TV VIEW: IT DOESN'T matter what sport you watch, the sexy part is the immediacy of the action unfolding. Sport has always had an inescapable splat, in your face aspect. The win or lose, the animation of high and low, of an ass-kicking or triumph, usually drowns out the less apparent trails that lead off in other directions.
The job of panellists, pundits, experts and the occasional professional spoofer is to try and bypass the more obvious aspects of a one-sided match and weave other issues into the experience. Dublin progress to the All-Ireland football semi-finals. Tyrone bow out. So?
You take what you are offered from matches. If it is a last-gasp point in which one umpire sees it good and the other does not but the referee makes his call, a lot of beer is spilled in the righting of it afterwards.
When a team has the match pocketed early in the second half other issues rise above the prematurely settled question of which side is going to win the game. Colm O’Rourke, Pat Spillane and Joe Brolly, under the guidance of Michael Lyster on RTÉ, watched Tyrone inexorably fall to Dublin. It was a slow -motion defeat that predictably arrived at where it had signalled it would do and so the former Meath star, O’Rourke, introduced the issue of retirement. Servants of the county like Brian Dooher were honoured and mentioned as players we may not see next year in the Red Hand colours.
The panellists spoke of Tyrone’s loss almost as part of the end of a natural cycle, magnified by the resounding proportion of the defeat. They spoke of the historical success of Tyrone, Spillane admitting that he was no closet admirer of their style but defaulting to praise for the three All-Ireland Championship wins in previous years. Dublin’s pounding appeared to push the door ajar for some Tyrone players to make a dignified exit.
The game prompted various thoughts. The joy that you imagine pervades the Brogan household when Alan and Bernard interchange passes, the clamour for adjectives when Diarmuid Connolly points as he did, the backdrop of the Ulster team’s recent history, Cormac McAnallen, Mickey Harte and his privately held, incomprehensible grief.
With venerable Tyrone fading under grey skies, Dublin grew in stature, fresh and emergent.
In Scotland, Irish rugby coach Declan Kidney sought some emergence with RWC 2011 looming. Anxious interest followed hooker Jerry Flannery and his body, if Rob Kearney could still play having been out since November, if the spanking new front row would hold, if Mike McCarthy would rise to his first cap, if the confident zip and vim was back with Luke Fitzgerald, if Paddy Wallace could plug a hole in defence and Fergus McFadden rise to the understudy role for Brian O’Driscoll.
You couldn’t help feel that with so many questions hanging over the team, it collectively weighed them down before the match began; an overwhelmed, over- freighted Irish team.
“There was no cutting edge,” ventured former Irish captain Keith Wood on BBC at half-time. Wood probably watched New Zealand beat Australia in the Tri-Nations earlier in the morning in what appeared to be an entirely different sport. “They are all playing confidently but they are missing the spark,” he added.
Wood watched as Ireland tackled high in an effort to wrap up players with the ball. That emphasis, he believed must come from Kidney with a health warning attached.
“The Irish tactic of holding players up in a tackle, I think that’s a risky tactic five yards out,” he said. The former Irish captain and hooker triggered imagery of Wallace or scrum half, Tomás O’Leary wrapping up Rocky Elsom after hitting a popped ball in Ireland’s second RWC pool match, or Ma’a Nonu or Jerome Kaino, if we get the chance to meet New Zealand. Wood let the question hang of who would bounce off who in those mismatches. Unlike Dublin and Tyrone in Croke Park, the rugby match in Murrayfield provided as many questions as answers.
Like Tyrone, though, golfer Tiger Woods played in a way that suggested well before the close of play at the WGC Bridgestone Invitational yesterday that he wasn’t going anywhere right now.
Tiger, you may say, has made some poor life choices while his former caddy, Steve Williams, at the time of writing has not. Picking up the bag of Adam Scott, yesterday’s final day leader, boorish Williams has almost immediately been rewarded.
Embittered by the public sacking by Woods, Williams was still involved at the business end last night. It provided an interesting sub-plot as the former all-conquering Tiger’s race was run long before the finish line.
