The great English sportswriter Simon Barnes has the perfect retort for anyone who sneers at one sport in comparison to their own. If, say, a soccer man turns up his nose at rugby or a tennis fan chuckles at the very idea of watching a day’s cricket, Barnes sets out his argument thus: if one of them is nonsense, then they’re all nonsense. And if they’re all nonsense, then the one you like is nonsense too. Be a soccer fan all you like, revel in its complexity and immerse yourself in its beauty as you will, but don’t imagine for a second that it’s a better sport than rugby. Or tennis. Or cricket. Because there’s no such thing as better.
Kind of ironic, isn’t it? The one thing all sports have in common is their use as a tool for determining who is better at something than the next person or the next team. And yet when you apply Barnes’s logic to it, it’s impossible to measure the actual sports against each other. There is no better, only different. If one of them is silly, then they’re all silly. And if they’re all silly, then yours is silly too. So enough with the sneering.
Barnes writes for The Times of London. Occasionally he will write a column on his ongoing struggle with having to take golf seriously and will berate himself for just not getting it. “If football is not worthless,” he wrote a few years back, “then golf cannot be worthless. I’m convinced of this matter intellectually. But I still can’t quite believe that something you can do while also smoking can be called a sport. Ho-hum.”
The key here is that Barnes is willing to try. His heart may be heavy when it comes to golf but his heart is open too. It makes for some unique and brilliant sportswriting. I’m possibly being a little presumptuous here but I’m going to take a wild guess that not many of the good men of the GAA’s Ulster Council take The Times of a morning. Because nobody who has read a lot of Simon Barnes could stand over the dreary and stubborn decision they’ve made to keep Saturday night’s Armagh v Down throw-in time at 7.30, 15 minutes before the start of the Champions League final.
A little splash of background. The Ulster Council set the dates and times for their championship back in October and, as has been the case for the past couple of years, set one game for a Saturday night. Armagh v Down is the tie of the round by a distance, with Monaghan little more than an x-ray of themselves since losing half a dozen of their team over the winter and in with little chance of giving Tyrone a game.
Armagh have also just in the past few weeks unveiled a big sponsorship deal for their newly-refurbished 19,500-capacity Athletic Grounds in Armagh city. Or the Morgan Athletic Grounds, to give it its new and proper title. They spent over €1.2m turning what was always a decrepit old smashed mouth of a place into a modern stadium in which Armagh can now hold a home championship match after 16 years of having to go to Clones. The game against Down, their next-door neighbours and last year’s All Ireland finalists, is an opening ceremony of sorts. Or at least it was supposed to be.
It would be stupid to say that nobody noticed that Armagh v Down was going to clash with the Champions League final until after the semi-finals put Manchester United and Barcelona through but that’s obviously when the first real objections came to light. The Leinster Council, who also had a game scheduled for throw-in at 7.30, very quickly moved Offaly v Wexford to five o’clock the afternoon to avoid a clash with the soccer. But the Ulster Council stood firm.
“Some people tell me when there is an omnibus edition of Eastenders attendances are affected,” sniffed Aogán Farrell, president of the Ulster Council. “The Russian ballet certainly affected attendances of a major sporting event in England that I was aware of. Do attendances get affected by television? Of course they do. But can we react to everything on TV? I don’t think so.”
This is dark ages stuff. The fixture clash isn’t about attendance figures, although the crowd they get on Saturday evening will be pitiful considering the occasion. Make no mistake, the Ulster Council will be hit in the pocket for this because they’ve wilfully torpedoed their chances of attracting any constituency of floating voter to the game. But whether they get a crowd or not isn’t really the issue. That’s just thinking small.
Let’s think a little bigger here. Why won’t they move it? Because they don’t want to be seen to be moving it. Because they don’t want to be seen bending the knee to another sport. Because they can’t find any way to hold their sport up against another without sneering. So they compare the biggest game of the year in the biggest sport in the world to an Eastenders omnibus.
Look, the GAA have every right to run their games how they see fit. In a way, there’s even something admirable in the Ulster Council sticking their heels in here despite the fact that a wide gaggle of voices from Down forward Danny Hughes to GAA president Christy Cooney have questioned it. Defiance is a piercing bullet shot from the right gun.
But they should have kept it in its holster this time. Keep it for an issue that matters. They may think they’re standing up and proudly cocking a snook at the planet’s biggest soccer match but that isn’t what the outside world sees. They don’t see defiance, they see wilfulness. They don’t see pride, they see fear.
Contrast the open heart of Simon Barnes with the crass disdain of Aogán Farrell. I know which I prefer.