One thing that the good people who preside over domestic football here cannot complain about is the level of media exposure. The natural inclination of a number of local newspapers to all things soccer, regardless of the seismic events that might be rocking other sports, is supplemented by an ever-keen coterie of radio and television journalists. No hamstring is too slightly strained and no small toe injury is too minor to escape their eager attentions.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. The struggle for serious media recognition of sport in an already crowded news agenda has been waged by too many people for it to be tenable now to start complaining about what exactly is given column space or airtime. But there are times when the sheer quantity of the coverage devoted to Irish League football positively points up its inherent deficiencies.
Last Saturday afternoon was one such occasion. It was supposed to involve a full programme of Irish Cup games at the point when the bigger clubs arrived to take on the more modest outfits who had spent the autumn and winter labouring through the earlier rounds.
The problem was that virtually the whole programme of matches had to be postponed due to frozen and unplayable pitches leaving just a handful of games still on. As a result, local BBC radio were at one of the ties that did survive between Lisburn Distillery and Crusaders. Flicking through the stations on a slow Saturday afternoon, the car radio happened upon the commentary from that game. There must have been a break in the rugby or Premiership coverage elsewhere because we actually stayed with this veritable clash of the Titans for a few minutes.
The game itself sounded like the usual kick and rush, 100 m.p.h. stuff that Irish League zealots have taken to their collective bosom. But far more interesting was what was going on around it. Distillery play their home games at New Grosvenor, right in the centre of Ballyskeagh greyhound track, so it is a fairly bizarre place at the best of times. Sound echoes around the empty spaces and when the wind blows the atmosphere is more Dodge City than Old Trafford.
It would be unnecessarily cruel to hazard a guess as to how many people actually were there but it seemed fairly clear from coverage so totally devoid of atmosphere that the joint was not exactly jumping. Irish League attendance figures are not, as a rule, made available for general consumption here, presumably because the embarrassment factor would be too difficult to explain away.
All of which seems pertinent, coming at the end of week when the newly-constituted Football Taskforce had held a series of public meetings in towns across the North. The purpose of these was to gauge public opinion before settling on the recommendations the taskforce will place before Sports Minister, Michael McGimpsey. The overall feedback from these meetings seems to have been positive and most tellingly they seem to have attracted more people than many Irish League clubs do Saturday after Saturday.
The way in which this debate about the future of football here has already generated a degree of interest is an indication of just how parlous the current situation actually is. It is almost as if the vast majority of men and women who would profess an interest in football here have given up on the game as it is presently constituted and are instead concerned solely with having an input into the proposed root and branch reforms.
The improvements that are needed can be recited like a mantra. Better facilities for spectators, some meaningful investment in the infrastructures of the clubs, a serious and rigorously enforced anti-sectarianism policy, more imaginative scheduling of games. The list goes on. There also has to be a realisation of the folly of setting sights at unreasonably high levels. The Irish League will never be the English Premiership or even the Scottish Premier League. Far better to settle for a small, reasonably self-contained and well-run league rather than miss the mark completely by fixing unattainable targets.
It is eminently fashionable here just now to point to the experiment with ice hockey and the Belfast Giants and suppose that it provides the perfect template for the way all sport here should be run. While it is patently obvious ice hockey does not and cannot supply that magic formula, football and the other sports which are currently jockeying for position could cherry-pick some of its more positive aspects.
Primary among these is the recognition that spectators are more than compliant cattle who will allow themselves to pushed and prodded uncomplainingly simply because that is always the way it has been done. The promoters of ice hockey here have honed in on the power of the pound and figured out pretty quickly it is much easier to attract supporters by treating them with a degree of respect.
The way in which the public has responded to that wooing, notwithstanding the fact that ice hockey here is still very much in its honeymoon, is indicative of the appetite that still exists for local sport that is properly presented and of a reasonably high quality. The transformation of Irish League football into something that comes close to matching that trade description should be the first target for those on the taskforce.
This is also a place which invests an incredibly amount of emotional energy in its sporting heroes. The public responses both to the death of Joey Dunlop and just last weekend to the terrible events that befell Bertie Fisher and his family were proof of that. There is an obvious communal hunger for sporting figures people can believe in and aspire to because that is something we have been deprived of for a long time. The sad truth is these prospective role models are nowhere to be seen on gloomy Saturday afternoons at New Grosvenor.
