The Gaelic Games Championship Season kicked up into another gear over the weekend with drama at every turn in the Men’s and Ladies Football, Hurling and Camogie.
2018 All Ireland finalists Tyrone were the major casualty in the winner take all Football Championship going down to Donegal in a rain-soaked and windblown encounter on Sunday. They joined Monaghan for a long winter of reflection after their dramatic last kick of the game loss to Cavan on Saturday.
Cork and Tipperary were dumped into the Hurling qualifiers as Waterford and Limerick secured their places in the Munster hurling final while Dublin and Wexford will also have to bounce back from defeats at Croke Park on Saturday to Kilkenny and Galway respectively.
The draw for those qualifiers took place this morning on RTÉ Radio One’s Morning Ireland and pitched Dublin against Cork and Clare against Laois.
Ladies Football and Camogie will have been disappointed once more with the lack of coverage given to their Championships in sections of the media on Saturday. Both organisations provide excellent news, reports and feature material to make it easier for sports editors to reflect a wider diversity of coverage but that penny of parity has not dropped yet for many.
We will be conducting a similar monitoring exercise this week to that which we revealed on Friday and which caused significant interest throughout the weekend.
Credit should be paid to those who do it better with The Irish Daily Mail devoting its back page to imagery and a report of Friday night’s Ladies Football clash between Armagh and Tyrone. Like all media they found room to give extensive coverage to the Guinness Six Nations finale, the Premier League and all the other sport but there was a greater sense that sport exists beyond those major global clashes.
Credit also to The42.ie whose sporting pages last night had reports of England’s win in the Women’s Six Nations, Man City’s win in the Women’s FA Cup Final in England and a round up of how Ireland’s female international soccer stars had done across Europe through the weekend.
Games were dotted across the weekend calendar with each of RTÉ, Sky, TG4, Virgin Media, GAA Go and various streaming services delivering the beat of sport into homes across the country.
Lockdown would be harder and longer without these games to light up the weekend and while not everyone would share that perspective, sufficient numbers do to make it part of the national plan to get through this.
Sport for Business Partners
