Each weekend we look back on some of the key moments in sport and how they relate to business.
Sponsor of the weekend
Insurance companies are perhaps the single most important sector for sports partnerships in 2015 and this weekends accolade goes to one of the numerous firms pitching their tent in gaelic games for a slice of the €25 billion annual premiums paid in Ireland.
Chill Insurance sponsor the Cork senior Hurling and Football teams who scored big high profile wins in the Allianz League on Saturday and Sunday. Their brand is prominent on the shirts of the players who are splashed across two days worth of national media.
Crossing boundaries
Social media was alight in the early hours of Saturday morning as Ireland secured a third win in four matches at the Cricket World Cup. Other results mean it will still be necessary to beat either India or Pakistan over the next seven days to make it to the quarter finals but their fate remains in their hands and once more the team have thrived in the most high profile event in the sport, watched by well over one billion people.
A measure of their ‘crossover’ success can be seen in the fact that one of the largest spontaneous celebrations for the victory achieved on Saturday lunchtime against Zimbabwe in Hobart came from the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis in Derry. Now there’s one to mark the importance of sport in bringing people together.
English Silver
Mark English provided the heavy metal from Prague as he secured silver in the European Athletics Championships over the weekend.
Spar will have been pleased with the payback from it’s Euro wide sponsorship of elite athletics with almost 8 hours of coverage on RTÉ television and radio over the past three days. It was neat timing to fill the gap between the RBS 6 Nations Coverage but nevertheless worthy of positive comment fro RTÉ who more often tend to be criticised for occasions when it does not cover sporting contests but on this occasion can be given a gold medal of their own.
Soccer Gold
There may have been less than 1,500 there but they did see history on Friday night when Cabinteely FC secured their first win in their first outing as an SSE Airtricity League member club. This is a heartening story of how a club that have worked brilliantly to build a community club with a strong juvenile contingent have had the guts to be ambitious enough to go ten steps further and make it onto the national sporting stage.
On Friday the traditional home of Blackrock College Rugby club swapped blue and white for green and white and the entrance to the grounds was adorned in temporary signs for the tenants. They were gone by Saturday as normal service was resumed for the mini rugby hordes but the memory of a large, loud crowd that would not have existed this time last year was good news for the League.
