LAST UPDATE | 11 Mar 2019
DECADES AGO, WHEN the GAA was still in the throes of its ban on foreign sports, a Longford delegate to Central Council growled discontent at the fact his county didn’t get a mention in that year’s GAA annual.
When told that his county were merely the victims of limited space, the delegate replied sourly that they had “found space for a bloody rugby commentator”, in reference to an article written in Irish by Brendán O hEithir.
O hEithir’s varied life took him from the Aran Islands to the centre of public life in Ireland, and he became known as a poet, author, Irish Times columnist and, very briefly, the aforementioned rugby commentator.
Although primarily a GAA man, he spent a short part of his life delivering Irish-language commentaries on rugby internationals. As he wrote in Over the Bar, he found the gig difficult: a “challenge to find simple forms of speech to describe any activity which was neither discussed nor written about in Irish.”
His protruding memory of it all was seeing the Irish players’ feeble gesticulations in response to Noel Murphy’s being knocked out by Wales’ Brian Price, thinking to himself what would have happened had Price embroiled himself with the “Buffers Alley hurlers”, who would no doubt have “hurled the jock-straps off those Welsh hoors all the way to Holyhead.”
If O hEithir struggled to penetrate the singular vocabulary of rugby union half a century ago, were he confronted with the lexicon of today’s game he might well have quit before ever he had to consider the distance to Holyhead.
While Virgin Media’s coverage of Ireland v France last Sunday ruminated on Joe Schmidt’s legacy – “I hugely respect him…even though they have been out of form for a few weeks, that will have nothing to do with the legacy he will leave” declared Matt Williams – their broadcast exhibited one of strand of that legacy: the extent of the change in how rugby is talked about on television.
Virtually all rugby coverage has, in the last few years, been drenched by curious words and phrases largely singular to the game.
Following Matt Williams’ introduction of the “corridor of power” a couple of weeks ago, Sunday brought us Shane Jennings talking us through some Irish players “on the latch” and Shane Horgan talking urgently about something called “pendulum” defence.
That studios are now flooded with Schmidt’s retired players, and given that the novelist Julian Barnes wrote that we only need 15 minutes on a phone with a solicitor to find ourselves talking like one, it is understandable that men who worked with the Irish coach for years should absorb some of his precise phrasing.
In fairness to Virgin’s coverage, host Joe Molloy does a good job of cutting through the jargon and they also did a lengthy feature on body language – a topic on which we can all confidently declare ourselves experts.
TW Wrap can only lament that these players-turned-pundits didn’t soak up some of Eddie O’Sullivan’s unique phraseology, responsible as he is for aphorisms like “as useful as a trapdoor in a canoe” and “Peter Stringer might as well be looking for a Mars bar in a bucket of shit.”
If O’ hEithir was working in rugby today, he would also be robbed of the comfort in finding refuge in one of the game’s great clichés: the essential unpredictability of the French.
Not that this is Schmidt’s fault. The sad diminishing of the French rugby team over the last six years means they have made themselves a stilted, denuded and lamentably predictable thing.
Thus the only unpredictability on Sunday last came from the Irish weather, with Virgin Media dispatching David Wallace pitchside during a thunderous downpour as CNN might a reporter during some disastrous weather event in Florida.
Minutes later, the studio was bathed in rich sunlight.
Some things never change.
Rio is shown PSG
Last week also brought another Irish team into a French tangle, with Manchester United shocking Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League.
BT Sport presaged the game with a documentary called Rio Meets PSG, in which Rio Ferdinand travelled to Paris to get an exclusive, all-access look at the French champions.
Rio spoke of his fascination with it all, intrigued as he was by the city and the “project.”
He spoke to manager Thomas Tuchel -”not a dictator”, in the presenter’s opinion – and veteran players Dani Alves and Gigi Buffon, attempting to probe to the heart of why these legends of the game were tempted to spend their gloamy twilights at what is effectively a start-up.
That they are being paid fantastical amounts of money didn’t come up, oddly.
Rio also explored the commercial aspect of it all, fascinated as he was by their exclusive partnership with Nike Air Jordan; kits he testified as being “pwapah fashonistas.”
Rio has his own clothing line, so he was naturally enthused as he was guided around the club store, cooing “this is me” when he set eyes on a top that he was then told was worn by “Will Smith.
This part of the documentary became little more than a man indulging his narrow interests; like a sausage magnate being led down the Tesco Finest aisle and being dazzled by all that was possible for the humble sausage.
Not that Rio Meets PSG worried about how the sausage is made.
“They have positioned them so well, commercially” testified Rio. “It’s a great story.”
Rio decided against discussing why all this was happening in the first place, of why PSG are so eager to “become one of the biggest sports brands in the world.”
He elected to ignore the ambient rattle of the laundry through which the Qatari owners were giving their image a good rinsing; spending hundreds of millions of euro to angle the mirror westward and away from the ugly reflection of their repressive kafala work system which – in the recent opinion of Amnesty International – they have failed to reform in spite of promises to do so, preferring to use the PSG “lifestyle” to puff up their image to the rest of the world.
Instead, Rio celebrated the “lifestyle” that PSG are selling, of how they want to “celebrate being a trendsetter in football culture.”
So we return to the ancient question that has become redundant in rugby: which French team is going to turn up?
Sometimes, it’s just the one they want you to see.
SNL does EPL
Talking of organisations filled with oodles of exceptional individual talent unable to produce anything of substance collectively, Saturday Night Live recently tried its hand at a parody of English football.
Best of luck making it all of the way through this.
- First published at 16.20
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