Amateurs, Dude
September 17th, 2007
With the amount of sports on at the moment, I picked a bad two weeks to go to America. Hundreds of TV channels, including dozens of dedicated sports channels, and 90% of them show nothing but college football.
In a country where 34.5 million people claim Irish heritage, I had expected it to be easier to find a place to watch the games. The Rugby World Cup is relatively easy to come by, since the Ireland games come standard with Setanta. I made it to the Hibernian Pub in Cary, North Carolina, to watch us blindly stumble their way past Namibia, and I’m happy to say that I didn’t go out of my way to watch the Georgia game. There was nowhere within 300 miles that was showing the Euro 2008 qualifier vs Czech Republic… although I gather that may also have been a blessing in disguise.
The one game I could not afford to miss was on today, and I was surprised to find that Napper Tandy’s Irish Pub, in Raleigh, was showing the All Ireland Football Final. We paid $20 each to watch the game, surrounded by Kerry people. What a disaster. All credit to Colm Cooper - he is a class apart. It has been a rough few months for Irish sports, particularly for a Cork person. Hopefully we can show some spark against France on Friday.
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September 23rd, 2007 at 13:23 pm
That quite as bad as the telly being switched over from the All-Ireland hurling final to some English Premier league soccer match in that epicentre of Irish culture, Dublin’s Temple Bar.