Cast your mind back a few years and you’ll remember how difficult it was to find out anything about a match like last night’s one, especially for those of us who reside outside Midwest’s broadcast area. If you weren’t one of the few frozen souls at the game, you’d probably have got the final result either on the sports news after the eleven o’clock news on RTÉ radio but if you missed that, you’d have had to wait until the following morning to get the result (and probably bugger all else) in the papers.  You could have checked Aertel as well but you’d have known in advance that there was no way they’d have bothered to get up off their lazy arses to provide information on something as niche as this.

I love the way that the web allows us to bypass traditional media sources and enables all manner of people – including, it should be pointed out, pro-active media organisations themselves – to get news stories out faster and in much greater detail than used to be the case.  I couldn’t get to Cloone last night for the U21 match but Club Mayo Dublin were providing excellent updates throughout the game (both on their website and direct to members via text messages) so it was easy to keep up with the action.  A few of the lads on gaaboard.com were also doing their bit and, of course, Mike Finnerty provided reports during and after the game on Midwest, which I was able to access over the internet.  The brief match report I did here last night, a second-hand account based on these sources, would have been a whole load briefer if I hadn’t had this information at my fingertips.

In the time since then, Club Mayo have provided a blow-by-blow account of what happened during the game, TIALTNGO has filed a good, in-depth match report and Mike Finnerty has produced for the Mayo News both an audio piece (unlike my efforts at same, there’s none of those bad ‘f’ words in Mike’s one) and a written report on yesterday evening’s match.  In fairness to the Indo, they also have a decent enough account of the game in this morning’s paper, while the Times provide the essential facts about the game but not a whole lot else.  But, of course, if you were interested enough in the game, you’d already have known all of this before these papers hit the shops.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Aertel, they’re still waiting for the carrier pigeon to return from Cloone with the final score.  Should we put them out of their misery, lads, or let them stew in it a bit longer?

UPDATE: Twenty hours after the final whistle sounded at Cloone, Aertel was at last displaying the result.  Tell us something we don’t know, eh?