{"id":472257,"date":"2026-02-11T06:20:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T06:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/472257\/"},"modified":"2026-02-11T06:20:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T06:20:08","slug":"football-crazy-contradictions-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/472257\/","title":{"rendered":"Football crazy contradictions \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Sir, \u2013 I refer to Sean Leake\u2019s letter (February 9th), on the coverage of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/league-of-ireland\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/league-of-ireland\/\">League of Ireland<\/a> matches in The Irish Times. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">His point is well made, but the level of coverage in The Irish Times is no different from that of any of our national newspapers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The coverage of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/soccer\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/soccer\/\">soccer<\/a> in our newspapers has always been first and foremost about matches in England. I have often found myself searching through the sports pages here for any reference to news of League of Ireland matches. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">But this extraordinary level of coverage actually reflects the level of interest in English soccer that exists here.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Now if we were still part of the British Isles, this would, in my opinion make perfect sense.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">But on the other hand, we quite blatantly want the English national team to lose all their matches, yet fanatically follow the same players when playing for their respective clubs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Therein lies a contradiction which stretches my modest understanding of logic. \u2013 Yours, etc,<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Eamon O\u2019Flynn,<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Merrion Road,<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Dublin 4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sir, \u2013 I refer to Sean Leake\u2019s letter (February 9th), on the coverage of League of Ireland matches&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":363596,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,70426,596,32731,13198,85],"class_list":["post-472257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-england-football-team","tag-football","tag-league-of-ireland","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}