SIDELINE CUT:Have sports stars become over dependent on their personal music systems, asks KEITH DUGGAN

Be it the World Cup or the Olympics or the GAA championship, it is a rare thing to see any athlete entering a stadium without the accoutrement of the slender thread headphones plugged into their barnets, transporting them to wherever it is they want to be before a match.

It is, of course, a fashion but you sometimes have to wonder about the effect that so much music has on the synchronicity of a team on the field.

If the full-forward, a big uncomplicated hoofer of a lad, has passed the journey from the hotel to the stadium listening to Sepultura’s Beneath The Remains at full volume while the centre forward, who is often acclaimed for the “intelligence” of his play in newspaper write-ups, has been mellowing out to the sounds of Keith Jarret playing Gershwin, can the team-mates truly expect to be in the same “place” once the match begins?

It is hard to pinpoint exactly when music became such a huge part in sport.

In the very early 1990s, when Michael Jordan had entered a different athletic realm to anyone else on earth, the Chicago Bulls used to take the court at the United Centre to a fairly obscure song that was released 10 years earlier.

The lights were dimmed at the stadium and the guitar chords of Sirius, the first song on a 1982 album Eye In The Sky by The Alan Parsons Project filled the stadium. It was a perfect choice of song; light, hypnotic and vaguely menacing.

And because the Bulls became a global television phenomenon, that short instrumental attained a universal recognition the remainder of the album never did.

But how strange it was that an obscure piece of music on a concept album by a British “prog” rock band should become associated with one of the most famous sportsmen of the last century.

It was such a peculiar choice it is tempting to believe it was down to freak luck rather than masterful planning; that the stadium manager at the United Centre decided one evening some music would be good to lift the crowd but discovered that the only CDs in the office were Barry Manilow’s Tryin’ To Get The Feelin’ and a dusty, coffee-stained copy of Eye in the Sky that had been left behind by some young lad from Birmingham who had sold hot dogs in the stadium a couple of summers earlier.

And even though nobody had heard of Alan Parsons, they all knew on instinct it wouldn’t do to have Michael Jordan taking the floor to the sound of Barry singing Mandy. So they slid the Parsons disc into the tray and the chemistry happened.

In the years afterwards, pre-game songs became par for the course at all NBA games and sports venues across the world soon began to adapt the trend for music played loudly and insistently.

Even at football grounds in England, where throughout the 1980s the pre-match entertainment had basically involved opposing fans thumping the lard out of one another, music was introduced.

Croke Park followed suit in the earlier part of this decade but the trend did not convince all GAA brethren: certainly, it will be a cold day in hell before we hear Jay-Z streamed through the redoubtable sound system in St Tiernach’s Park in Clones.

But since then pre-game music, like everything else in life, has become about individual choice.

In 2001-02 the Washington Post journalist Michael Leahy spent a year basically walking – uninvited – in Michael Jordan’s shadow and wrote a book about his unhappy comeback to basketball.

In the NBA (memo to GAA), media have access to dressingrooms until an hour before the throw-in and by then, Leahy noted, most players and especially Jordan were using headphones to block out the outside world.

In the years after that, it was a trend that quickly spread throughout the world. At the World Cup, all players wore headphones as they got off the bus, with the exception of South Africa, who preferred to sing their own song.

But at South Africa’s public training session in Johannesburg, most of their footballers sported personal stereos when they walked on to the field, removing them only when the trainer blew the first whistle – which half of them couldn’t hear. But music systems are everywhere.

Athletes wear headphones on to the track. Michael Phelps wears them out on to poolside and removes them just seconds before entering the water and creating a new world record.

A few years ago, a bus carrying one of the big GAA teams into Croke Park got stuck in the crowd and half of the players were wearing the big retro-type headphones that Dave Lee Travis had curled around his neck back when he presented Top of the Pops.

So the stars of the GAA are also lost in music. One of the pioneers of the GAA pre-game song in Croke Park was James O’Connor of Clare, who used to listen to Street Spirit by Radiohead before going on to the field. But it was just that one song – that burst of perfection – which he required.

Now listening to music has become part of the general pre-match routine. And there are plenty of genuine music heads among the fraternity of elite GAA players.

The days of GAA stars listing Simply Red as their favourite band in the match day programme are over.

But I often think their managers, most of whom played in the 1980s, are privately frustrated by the relationship their players have with their music systems.

If you look at most county managers closely, it is hard to imagine any of them having much interest in music.

In fact, it is a good bet that if you were to go through the glove and door compartment of the cars of all county managers whose athletic heyday happened to occur in the mid-1980s, sooner or later you will discover that the music collection of most GAA managers begins and ends with a cassette copy of Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits.

When a corner forward is flashing over wides from all angles or the normally tough-as-nails centre back is looking decidedly flaky, it must be tempting for the manager to conclude that “his head is not in the game” and to maybe draw the conclusion that the reason that his head is not in the game is because it is still halfway fried from his sounds.

But for most of the best players in the game, winding down or getting pumped through music may be the most valuable part of their pre-game routine: more important than what they drink or what boots they wear or – Heaven forfend – what the manager says to them in the seconds before they take the field.

Sooner or later, though, they are going to have to acknowledge the role music plays in their sporting lives.

We have already had Conor Mortimer’s memorable tribute to Michael Jackson. Others will follow.

Sooner or later, when a hurler from Kilkenny or a Kerry footballer is asked about the most important influence on his career, he is going to have to look directly at the television camera and announce to everyone that none of this would have been at all possible without the The Carpenters Greatest Hits.

“Croke Park followed suit in the earlier part of this decade but the trend did not convince all GAA brethren: certainly, it will be a cold day in hell before we hear Jay-Z streamed through the sound system in St Tiernach’s Park in Clones