IF there was ever a thesis done on Kieran McGeeney, the majority of its conclusions would be drawn from the 24-second clip just before Armagh went to war with Kerry twenty-two years ago.
A camera intrudes on their final pre-match huddle. McGeeney is not asking his team-mates to do anything. He is telling them to do it.
“I want yous to listen in here. I want yous to focus. Listen. Yiz go for the first ball like it’s your last. Boys, dig deep for the first 10 minutes. Give it what you have, the rest will come out. It is in your legs. You will not get tired. Do yiz hear me? Now boys I’m telling ye, the first ten minutes, go for it like your F***ING LIVES depend on it.”
He’s a paradox. Often borderline mono-syllabic in front of a microphone. Glaring. Thinking. Disagreeing. Challenging. Smiling inwardly. Making you answer your own question first. Glaring some more.
Rarely the animated figure that operated like a set of steel gates at the heart of his county’s All-Ireland winning defence.
Mellowed. Older. A different perspective.
The skin you shed is forever the one you lived in first.
He will always be that man in that short video. Emotional in a different sense. Raw. Vocal. Two hands on the wheel, driving Armagh football to its destiny.
If it weren’t for that nosey cameraman sticking his oar in just at the right time, late enough that nobody was gonna break Geezer’s flow to hunt him, what would we really know about exactly how he was inside the Armagh changing room?
It’s standard media fare to grumble over a lack of access. I’ve always promised myself that I wouldn’t write that column because A) nobody cares and B) see A.
This isn’t it.
It’s more from the point of view of engaging the public.
And on that front, the media sometimes doesn’t help itself. Particularly with football, the default position is negativity.
The games are boring, the structure’s no good, sure Dublin or Kerry will only win it anyway, yada yada.
In the last two weeks alone, we’ve had Limerick’s drive for five ended and Dublin knocked out of the football. We should be feeding off the momentum of it, building up the last few weeks of the season.
It is difficult to build when the inside doesn’t so much hold the public at arm’s length as it places itself on the far side of a moat.
But whether they understand it or not, the people involved in inter-county have a serious responsibility to sell the games.
The discourse around football is so boring.
It’s so analytical with almost no sense of personality.
That feeds into the negative cycle because when there’s nothing to talk about, you’re drawn analytically to what a team needs to fix rather than what it’s doing well. That leads to the perception of criticism, stuff pinned to a wall, another bit of the lead from media to team being cut away.
Take RTÉ's website this past week. If I missed other parts, I apologise, but the sole study on Limerick-Cork was a fine statistical piece by Eamon Donoghue on the dip in Diarmaid Byrnes’ form.
Why? Because it was there to be talked about and they didn’t give anyone anything else.
It all comes from a deeply embedded culture of fear. Not of the media itself, but of being seen to be brash or boastful.
There’s a strength of character involved in putting yourself front and centre ahead of a game.
Culturally, the GAA’s tendency is to shy away from displaying that its central figures have that character.
They do have it. We know they have. You can’t go out and perform in front of 82,000 people without it.
But nobody’s prepared to break the cycle.
So what RTÉ ended up focussing on instead was the manna dripping from Rassie Erasmus, both in his press conferences and his social media account.
Ahead of South Africa’s first test with Ireland, the former Munster head coach actually tweeted last week his prediction of what Ireland’s matchday panel would be, complete with their weight, age and number of caps.
Eben Etzebeth accused the Irish media of targeting him for comments he’d made in April claiming that “probably 12″ of Ireland’s players had said to him they would “see you guys in the final” after their pool stage win at the World Cup last year.
A summer tour went from off-radar to front and centre. It became an event you had to watch.
That fed into the game itself, a ferocious physical battle fuelled by its build-up.
This is a South African team that has allowed the cameras in to document the most intimate moments of its last two World Cup campaigns.
In Chasing The Sun II, Rassie Erasmus breaks down in tears as he tells the story of Makazole Mapimpi’s jersey.
The South African players were asked to submit photos of family members that would be printed individually into the number on the back of their strip.
Mapimpi only had photos of himself.
“He only had photos of himself… because he didn’t have anybody else. And I will say ‘why are you doing this?’ and he said his brother died, his mother died, his father died, and he doesn’t have a photo. So he doesn’t play for one thing. He just got [pff] massive heart… massive heart,” Erasmus says.
You instantly feel warmth towards them all watching it.
Look now, it’s started to feel like a media thing, but it’s really not.
Imagine for one moment that Padraic Joyce had come out before the Dublin game and said Galway would win it or that Dublin were looking tired or poured any little bit of fuel on the fire.
You can understand why they’d look at that and think yeah, that’s alright for you to say, all that does is motivate Dublin.
But there’s something to be said for having the confidence to back yourself publically.
We have no rivalries, no bad blood, no grudge matches, no anything.
It’s all pleasant and placid and PR friendly.
If hurling people knew that Adam Hogan and Eoin Cody didn’t like each other before Saturday, why didn’t they think to tell the rest of us?
It might have put another 10,000 on the gate and another 100,000 on the TV viewing figures.
There has to be some acceptance that a lot of the fair weather fans you might pick up couldn’t care less who plays as the sweeper or what Galway’s retention rate from kickouts is.
They want blood and they want fireworks and they want people to be at each other’s throats for an hour and a half.
That is what sells a sport.
Even Formula One is looking sexy again. They had the Verstappen / Horner row earlier in the year and now they’ve a very frank exchange of views between Max Verstappen and his good friend Lando Norris.
That is the stuff that attracts the middle-grounders, the fans who are in the market for sport and they don’t care what it is as long as there’s a bit of needle in it.
We are missing the needle so badly. Missing the insight. Missing the realness.
Everyone has to take a share of the blame for that – but it’s so fixable.