LockerRoom: Ever notice how media coverage of events follows the same pattern every time. If a movie is banned, for instance, there comes first the debate on censorship followed by a series of pieces from film reviewers which always state that the film in question is boring anyway.

And the newspapers' letters pages anticipate it. Every controversy peaks at just the moment before the first wry "what's-all-the-fuss-about?" letter appears. Watching those pages this week as the FAI were kicked to death there emerged a number of shrill but wry voices saying "Ah now, leave the poor craturs alone, sure what harm are they doing?" I don't know about harm but if they were making Friends videos instead of running Irish soccer we would have a splendid compilation at this stage.

"The One where the English fans Riot"; "The One where the Friends go to three major tournaments and make no Money"; "The One where the Friends try to build a Stadium"; "The One where the Friends don't recognise that Tony Cascarino isn't Eligible"; "The One where the Friends have a thriving league and mislay It"; "The One where the Friends get their eye wiped by something called Samba Soccer"; The One where the Friends have to move out of their first-class Seats"; "The One where the Friends decide only to play friendlies in Poland"; "The One where the Friends lose their Best Player"; "The One where the Friends deal with a ticket tout of Greek origin and lose a lot of Money"; "The One where the Friends keep changing the league format"; "The One where the Friends let their league disappear from RTÉ and straight on to Court TV"; "The One where the Friends give the best soccer ground in Cork to the GAA"; "The One where the Friends try to sell 10-year Tickets".

And now we get what could be their monster break-out hit - "The One where the league gets moved to the summer and nobody notices because at the same time the loyal soccer-watching public are all alienated in one stroke."

But yes. Yes, yes, yes. The FAI aren't entirely to blame. They never are. RTÉ has been starved of funds by the Government for so long now that those little ads the station runs about all the things we get for our licence fee have become a sour joke. The Government, now wringing its hands in horror at the situation that has arisen, has crippled RTÉ and at the same time chickened out of establishing any sort of list system for important sporting events in Ireland.

Lists are a contentious business but perhaps the fluid Australian model would work best for us. The Aussie idea, to prevent all popular events being syphoned off so they become the preserve of those who can afford it, is to allow Pay TV broadcasters to broadcast a series of events only if the rights to those events are also purchased by a free-to-air TV company. The list changes frequently. Last Autumn a number of events came off and events, including swimming and Australian soccer internationals, went on.

In other words Pay TV is precluded from cherry-picking the best and most popular events and then paying lip-service to producing the rest of the package. If Sky wanted a package of Irish soccer they would pay a smaller fee than they have as RTÉ would be competing with TV3 for simultaneous live broadcast rights to the international games as well.

Sky would then attempt to recoup their money by the quality of their live international coverage, by building audience loyalty, by selling ads around events, by programme sponsorships, by improving the breadth of their additional Irish soccer coverage. Sky would appeal to the hardcore fan by virtue of its specialist domestic league programmes and its follow-up and preview programmes concerning international soccer.

INSTEAD, of course, the deals have traditionally been much messier than that. You force people to buy dishes and subscriptions by buying up the events of the broadest cultural importance. Sport has played on this in a short-sighted way. So, shamefully, have RTÉ. In exchange for the rights to the live internationals RTÉ have (unbelievably) surrendered all journalistic integrity and permitted the FAI to make a weekly programme about itself, The Soccer Show.

Any wonder that when the parties began negotiating this time around respect for each other seems to have been at an all-time low and both sides have come away making accusations of bad faith. It seems to me that two cultural assets, our airwaves and sport, have been carelessly abandoned to the markets and they have assumed the life-without-principle ambience of frontier towns.

Instead of linking people to their sporting culture television, which should bring to the broadest mass of people events which are of importance and of interest to them, has been allowed to degenerate to the point where television hijacks those events and just extorts more money for their broadcast.

The challenge of Pay TV should have been to sell a greater depth and breadth and quality of coverage to the most committed. Instead the most popular events have been abducted and part of the ransom for getting them back is that we swallow entire packages of things we have no interest in.

And sports connivance? It is easy to say that the FAI has a right to sell its games to whoever it desires to sell them to but that ignores the trustee role which the FAI occupies. The FAI administers our national team because we as a nation have decided, that, lord save us, the FAI shall be in charge of representing us at soccer. In exchange we give them lots of tax euros and our loyalty.

The problem is larger than just the FAI, RTÉ and a slow-witted Government. It comes down to us having no philosophy on sport in this country, no discussions over the ethics of sport and the cultural importance of sport. No firm grasp of what we want sport to do for us. All the evidence from the great controversies of the past few years - Michelle Smith, BertieBowl, Roy, and now, Sky TV, is that sport matters a great deal to us, that we need a broad national policy and philosophy on sport.

We need to map sport's role in regional development, tourism, in health and in education. We need a philosophy unpolluted by ego or partisanship or profit.

Right now we don't know what we want apart from the jollies. The FAI can never be entirely wrong because at least it fights the battle on the ground, coaching kids and recruiting kids, but we will all stumble on from aggro to aggro solving everything piecemeal and unravelling each problem after the fact.

We deserve everything we get.