Football

Kicking Out: Derry's silence surrenders control of the narrative

Derry County Board’s reluctance to engage with public discourse about the county’s finances has led others to fill in the blanks. Picture by Margaret McLaughlin
Derry County Board’s reluctance to engage with public discourse about the county’s finances has led others to fill in the blanks. Picture by Margaret McLaughlin Derry County Board’s reluctance to engage with public discourse about the county’s finances has led others to fill in the blanks. Picture by Margaret McLaughlin

THERE was always a great saying in Derry that originated from the time of the civil rights movement in the city.

“Say nothing ‘til you see Claude.”

We'd have heard it around the house, and us not the first clue who Claude was.

Claude Wilton was known as the poor man’s solicitor.

His unofficial slogan when running for election was: "Vote for Claude, the Catholic Prod".

Nobody in Derry said much during the Troubles. Touts were shot and survivors were shot again.

So you can understand why we’re a suspicious people.

That applies right across the north.

As a sports journalist, when you ring a GAA county official in the north, you can feel the suspicion down the phone.

“And what do you want?”

Sometimes they only think it. Other times they’d say it out loud.

Such attitudes have led to a tricky relationship between county boards and the media.

Yet good PR in the GAA is never hard to find.

Flick through the pages of any green-leaning local newspaper.

Not only do they promote the GAA as best they can, they lean heavily on it for sales.

The Irish News has never been any different.

On any given day, we could have anywhere from eight to 20 pages of GAA coverage.

A huge percentage of it promotes the games, the clubs, the players and the work they’re all doing.

It all comes in different forms. Player interviews. Manager interviews. Former players offering some gentle spin.

It’s mostly harmless stuff. Good days, it puts 50p in the meter that runs the national conversation.

Last week, for example, Steven Poacher stirred a hornet’s nest when he came out and said that Ulster champions Kilcoo were “probably the most defensive team that I have ever seen – they make me look like the Barcelona manager with the way they set up at times”.

This day week ago, all anyone in Down GAA was talking about that morning was Poacher.

Some would have agreed with him. Others would have scoffed. Plenty would have felt he missed the irony. Most will be keeping half an eye to see if his Bryansford team meet Kilcoo somewhere down the line.

That game, if it were to happen, does not need sold any more. The 300-odd tickets for Páirc Esler would be like gold-dust, even moreso after the ‘Ford’s remarkable double-comeback against Clonduff at the weekend.

Having begun their ascent from 10 points down in normal time, they brought goalkeeper Marc Reid out to midfield and played with nobody in goals after the second half water break. It hemmed their opponents in.

There’s a narrative around Poacher’s teams that would lead you to say, ‘grand so, they came back, but how did they end up 10 down in the first place? Playing shite football, that’s how’. And they might well be right.

But because he engages with the media, he gets to steer the narrative.

The truth is that most GAA journalism isn’t really journalism.

It’s not quite fan-with-a-typewriter stuff, but there is at the very least an unwritten code that we accentuate the positive wherever possible.

That is primarily because we rely, to some extent, on engagement and co-operation from those involved in the games.

There is a very obvious scratch-my-back element to it all.

But it’s not all puppy dogs’ tails.

There will be days that, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, there will be bad news to write about.

Whether it’s a row (usually is), a biting incident, some unsavoury sledging, or as is the case in Derry this week, the renewed idea that their financial position is beyond worrying, the public can’t close its eyes and pretend it never happened.

In his weekly column on Sunday, Joe Brolly claimed that the Oak Leaf county board has taken out a £300,000 loan and is £200,000 in the red.

While those figures have not been verified by The Irish News, it tallies with a story we ran last March.

I’d known Derry were in financial bother for a while before that.

Almost 18 months after the first news of their financial troubles, they have yet to put their hands up and tell the clubs the situation.

The most damning aspect of Brolly’s piece was that he had quoted his former team-mates Kieran McKeever and Fergal McCusker, both of whom are involved in the current setup. McKeever is vice chairman, while McCusker is on the finance committee.

I don’t believe he was doing it to kick his own county, but rather to make a wider point about the insanity of rampant over-spending by county boards around Ireland on their inter-county teams.

Derry just happened to be the example used.

I spent pretty much the entire first half of yesterday trying to get Derry county board to engage.

Voicemail left. No reply.

Message read. No response.

It became like The Day Of The Blue Ticks.

All any of them had to do was come out and say ‘we will be in the 2021 championship’. End of. Story dead.

It would be frankly unthinkable that Derry wouldn’t enter a team.

But because their media strategy is primarily to say nothing to anyone about anything, least of all when the story might be unflattering, they end up with a stream of negativity.

Take last night for example.

Rather than doing the simplest of things and broadcasting their championship draws on Facebook Live, the same as every other county in Ireland at this stage.

At the time of going to print, the plan was to do it behind closed doors at a CCC meeting.

I’ve absolutely no doubt that it was all above board and correct, but why invite any element of suspicion upon themselves when it is so much easier to just do things in the open?

Derry county board feel besieged by negativity, yet the truth is that they have failed to take control of any of it.

No media is more complicit in accentuating the positive than the GAA media.

Derry need to learn that lesson, and stop waiting for Claude to ring back.