If you want to blame anyone, blame The Irish Times podcast people. Specifically, the In The News podcast people. They’re the worst, the absolute pits. And it’s high time we all stopped shilly-shallying about the place and called them out on it.
So there I was, wandering through the serious floor of the building a couple of weeks back, craning my neck for a look at the fancy coffee machine the news reporters get to use. In sport, we make do with sniffing the lids of old Maxwell House jars for our caffeine hit so this one, all frothing milk and tar-black ristretto, was borderline pornographic to behold.
I lingered a little too long, my nose pressed against the kitchen glass, when one of the podcast people asked was I okay and did I need something and was I really supposed to be here in the first place? “Why, I could ask you the exact same thing,” I replied gruffly, using my Irish Times training, specifically the module on never admitting to being in the wrong or out of your depth.
After years of heartbreak, can Rory McIlroy finally win the Masters?
After a quiet moment of sizing each other up, we fell into conversation, in the course of which it came up that we were entering into a busy period of the sporting calendar. Sports fans will be familiar with these chats, wherein the normies in our lives are suddenly seized by a vague subliminal feeling that there is a big sporting event somewhere on the horizon.
Michael Walker: Carlo Ancelotti’s time at Real Madrid looks up unless he can add to trophy hangar
Mountains being moved to find success in Wicklow football
Do you believe that Tadej Pogačar is the greatest cyclist of all time?
FAI and League of Ireland clubs agree on the need for Government funding – but not much else
Meanwhile, we, the sick puppies who live by the tick-tock of the sporting year, already know not just the dates and times of what’s coming up but have diligently worked out what portion of which family events we will be able to mould and shape to fit around them. And, of course, we kept that information to ourselves on the off chance that we might be able to strike a better deal closer to the time. No point giving away leverage before you have to.
(Isn’t that right, Mr President?)
Anyway, this led to the possibility that I might come in and appear on the In The News podcast. Or, in the words of the podcast Big Cheese as he thoughtfully fingered his light covering of undeniably handsome stubble: “Sport. Yes. People like sport.”
So I did. Twice in the space of a week. The first time to talk about the effect of the Football Review Committee’s new rules on the then-upcoming football championship, the second to talk about Rory McIlroy’s quest to finally win the Masters. Two podcast hits on two wildly different topics, bubbling with anticipation for the arrival of both events.
The tenor of both episodes, when you boiled them down, was quite similar. Some things had been crap in the past. Some things had recently changed. There was a chance, now, at least, that some things might not be quite so crap. Indeed, there was a chance that things might be glorious.
It’s hard to say exactly when the penny dropped with me that glorious might be a reach. Maybe it was in Ballybofey last Sunday when the first note I made on my page at the Donegal v Derry game was that Derry had kept the ball for the opening minute and 42 seconds of the match. Or maybe it was later, when one of the final notes I made was that the first solo-and-go in the whole game had come in the 66th minute.
Definitely, by the time 22.58 on Thursday came around, and McIlroy’s chip from the back of the 15th green started rolling and rolling and falling off the front and into the water – definitely by that stage, glorious had left town. By 23.34, when he was three-putting the 17th green, glorious was in witness protection.
Why do we do this to ourselves? Why, as followers of sports, do we kid ourselves so often and so fecklessly? It’s one thing to hope for the best. It’s quite another to so routinely convince ourselves that the best is even possible. Not just that, but to look forward to it so intently.
And yet we do it. Leinster have lost three Champions Cup finals in a row. In 30 years of the competition, no other team has ever lost two in a row, never mind three. Yet last weekend, they brought 55,627 to Croke Park for a game in which they were always going to give Harlequins a hammering. Some of them were day-trippers, no doubt. But there’s a lot of believers there still.
Same with Munster in France. They haven’t won the competition for 17 years now. At least Leinster get to finals before their hearts are broken – Munster haven’t even got that to sustain them. And again, there would have been plenty of event junkies in La Rochelle last weekend, there for the trip and the sun and the vibes. But there was no shortage of true devotees there either. It probably won them the game, truth be told.
We go again. That’s what sports is about. The anticipation isn’t some added extra to the action. For plenty of people, the anticipation is action in and of itself. The Masters lasts for four days, but we spend months building up to it.
The championship will eat up the majority of our time from here to August, but we spent the whole of the league talking about how the rules were going to save it.
We never learn. Even as I’m writing this, McIlroy has just eagled the 13th hole, Justin Rose has bogeyed the 17th. An eight-shot gap is down to three. Sure there’s miles to go in this yet!
