BROKEN DREAMS
Éire Óg Greystones voice their upset at fixture pile up
DR. BRENDAN CUDDIHY has said he has ended his long relationship as doctor to Wicklow GAA county teams after his club, Éire Óg Greystones, was forced to play the county Senior hurling semi-final and the county Senior football quarter-final replay in less than 24 hours.
There are also rumours that many of the county players who hail from Éire Óg may no longer be making themselves available to the Senior county hurling and football squads after Wicklow’s CCC failed to find an alternative to the fixture pile up last weekend.
‘We talk about fairness, but my job as doctor to these guys is their welfare and I have to look at them and say the County Board are making you play two games in less than 24 hours,’ said Dr. Cuddihy moments after the Éire Óg footballers were defeated in the football quarter-final replay against Baltinglass.
‘This is very bad practice. You wouldn’t see this happening in other sports. You don’t see it happening in rugby, you don’t see it happen in soccer. Our lads are being discriminated against, basically.
‘As a result, I have an association with the County Board here as a volunteer since 1985, I was here as a volunteer doctor for the Laois championship match and as of today I’m walking away, because I couldn’t be associated with, I don’t want to be associated with an organisation that doesn’t take player welfare seriously.
‘That’s the end of the road. We talked about player welfare all week and that has been ignored.
‘It’s on the GAA website that player welfare is paramount. Paramount means that it’s above all else. In Wicklow we talk the talk but we don’t walk the walk.
There is a saying from Ancient Rome: “the senators are wise but the Senate is an ass”. The officers of Éire Óg Greystones have respect for the individual mem- bers of the County Board, but we feel their collective decision-making process has failed our players.
Wicklow Chairman Martin Coleman said that at a County Board meeting earlier in the year, the clubs voted against starting the championships early and they were warned on the night by a member of the CCC that they would be playing games weekend after weekend and day after day in some cases.
He also said that he would be “very sorry” if Dr. Cuddihy was to step aside from his voluntary role.
THERE is a feeling of huge disappointment and anger in the Éire Óg Greystones club this weekend following the fixing of the Senior hurling semi-final and Senior football quarter-final replay on Saturday and Sunday of last weekend, within 24 hours of each other.
Éire Óg Chairman John Keane and Dr Brendan Cuddihy spoke on behalf of the club following their footballers exit to Baltinglass in Joule Park, Aughrim, on Sunday.
“After the Carnew match last week, I contacted Mick Hagan after the game, the St Pat’s game was still going on at this stage. I asked, the football was obviously fixed for this Sunday, and when were they thinking of fixing it and he said the Saturday, the day before. And that was his immediate reaction,” said John Keane.
“I said, ‘That’s impossible, very unfair, player welfare, we’ve a lot of players involved, eight players involved, four starters, and four who would come on’. And he said, “Well, we don’t want to put back the hurling county final. And I said, “If you put it back by one week, that solves all the issues’.
And he said he couldn’t do that. I asked why? He said, ‘We can’t’. So, it wasn’t even in his thinking at the time.
“We discussed leaving the hurling fixture as it was and moving the football to the Wednesday and if the hurlers lost on the Saturday then you just play next Saturday instead.
“So, Mick Hagan said he would think about it and the next day I rang him and he was gone on holidays to Clare. It was left over to Bridget Kenny. After many phone calls, they said they were having a meeting of the CCC on the Tuesday night. That didn’t happen. So, they met on the Wednesday night, and we got a one-line email saying the fixture was going ahead as stood. No reason why.
“We emailed them back and said we were very unhappy with the situation and we wanted to know the reason why. No answer to that. We met on the Friday night ourselves as a committee and with the management of both sides. The management teams were very unhappy, on both sides. The players were very unhappy, committee very unhappy and the club was very unhappy, but we said we had to the best for our players at that stage because we had done our preparations but the players still didn’t know if they were going to be playing or not.
“That was the club’s approach to this weekend. We didn’t know if we were going to be playing these fixtures or not. Massive games. Besides all that, there’s just the unfairness of it. I spoke to Martin Coleman, I spoke to Martin Fitzgerald and they sympathised but they both said there was nothing they could do as they don’t sit on the fixtures committee.
“Obviously, we lost both games, so we said we’d hold off, and we had the situation of Rathnew and Glenealy, (both clubs are involved in the Senior hurling and football championship and both have a cross over of players) but I know well that that won’t happen, the two teams won’t be back to back.
“But, if it’s good for the goose it should be good for the gander. It shouldn’t happen to anyone, but we shouldn’t have been put in that situation.
“As a club, we have been trying very hard to establish fair play, we’re in a soccer and rugby town, we have our own little section of GAA. We’ve doubled the size in the last five years, we have 500 juveniles down there, we’ve increased our teams from two to eight adult teams, we try to do everything right. We preach fairness, that the GAA is something worth playing in and being part of, but, how can I go down to these players and management and everyone and explain the situation to them. Like, how can we be playing two games on the one weekend. It makes no sense by any manner of means.
We are really unhappy about the situation. We could have given walkovers and f***ked up the whole championship from beginning to end. We could have went down the appeal route but we decided that wouldn’t be fair to anyone, to any team either but, at the end of the day, both teams are out this weekend, our season is over, our managements are probably finished and we have to start afresh next year with this bitter pill to swallow.
The player welfare issue alone, as Brendan (Cuddihy) will talk to you about, that is the biggest concern for me; asking those lads, Stephen Kelly, Billy Cuddihy, two captains who captained Wicklow in both codes in recent years, Darren Hayden who actually works for the county. He was adamant that we shouldn’t be playing this game. And maybe he was right. Maybe we have to go down that route. But we try to do everything right in Greystones. No two teams should play back to back. There’s enough weekends in the year. As I said to Martin Coleman and Martin Fitzgerald, if we had drawn yesterday in the hurling, what’s the plan? They said there was no plan’.
County Chairman Martin Coleman said that he was aware that the CCC had met on Wednesday night and that they had tried to find a solution but that none could be found.
He said that the county finals had fixed dates and they had to be adhered to, and that if Éire Óg Greystones had kept winning and the CCC couldn’t get the matches played due to the Greystones club looking for the dates to be pushed back then the county would miss out on the Leinster Senior club competitions.