Hurling is our glorious skill-packed indigenous game - first touch, ground play, aerial acrobatics, shortened and hooked camβns, wrist action, and totality as far as athletic commitment is concerned. For me, hurling is the game in which I would have treasured the chance to be parish hero. Alas, the best I could do was to become a television director for the amazing game that is as genuinely Irish as the Rock of Cashel.
Hurling this weekend will be the stunning game, full of surprises. I grew up in a society where a hurl and sliotar were asked of Santa Claus at Christmas, where John, Tommy and Jimmy Doyle were my champions, and where to wear the blue and gold jersey of Tipperary would have been more prized than the jackpot in the richest sweep or lottery. I was a miserable failure when it came to using Ned Cummins's carved ash!
Directing the 13 cameras at tomorrow's All-Ireland Final, for RT╔ and for worldwide satellite distribution by Setanta Productions, is a poor replacement, although I do get the best seat in Croke Park because I will be seeing the game unfold from several camera angles at the same time. Within a split second, I must decide what element is available to the viewer - either through live pictures or video slow-motion replay. But I still regret being a letdown on the hurling field all those years ago.
Galway may be playing the mighty men from Tipperary, but this director must be objective and impartial, and entirely loyal to both the story of the game and what is best for the viewer. The choice of picture is the director's privilege. The flow of pictures from the director's fingers must be seamless and unobtrusive. Directing is equally about teamwork, the use of video and audio space, and the creation of an ambience.
The person in the director's chair can make the biggest mistakes when he makes decisions, somewhat like the often maligned referee. The director must make his decisions in public, and many thousands of them at that. What is done cannot be undone; each error of judgment is there for all to see live, and yet the game must go on towards a conclusion.
The trick is to avoid blunders, to forget the nightmare of a missed opportunity, if it should happen, and to go forward with confidence rather than fear.
The musical notes used by Beethoven are the same as Bono's in rock 'n' roll. The difference is how they are placed together, and the rhythms and melodies employed. "All the words I can use in my stories can be found in that dictionary. It's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences," Somerset Maugham once told an admirer. The television director on a live game can only select from the shots he is offered. But it is how he does it, the passion he employs and the pace he sets that matters to the viewer, without the observer knowing it.
One of the director's primary concerns is to develop the camera shots (the angles) and to add the audio mix which conveys to the viewing audience the essence of what is happening in the arena. Television represents reality through visual and auditory images. That goes for drama, current affairs, hurling and much more, and it is made up of angle, shape, mass, space, texture, pattern, balance, colour, time, motion and sound. Sound is about atmosphere, tone, commentary and immediate observation.
Nowadays, we are helped by improved cameras and longer lenses, by better graphics and videotape contributions. Our viewers better understand hurling itself because we in RT╔ have been covering more of it live in recent years, not edited recorded highlights, and maybe it is a little better covered by ourselves because we are more courageous in putting the shots together.
On the live games tomorrow at Croke Park this ageing director will be cognisant of all those elements, while at the same time I will be concerned with the developing story of the game. It must also be a journalistic operation. This will be true "reality television" as far as the entire RT╔ crew of 60 is concerned. There is, thankfully, nothing contrived about hurling. An incident missed may never be retrieved. Without squad solidarity the director operates in a wilderness. And yet the director is asked for leadership and attitude. He can seldom be the winner.
A former director-general at RT╔ is reputed to have said that sport was "only a matter of pointing the cameras. The game happens, television follows". The poor man, if he ever said it, was so wrong. There has to be thought and a philosophy to the coverage, like giving the viewer the best seat in the house, like screening those special hurling skills, like showing player recklessness, if any, or central refereeing decisions, and spectator involvement. Sound decorates the pictures and makes the total mix acceptable.
Croke Park is a magic arena - a theatre of imaginings and shattered dreams. There are the sideshows, the icons and parades, all a part of hurling's greatest day. Those elements are often as important to the viewer as the game itself, or the colour and excitement generated by a dazzling goal or a sensational point.
Could the masters at Croke Park not think more of the millions of television viewers, here and around the world? They might also help those same viewers with better numbering on players and the redesign of the protective netting behind both goals.
And yet, too much must not be made of the sideshows such as yellow or even red cards or the on-pitch incursions. The television director must tell an honest story. My dream is to hit every button (one of the 13 cameras) precisely at the correct microsecond, as well as to re-run every video replay (six or eight other buttons) in a restricted space when nothing crucial is happening on the sacred turf, and to get every graphic display and statistic clear-cut and accurate. The hope is to cut tight to a close-up at the moment something important is happening, and yet to be wide enough to see what is occurring off the ball. Too wide and the viewer cannot see the sliotar.
Every second is decision time. During dead-ball moments the unfortunate director, imprisoned in a mobile control room behind the new Cusack Stand, can create a space full of people and players and absorbing faces. Colour shots we call them.
There is no time to relax between 12.35 and 5.30. The story is changing every moment of the afternoon, and yet the all-important incidents occur during the 70 minutes of play in the big game, that most likely will last close to 80. The final five minutes of a close game can cause chest-tightening inner tensions for the director, if he lets it. There is no time to unwind, yet relaxed he must be in dealing with cameras, sound, video, floor managers, reporters and commentators.
The worst moment for me is to have to show rough or dirty play and thus involve players in long-term controversy. But it happens. The valiant men of hurling, my heroes, are amateurs who, in a few days' time, will return to their jobs either as winners or losers. They must be considered. Yet I have no time for hatchet men and I must deal with reality.
As far as I am concerned, I will sleep tonight in the hope that tomorrow's game will be the best All-Ireland Hurling Final ever, that the better team will win and that the entire RT╔ crew on duty in Croke Park will have the game of their lives. I may have directed 37 All-Ireland finals, but you know what, I have yet to direct the perfect game coverage. Did Somerset Maugham write the complete novel? Television is also like that! It would be a bonus if the lads in the blue and gold played a faultless game! Whether they do or not, they will still be my heroes on Sunday evening.
Coverage of the All-Ireland Hurling Final starts at 12.35 p.m. tomorrow on Network 2