Watching the NFL game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Minnesota Vikings from my position on the couch about six kilometres away from Croke Park last Sunday was quite disorientating. For a start, watching an NFL game while it’s still bright outside was a new one on me.
But there was also that feeling of the familiar mixing with the extremely unfamiliar in rather strange and wonderful ways. There was one shot on the television coverage right at the kick-off for the start of the second half – so at about 4.30pm – when the sun was dipping down just under the corner of the Davin and Hogan Stands, which reminded me intensely of one of the best photographs of any All-Ireland final day, as Mayo’s Rob Hennelly watched the Dublin team lift Sam Maguire after the 2013 All-Ireland football final.
I’m a split-season man, but there’s something about late September light in Croke Park that is impossibly evocative. Winter is coming.
The television broadcast was rather thinner on leprechaun talk than I had expected or feared; there wasn’t much in the way of overly aspirational guff about the GAA either, and everyone that I’ve spoken to who was at the game seemed to have had broadly the same experience.
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The absence of a military flyover was a relief; the inevitable creeping ra-ra-ra militarism of the NFL in the 21st century was dialled down to somewhere near an acceptable level. The music was pumping, the show was great, and the whole day felt like an occasion.
The question has been asked as to what the GAA could learn from the affair. The more accurate question is what Croke Park has learned from it, because while many of the theatrical elements were fun, and possibly instructive, I didn’t see much that could easily be translated to O’Moore Park or the Hyde.
I’m the sort of person who despises with a passion the fact that I can’t talk to my mates at half-time in an All-Ireland quarter-final because there’s a sponsor’s advert being blared out of the PA system within 20 seconds of the half ending, but I realise that is not necessarily a majority view.
The GAA does not need musical interjections during particularly dull passages of possession for the Armagh footballers, for example (although when Rory Grugan’s hand goes up in the air, the stadium DJ could be forgiven for getting itchy fingers).
But the idea that the stadium screen is there to tell you things, to enhance the watching experience, is actually a revolutionary idea in Irish stadiums. Sitting in Croke Park or Lansdowne Road, having paid three figures for your ticket, and being refused the chance to watch replays of even mildly contentious issues (or even a clock that shows what’s gone in injury time) is intensely frustrating.
American sports use the big screen to give the paying customer an in-stadium experience that is as close to the TV experience as possible, and that means leaning into doing stuff like telling the crowd who just scored, either on the big-screen or over the PA. After all, who among us has not expounded loudly in the pub about some wing forward we reckon didn’t get a touch in the game we’d just watched before being informed that, in fact, he hit 0-4 from play.
Even if it’s only for a moment, the idea that the big screen would show you who just scored would also be an opportunity for attendees to get a look at hurlers without their helmet on, because there’s an excellent chance 98 per cent of the Irish population has no idea what Eoin Cody (and plenty of other extremely talented hurlers) looks like, and that shouldn’t be the case.
NFL players lean into this sort of stuff, and co-operate fully with it, because they’re contractually obliged to. The GAA don’t have player contracts, so they have less leverage, but fans knowing what Eoin Cody looks like benefits everyone. Making the GAA community believe that and know it in their bones is the battle.
No one is expecting Sweet Caroline to be blaring out during the last 10 minutes of an All-Ireland hurling final, and no one would even suggest such a thing. Some people find the musical interludes – even in a game as stop-start as rugby – intensely frustrating. But I feel like it rather depends on how emotionally invested you are. If you’re only marginally invested in the Vikings vs the Steelers, as many of the crowd were last Sunday, putting on a non-stop song and dance show for three-and-a-half hours is a pretty decent day out.
The GAA championships are not for the emotionally detached – quite the opposite, in fact. Much of what we saw on Sunday was distraction, and the NFL gives you plenty of time to get distracted. But treating the paying customer with something other than disdain seems to me to be a pretty good idea.
Una Mullally of this parish and plenty of others have already outlined what Dublin City Council should be doing for our All-Ireland finals, after the city displayed quite vividly the extent to which they were willing to roll out the red carpet to the Vikings and Steelers last week.
Amid all the easily ignorable guff, and notwithstanding the often distasteful double whammy of the NFL and the Ryder Cup last weekend, cherry-picking a few items from the American sports menu could still be worthwhile for this corner of the sports world.
