Originally Posted by
FahyForever
At the start of the season before last I wrote a long letter to the Mayo News, my local paper, complaining about the lack of coverage of football in the paper. It was completely fair, in that I stated that I understood that gaelic was the main sport in the area and that they had a responsibility to it's advocates, but I felt that giving a full page, with colour pictures, of some random under 12 match in Geesalagh was a bit much in comparison to the coverage football was given. Their main football man, Edwin Mc Greal, in fairness to him, emailed me back a long and detailed letter, explaining how they decided their insane 25:1 page ratio of gaelic to football and then went on to detail his plans for the upcoming year in terms of his paper's coverage of our sport. There was a huge disparity between what he promised and what he produced. The Mayo News is totally formulaic in it's approach to football. If it's Westport, stick it in. Which is fair enough, as it's a Westport paper. However, they think that one page for each of the divisional cup finals, two pages a week on general matters and a little bit of Oscar Traynor coverage will suffice. Moreover, some of the match reports, by actual paided reporters, rather than correspondant from the clubs, are tantamount to criminality.
Skewed assessments, abounding cliches and half-arsed conjecture dominate proceedings. Some of the reports I read last year were the equivalent to "What I did On My Summer Holidays" essays you expect to receive from nine year olds. Then again, nobody else is any better. Face it, media in our part of the world leaves a lot to be desired. The answer would be to give the match reporting jobs to someone who understands and enjoys football, and can write, rather than someone who would prefer to be eating doughnuts and watching Countdown. As for their pre-season predictions, I can only presume they close their eyes, take out a needle, and proceed to make Pr#cks of themselves.