LIAM GRIFFIN ON WHY THE CPA IS HERE TO STAY
Griffin still dismayed by attitude to clubs
IN most circumstances, a first anniversary is something to celebrate. A reason to maybe pop a bit of bubbly and reflect on the road from there to here.
To bring a group of like-minded individuals together and spark a movement that has drawn over 25,000 in support, surely that’s an achievement in itself in the space of 12 months?
Not quite for the Club Players Association. This is one group where every year of existence means that there is still a major problem to be solved at grassroots level in the association.
On January 9, 2017, the body was launched at the Ballyboden St Enda’s club on Dublin’s southside. Liam Griffin — the successful businessman and hotelier who will forever be associated with leading Wexford’s hurlers out of the All-Ireland wilderness in 1996 — was among the heavy-hitting top table, there as fixtures co-ordinator.
One year on? He remains exasperated at the failure to address the calendar as a whole, the GAA instead opting to make incremental change, going with the CPA’s original idea of a ‘club only’ window in April but putting no penalties in place to enforce it. Upgrading the inter-county scene with bold, new round-robin Championship elements in hurling and football that increase the number of fixtures for the top one per cent has also infuriated.
With president-elect John Horan set to succeed Aogán Ó Fearghail at Congress this spring, he can’t understand why the CPA remains on the margins as far as the GAA’s top table is concerned.
‘The next thing that has come out, the new president is doing a survey, a root and branch review around the country. Which we asked for. The one thing that would disappoint me is that he didn’t send that to the CPA. Now we have it and we’re going to do it ourselves. But he didn’t send it to the CPA and say, “I’m running a business. I could get feedback from my customers for free to tell me what was happening.”’
Why not pay heed to two surveys that have already been done, he wonders?
‘When the CPA commissioned their own one before last September’s GAA Special Congress, which rubber-stamped a new group-style Leinster and Munster championship from 2018-2020, the findings were stark.
‘Here’s what our survey found: 91.67 per cent are unwilling to wait until 2020 for a solution to the fixtures problem; 98.79 per cent think that club fixtures should be on the agenda for the forthcoming special congress; 95.43 per cent want the CPA to escalate its response to the GAA.
‘Now we did not escalate it. We’re going to hang in there and we’re going to work away. The only thing that would disturb you is that people are so angry they are going to take action. Just remember, 95 per cent of our members want to escalate things with the club. Yet they’re not prepared to listen to us with 25,000 members.’
If not the CPA, then he says why not take heed of a previous survey which explains their existence. ‘The most telling statistic of the lot comes from an independent source, the ESRI (Economic and Social Research Institute]), which is a government agency. They did a survey in 2013 ‘Keeping Them In
The Game’, [covering] all sports. ‘Their work in relation to participation in the GAA alone is actually enough subject for a national conference. That’s never happened. We have a 75 per cent drop out between the ages of 21 and 26 in Gaelic football. Sixty per cent drop out in hurling and camogie.
‘Contrast that with soccer. Now all three sports endure a sharp drop off from 17 to 19 years of age. But the fall-off is more severe for Gaelic games.
‘We are the ones with the massive issue. Why would that be? The average club player in soccer gets a game every week so he doesn’t drop out. But we let them drop out at a rate of 75 per cent.
‘All of the incremental changes pay no attention to that. That should be a worry for every single member of the GAA who has a love of the games. I’d rest my case on that alone.
‘It has to be worse now. The GAA have made themselves oblivious to that. Clubs are having to make do what they are getting. Some championships are just blitzes now. If we continue to do that, we’ll have a bigger write-off than 75 per cent which will ultimately affect the inter-county standard because the players won’t be coming through.
‘If I was the president tomorrow morning, I’d be saying “get me some facts here”. Everyone is talking sh*te here. You’ve got newspaper fellas giving out because the weather is bad while we’re filling the stadium for Ulster and Connacht in a rugby match they couldn’t get 50 at years ago.
‘Why are we so wrong? We want to put Laois against Offaly in a bad bog somewhere. If the fixtures were attractive, then people will want to turn up. That’s what the Ulster clash proves. They wouldn’t have got enough to answer the rosary 20 years ago. They’ve managed to market it and bring it to the top. And they’re B teams!’
With CPA chairman Micheál Briody warning of ‘carnage’ in relation to the 2018 fixture list, the knock-on effects of a few postponed games last weekend are already being felt.
‘Yes it’s going to be a bloody difficult season,’ adds Griffin.
As a sign they meant business, the CPA put countless hours into designing a series of alternative fixture plans only for them to be ignored. ‘Our “Plan Green” is miles ahead in my view than anything that’s out there,’ he says. ‘We took the provincial championship as stand-alone instead of National League. Then you have a graded Championship so you won’t have Dublin playing Longford in the first round. Those plans were never even considered.’
The CPA drafted eight motions for change at Congress but only one survived county convention. It concerned vote traceability that would allow a delegate’s vote to Congress be recorded and made public within minutes, giving clubs visibility to how their county voted. It was passed at Wexford’s convention where Griffin himself was elected as a delegate to Congress. That means the CPA’s voice will be heard after a request to address Congress was declined last year. A motion seeking official recognition was also withdrawn in the face of delegate opposition.
‘We’re not going away,’ he says, by way of closing. ‘We want to work within the system. We’re going to continue to point out that the problems are there.’
‘Some club championships are being run off as blitzes now’