Great Article in Sunday Indo
Not sure where to put this but its a great article, hits the nail on the head in a balanced way.
Sunshine supporters reign on
Paddy Come Latelys should look closer to home for focus of adulation
Tools
Sunday August 05 2007
THERE was something extremely dispiriting about the fact that Bohemians, Galway United and Cork City drew their biggest crowds of the season to a pointless trilogy of friendlies against Sunderland.
It was even more dispiriting to see the media hype surrounding these kickabouts (one particular newspaper which normally seems to take a perverse delight in ignoring domestic soccer gave more coverage to Roy Keane's press conferences than it would ever give to a whole weekend of eircom League action.)
Bohs, Cork and Galway will all host genuinely exciting matches this season, matches which actually have something at stake (honours for the first two, the avoidance of relegation for Nick Leeson's crew). Yet they won't attract anything like the crowds which packed Dalymount, Terryland and Turner's Cross last week to see a not particularly distinguished foreign team play at half-pace in warm-up games, the results of which did not matter one iota.
You can't consider yourself a genuine fan unless you make the effort to support the domestic game
If you're one of the people whose only sight of an eircom League ground comes when an English team visits, shame on you. Because you can't consider yourself a genuine fan unless you make the effort to support the domestic game. It is, after all, where Roy Keane got his start.
The hoopla surrounding Sunderland may be the most graphic illustration yet of how shallow the attachment of many Irish fans to teams across the water really is. This time last year there wasn't a Sunderland jersey to be seen in this country. Now, as if by magic, you can hardly move for self-proclaimed fans of the Wearsiders. As Niall Quinn likes to put it, "the brand is growing".
Apparently all it takes for the fan gene to click in is the appointment of a famous Irish manager. How trivial can you get? One minute you're a supporter of Manchester United or Everton or Newcastle United. One managerial change and a small bit of success later and you're in love with Sunderland. It flies in the face of what supporting a team should be all about, namely the loyalty which enables you to stick with them through thick and thin and makes the victories seem earned when they do come along.
Then again the Irish soccer fan can be a fickle character. Supporters of Keane were in the minority back around the time of Saipan. It took a couple of disappointing results for Mick McCarthy before the majority swung round to the idea that the Corkman had been traduced by the manager and the FAI. At the moment Keane is something of a secular saint, hence the rush to touch the hem of his garment last week. He certainly looks to have the right stuff to make it as a manager at the top level but he will probably need a better club than Sunderland to fully achieve his potential.
And when Keane moves on from the Stadium of Light? The erstwhile Sunderland fans who turned up in their box fresh stripy jerseys at Dalymount, Terryland and Turner's Cross will go with him. Especially if it looks like he's going to win something at the new club. Sunshine Supporters are like that.
Perhaps I'm being unfair to those people who have formed a genuine attachment to foreign clubs and have maintained this for years. Perhaps, but they still mystify me. The eircom League has its problems but take in enough matches in a season and you'll witness more than a few thrillers. In any event, there is a vicious circle effect going on here. People who make the lame excuse that they never go to local football because the standard isn't as good as they're accustomed to seeing on Sky don't seem to realise that if attendances were bigger the clubs would have more money to spend on players and the standard would improve rapidly. It's the stay away fans who keep the league in relative weakness.
For all our love of nationalist rhetoric, the post-colonial mentality still plays its part in Irish society. Witness the almost indecent excitement about Bertie Ahern being invited to address the House of Commons. The English parliament shouldn't impress us any more than the French, the German or the Swedish. But it does. And the Premiership shouldn't cast such a spell over Irish fans. But it does. This is what the Australians used to call, 'The Cultural Cringe'.
The sad fact is that attendances at League of Ireland (as it was then) matches began a precipitous decline when televised English soccer became a fixture on the nation's goggle boxes. Seduced by the event glamour generated by the mass media, fans weren't happy with the native product any more. Local clubs have been fighting a rearguard action ever since.
That faithful band of supporters who continue to resist the blandishments of the big league across the water and who are patronised, mocked and condescended to for their loyalty are, in my view, heroes. They saw Keane at Cobh Ramblers, Daryl Murphy at Waterford United and will have known from first hand experience just why the Sunderland manager is so excited about Roy O'Donovan.
As for the Foreign Football First brigade, well perhaps they should take a leaf out of their GAA counterparts' book. Fans of Wicklow, Carlow and Leitrim don't desert en masse to support Kerry footballers and Kilkenny hurlers because that particular bandwagon is more congenial. It's an odd irony that people are lionised for following their local teams in football and hurling and ridiculed for it in soccer.
It's not even as though there was anything particularly special on offer this week in Dalymount, Terryland and Turner's Cross. In my younger days I worked as a reporter on local papers in Essex and Hertfordshire. Pre-season, the likes of West Ham, Spurs and QPR would venture beyond the M25 to play the same kind of warm-up games everyone has been getting so excited about over the last week. No one took them that seriously or thought that Purfleet's 3-0 victory over QPR or Grays Athletic's 0-0 draw with West Ham United meant anything other than that the professional teams hadn't been particularly arsed that evening.
These days we're exhorted to believe that these friendlies mean something. The season starts earlier and earlier, teams play in pointless multi-national tournaments for meaningless silverware or embark on gruelling overseas trips which have less to do with football than with the promotion of commercial opportunities for the bloated corporate entities which the big clubs have become.
Those pre-season matches are just one example of how phoney the English game has become
Meanwhile, the propaganda from the television companies for whose benefit a lot of these games are put on tries to persuade us that these matches are something more than glorified training sessions.
Yet it won't be long into the season before managers are complaining about the demands on their players and suggesting that there are too many games in the season. This after carting their teams from pillar to post when the players would have been better off with a few weeks extra rest. Those pre-season matches are just one example of how phoney the English game has become with its culture of increasingly dodgy foreign owners, its merciless maximising of corporate income, its remorseless hard sell and its ever increasing tendency towards self perpetuating oligarchy.
If that's the game to which you want to pledge your allegiance, go right ahead. But the first thought of those genuine, lifelong and local Sunderland fans you'll be meeting this season won't be how great it is to see you suddenly supporting their team. Instead they'll wonder why all these Paddy Come Latelys aren't following their own clubs.
Will you have a good answer ready for them? Is there one?
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