Montrose should not take all the blame for confusion over the live broadcast of certain upcoming championship matches, writes SEÁN MORAN

IN JUST four years' time we will be marking the 50th anniversary of RTÉ's first live broadcast deal covering Railway Cup finals and All-Ireland semi-finals and finals, which cost the station £10, a nominal fee fixed to expedite an arrangement that was concluded more as a gesture to the station's first Head of Sport, Micheál O'Hehir, than as a money spinner.

It wasn't long before reservations about live match coverage cropped up in the report of the McNamee Commission back in 1971. Having surveyed declining attendances at big matches, the report concluded that live broadcasting of All-Ireland semi-finals and provincial finals should not be allowed.

The current situation in which matches are broadcast every single weekend of the championship would have been unthinkable then, and it's only in the past few years that the rights have become a particularly valuable commodity.

In common with much of the GAA's commercial dealings, the area of broadcast rights has become more lucrative but, equally, more complicated. This year's move away from a single rights holder demonstrates as much.

The main focus of coping with such multi-party arrangements fell on the Champions League model of sponsorship, three companies taking over from the title-sponsor format in use since 1994, with the appointment of a dedicated sponsorship executive. The break from single-broadcaster championship coverage has, however, the potential to be just as awkward.

Last Sunday saw RTÉ's monopoly on live broadcasts within the jurisdiction broken with TV3's transmission of the Clare-Waterford Munster championship match.

The organisation has to grin and bear it, having been allocated the vast preponderance of match rights, including a monopoly of all the big matches at the business end of the season.

Nonetheless the new season has already caused a bit of teeth-grinding in Montrose. The lightning rod for the flashes of grievance has been the difficulty that has arisen over the two Leinster championship matches due to be televised in the upcoming two weekends.

When it was reported - not entirely accurately - that RTÉ had "dropped" the Westmeath-Offaly and Wexford-Dublin football and hurling championship matches in favour of European Championship soccer fixtures the broadcaster was privately furious, having invested large sums in the television rights and the sponsorship deal for the hurling championship and ramped up its coverage with such innovations as live webcasts of matches with less box-office appeal than the main terrestrial broadcasts.

It's easy to understand the anger. The dates and times of Euro 2008 matches have been available long enough at this stage for them to be included in the various sports calendars published at the start of the year.

The GAA were not sitting down with their chosen broadcasters until March to thrash out a schedule, so the championship broadcasts clearly could not have been "dropped" in favour of soccer fixtures when the latter were already in place months before the GAA matches were agreed.

During June in years of international soccer tournaments there are limitations to what RTÉ can show. Whereas there is generally no objection to showing sport on two channels, that cannot be done on Saturday evenings, simply because programmes like the news and the lottery broadcast are not moveable.

A cursory glance back at the television listings for June of 2004 confirms there were no clashes on Saturdays between soccer and GAA fixtures and that the latter were played before the former kicked off - in other words not during evening hours.

None of this appears to have been a calculated slight on the broadcaster - just an example of what can go wrong duly going wrong. RTÉ always believed the matches in question would go ahead on the two dates, June 7th and 14th, in the afternoon and were unaware of the cross purposes until a couple of weeks ago.

The difficulties arose principally because no one picked up the broadcaster on its original proposals for Saturday afternoon starts, whereas RTÉ only discovered a couple of weeks back that throw-in times had been changed.

One of the reasons the purposes were crossed was that the negotiations on who was to get what slot, this year for the first time involving two broadcasters with primary rights, did not take place until comparatively late, and it's clear that not everyone was singing off the same hymn sheet.

It is believed that one of the initiatives arising from this will see television allocations decided a lot earlier in advance of next summer's championship.

Provincial councils, even one as co-operative as Leinster (whose chief executive, Michael Delaney, as long ago as 2000 expressed himself open to the idea of midweek, televised matches), do not like staging fixtures on a Saturday afternoon because the ordinary motor traffic around towns makes for chaos when supporters start trying to arrive.

Four years ago it took some spectators at the Cork-Tipperary qualifier in Killarney seven hours to get from Dublin to Fitzgerald Stadium as traffic seized up in the southwest on a Saturday afternoon in July.

Embarrassingly for RTÉ, one of the matches affected is in the hurling championship, of which they are one of the sponsors. Dublin-Wexford has the distinction of being the only match in the Leinster championship whose result could be regarded as genuinely open to doubt.

It's likely, however, that the situation will be salvaged, the match being brought back to a late-afternoon slot.

But once again there has emerged a tension between the GAA's commercial ambitions and the ability of an unwieldy organisation - relevantly in this case, four provincial councils, two broadcasters and a couple of central committees - to deliver the product.