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Kansas City Irish Festivals, Music, Pubs, & Events by an Artist in Ireland

Ireland v England. Six Nations. Dublin. Croke Park.

This is history. This is huge.

England at Croke Park.

Saturday, February 24, 11:30am KC Time

Three options.

1. The Pub
2. The Internet Pay-Per-View
3. The Dark Side

Option 1. Of the pubs possibly friendly to showing sports foreign to the US, The Gaf gets most credit. For knowing that the game is on and for wanting to show it. Probably because they have a New Zealand manager.

Alas Setanta still treat KC as if it had an actual Irish population (i.e. interested) the size of New York. It doesn’t, so the package to show the game live is too expensive.

However, you can actually watch the full game at The Gaf a day later on Sunday when the pub are opening up especially to show the game to a bunch of Irish and English lads who are turning up for it.

Some of them won’t know the result. If you do, don’t be a jerk like at least one Irish person last year, and ruin for the others. If you actually care about the sport more than the party you’ll get your moment.

O’Dowd’s pub on the Plaza said they are showing it live if it is on ESPN or Fox World Sports, god bless them. Setanta? No, we don’t have that.

WJMcBride’s Irish Pub out west by the Speedway say they have Setanta and if you just ask the manager to turn on the channel you can watch it there. Sounds like they’re not gearing up for a crowd, and probably because they have the same service as The Gaf so will only be showing a day later.

Option two. The Internet on Pay-Per-View. Setanta own this Irish world. Pay a few dollars. Watch it live online

Option three. Now I only know this because several years ago on a trip to the Far East I acquired an insatiable fondness for Canto Pop. And now I need to watch it free all the time. Peer-to-peer television does the trick. Or P2P TV, if you’re low on ink.

It’s not the market leader, but it is reliable; if you were to download something called SopCast, and start it up, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were several sporting channels showing something. I know for the Ireland France game I was happily hunting for Canto Pop when I saw a channel called Star. Bound to feature musical starlets I said, but next thing I know I’m watching Irish rugby players kind of make history. Full screen, like.

You wouldn’t believe how much Asian pop music I watched during the last year’s World Cup in Germany.

Amid all the jokes currently going around about 19-16 being the perfect score, and the English not being as strong this time around at Croke Park because they don’t have the machine guns and armoured car, I think people are forgetting that 19-20 would actually be a more fitting result. And does anybody believe that England won’t field a supposedly injured Jonny?

David McKittrick in the London Independent has some background on what this game means historically.

And the BBC explains why the England team were literally given a history lesson before the game.

Game on.

See Also:
   • Wanting Ireland to Lose
   • Wales v Ireland, Croke Park and all that
   • San Marino v Ireland: No results within 100 mile radius

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 4:00 pm and is filed under History, Ireland, O'Dowd's - Plaza, Setanta, Sport, Tech, The Gaf, WJ McBride's - KCK. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.