low rent: The Big Trip! Going on expedition down to Australia is a whole lot more exciting than pegging a few games onto a long season at home. And vice versa. Being the home side is a chore.

The impact on attendance was pronounced this time. A good crowd turned up at the MCG in Melbourne, but so what? Sports events in Melbourne have the highest per capita attendance of anywhere on the planet. Any bunfight draws a crowd. In Adelaide, the attendance scraped over the 30,000 mark with the series on the line. There were mitigating circumstances in both cities, but it is safe to say that International Rules footie is not a wildfire raging in the public imagination.

Fans of the series will argue that aggregate attendance around the 80,000 mark this year is respectable. Yet there has to be context. The magazine Sports Business recently surveyed Australian attitudes to various sports in terms of interest, participation and attendances. Thirty-one per cent of the population confessed to some interest in rugby union (placing the game a mere 12th on the list of Oz interests, with swimming first, cricket second and tennis third). A mere two per cent participate in rugby union, 10 per cent attend games and 28 per cent watch on TV. Yet a rampantly chauvinistic Australian public provides full houses for any game its World Cup-winning team plays.

Aussie Rules works from a far, far stronger base: 50 per cent of Australians are interested, five per cent play, 26 per cent attend and 46 per cent watch the games on TV. Twenty-three per cent of Aussies rate the Grand Final the most important sports event in the Australian calendar (as opposed to three per cent for the Bledisloe Cup), yet the code's only international form of expression makes very few dents in the native imagination - or in the native media, if the web editions are anything to go by.

Then there is the nature of the game itself. A hybrid sport which gets played twice a year is a tough thing to nurture. The Australians bring their physique and their strength to the party, but they have made most of the compromises as well. Abandoning the oval ball is inevitable if the game is to have a future, but it is a huge concession, and, as the Irish players have got fitter and stronger over the years, the Australians have lost out in other ways.

They tend to run with the ball like rugby forwards rather than rugby half backs. That is, they travel in straight lines relying on their sheer power as they crash into bodies. The Irish have learned to sustain these impacts while deploying the lighter footwork and short passing of their own game when in possession.

To adapt, the Aussies have begun picking smaller players rather than the giants who creamed us early on, so now we compete physically and enjoy all the other advantages too. One gets the impression that if the Irish got their act together they could win most of the time.

But what would be achieved? We would be ranked one in the world instead of two? Yippee!

If the series is to survive beyond its four-year extension, somebody should ask why and to what end. At present it provides another shop window in which the Aussies may browse for good young Irish players, and it offers a good trip for some great GAA players, allowing them to wear an Irish jersey, albeit in a somewhat blurry context.

Certainly Ireland is being "represented", but in a game we do not play at home against the only country we can find to play a hybrid game with. Is a stitched-together game between countries truly a sport? An international sport? When it has no context beyond its two games per year?

What do we gain? A context in which to place some of our top footballers? Sure. If anyone wondered about Darren Fay they needed only watch him in action in the past couple of weeks. Ditto Kieran McGeeney, Graham Geraghty, Michael Donnellan and others. A platform for personal achievement? The greatness of some our coaches has been underscored by the way in which they have teased out a tactical side to a game founded in mayhem.

That all, though? We caught up with Friday's result and nodded and smiled. The series takes place in a vacuum with nothing for us to measure worth against. Beating the Aussies? Against a good Aussie team or a bad one? Did they train? Did they care? Who really knows?

And has the experience contributed to the evolution of Gaelic football? Have we taken broadly-admired concepts like the mark and incorporated them into our own, often unlovely pastime? Do we even think about such things outside a couple of Sundays every October?

Four more years and some hard thinking to be done.