It’s heart-warming to read, courtesy of the Irish Independent, that LA Galaxy are recovering from their injection of celebrity culture. It vaguely calls to mind that great story of the Skibbereen Eagle keeping its eye on the Russian Tzar.
Actually, the piece, prompted by the meeting tomorrow of Galaxy and the San Jose Earthquakes (yes that’s plural — no point messing around with those club names, cheese eaters!), comes courtesy of The Times of London, as the copyright notice informs us.
Context: an Irish newspaper that already gives many multiples more coverage to British football than it does to the Irish game is buying in from a UK newspaper an article about a team in a famously weak league on another continent, written because of the showbiz connection, but in which, we are told approvingly, proper football considerations are at last winning out.
That’s globalisation for you! No parochial flies on us!
The problem with buying in and regurgitating British sports media pieces is that this method of padding content is designed for print and won’t necessarily work on the net, unless newspapers start charging for access again.
Irish fans fascinated by ManU, Liverpool and the rest may as well just read The Times. Irish newspapers facing this potential reality may be better off supporting a different league closer to home.
Already, Galaxy replica tat is on sale in some Irish sports shops, and if and when they or the Earthquakes go global and have bigger budgets than the EPL behemoths, bandwagon fans will be able to tap directly into the LA Times or the San Jose Mercury and won’t need media here to cheer-lead for them.
The Indo is far from being the worst offender in Irish print media in terms of contempt for Irish football: it has some decent LoI content and the usually superb Daniel McDonnell, and it has a proper dedicated Irish section on its website, even if it is rather unreliably maintained.
But syndicated MLS on a weekend when right under our noses we have critical league run-in clashes and cup semi-finals, with enough to fill a whole supplement? How lame is that?
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- Extratime
- loi.ie
- Eleven-a-side
- Soccer Republic
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- The Big O
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October 23, 2009 at 1:02 pm
“Context: an Irish newspaper that already gives many multiples more coverage to British football than it does to the Irish game is buying in from a UK newspaper an article about a team in a famously weak league on another continent, written because of the showbiz connection, but in which, we are told approvingly, proper football considerations are at last winning out”
My head hurts . . .
October 23, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Understandable… so would mine if I were a Liverpool fan.
October 23, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Or the Blues. Ever since I started going to the RSC everything has turned to crud!