LEARN TO PLAY THE GAME, TV3

I had the dubious pleasure of watching for the first time on Sunday last the coverage of the All Ireland Football Championship from TV3.

Last year the GAA auctioned the rights to provide coverage of the games in both football and hurling codes. Previously RTE had a monopoly on coverage since time began, with the exception of BBC Northern Ireland, which covered some of the All Ulster clashes.

I sat down to watch the Kerry-Monaghan qualifier clash at Croke Park. Initial impressions were good with sound analysis from the studio team, headed by Matt Cooper.

Cooper and TV3 impressed when handling the Rugby World Cup in 2007 so a similar refreshing take on GAA games was not an overly ambitious aspiration by the viewer.

There the professional presentation unfortunately ended.

The viewers were sold a pup. We had the bland and entirely unsuitable Trevor Welch commentating on the game. Is TV3 living on such a shoestring that they must employ this excuse for a commentator on GAA games as well as soccer matches?

He is bad enough at that pedestrian game because firstly, it is as slow as a caterpillar in the Olympic 100 metres and secondly there are only 22 players to identify instead of 30.

On Sunday, the commentary and camera work was appalling. You would see and hear better at a county final of a Junior Championship, when the committee would ask the least illiterate of its number to do the job for the sake of the club. This lad would then borrow a handy cam from a friend and bellow his way through the game. You can be sure though that he would know his players and those of the opposition. The viewer would be at least entertained.

The Kerry-Monaghan was a great match. Welch and his camera crew were a disaster and an embarrassment. Constant mistakes with identification of players followed by hasty corrections made the viewer cringe. The monotone voice that might as well be commentating on a particularly tragic state funeral, failed to grasp the important scores and events throughout the game. Poor judgement and opinion on pieces of action were constant throughout. It was an utterly incompetent display of commentating made worse by the fact that it was a good game.

Worst of all was the camera work. The panning of the action was atrocious. At one stage, the Monaghan corner forward was bearing down on goal and the camera stayed fixed in close up mode. The viewer was screaming for a wider view to see the context of the play, and the options available to the Monaghan forward. He could have been hurtling towards his own goal for all we knew. The dreadfully inept camera crew must have been on their first assignment after college – that is if they went to college at all.

TV3 paid a lot of money for the rights to broadcast GAA games. They should now go out pay good money to hire decent staff to protect their investment.