“WHAT HAS THE game come to?” chuckled Martin Tyler as Roberto Firmino gently returned the child with whom he agreed to be photographed during the second half of the Merseyside derby on Sky Sports.
Hours later, after Mario Balotelli had Instagrammed his goal celebration for Marseille, the fatalists could tell Tyler at which point the game currently is: it’s gone, mate.
TV Wrap disagrees: the game ‘went’ a long, long time ago.
As elite sport becomes a television show, its main actors largely exist like celebrities and are treated like spectacles, as something to be filmed and photographed.
Balotelli turning his back to the crowd to film himself shows how happily complicit some players are in becoming so, but it suits much of the public too: by making celebrities out of our sports people it becomes easier to hijack their lives for our own benefit.
The absurdity of celebrity was the central theme of last week’s installment of TG4’s Laochra Gael series. It focused on the life of Seamus Darby, he of the “sensation of sensations” – the goal which detonated a Kingdom’s five-in-a-row expectations and instantly became one of the most iconic moments in the history of the GAA.
The problem with on-the-spot myth-making, however, is it demands a hero frozen in time. How to keep on living?
So while the founding premise of the Laochra Gael series is that there is no Irish landscape too sparse for dreaming, this episode carried with it the twist that the same land’s fruits in laurel can be too rich.
“The goal that turned my life into a nightmare” read a newspaper headline as Darby reflected on the aftermath of the goal.
He was, as Vincent Hogan of the Irish Independent testified, out five nights a week seven months on from the All-Ireland final; “pulled and dragged everywhere” in the opinion of Kerry’s Sean Walsh.
All the while, his daily life groaned and buckled beneath the weight of his hopping from one function to another.
After a decision to gamble his security on a pub in Borrisokane backfired, Darby left for London. His marriage dissolved and he ended up sleeping fully clothed beneath a radiator in a disused pub.
Darby testifies that he is happy with his lot right now, and has returned to Ireland after what his brother Stephen said was a kind of necessary exile.
It really was a place where he was trying to find himself, and it was the place he eventually did. He probably had to go that far away, and stay away for a considerable time, to appreciate the many good things he did have.”
Narrator Brian Tyers asserted that Darby’s goal “was no longer the property of the man who scored it”, but the same could be said of Darby himself in those frenetic months after the All-Ireland final, as he willfully became the property of just about everybody else.
The final word goes to Vincent Hogan, who meditates on the enduring message of the Darby goal.
“For GAA people everywhere, it was that Cinderella moment…that you have that shot. Like a boxer with a puncher’s chance. And that’s what sustains the unheralded in the GAA, that you have that puncher’s chance.”
Laochra Gael asked another question: what are we all doing to the puncher?
Jerry! Jerry!
One man who is unlikely to ever become tangled in someone else’s story is is Jerry Kiernan, the Kerryman who has steadfastly ignored convention to the point that he has spent a slice of the last quarter-century having a pop at the GAA.
That RTÉ carried live coverage of the European Indoor Athletics championships meant that our weekend was elevated by the presence of Kiernan, otherwise known as the RTÉ athletics analyst who didn’t have a long and meandering anecdote denounced as “rubbish” by Vincent Browne.
It is one of the enduring realities of Irish broadcasting – like the fact TG4’s GAA coverage must always be underrated, (regardless of the deluge of recent rating), and that RTÉ One is always either showing Erin Brockovich or Pretty Woman – that Kiernan isn’t on television nearly enough.
Nonetheless, when RTÉ shows the bit of athletics it permits us a look into Jerry Kiernan’s world, arriving as he does like a wise traveller from another world.
His is a world of meritocracy and precision, in which even time is measured differently. “One-tenth of a second is a lot of time, Peter”, as he explained to an audience more used to hearing that a week’s a long time in politics.
His depth of knowledge is extraordinary, yet it is delivered in such a way as to never feel overwhelming. With Kiernan, nothing ever feels inessential: if someone ran a 52.70 in Gent three weeks ago, it is of no doubt of huge importance to whatever we are about to see.
His is a kind of grudging but no-less sincere patriotism, which eventually triumphs over his passion for the sport.
Looking back at Mark English’s medal-winning race, he couldn’t help but be disappointed in Bosnian runner Amel Tuka.
“It’s disappointing for Tuka…but we don’t care.”
Kiernan is a rare example in televised sport in that he is utterly and entirely himself.
And in these days of falsity and celebrity…that’s a revolutionary act.
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