TOM RYAN ON THE GAA’S FAILURE WITH FIXTURES
THE club-county tug of war has been with us a lot longer than you might imagine.
We had hardly walked off the pitch after beating Doon in the 1979 Limerick county final when one of my selectors came to me with a proposal.
‘Tom, we should ring the board and tell them that we are withdrawing our players to focus on the Munster Championship,’ he suggested.
Back then the National League was split either side of Christmas and was played in the same calendar window as the provincial club Championships.
‘By God we won’t,’ I vowed. ‘Because I am done with hurling the day I start telling players not to play.’
That was always my philosophy as a manager whether with club or county — I was there to facilitate players playing the game and not to obstruct them.
You hardly need telling that my kind are in the minority.
There are many reasons why the club-county tug of war has escalated into a full-blown crisis, but the most powerful one is that county managers believe that players are best served by playing as little as possible.
Actually, let me rephrase that. County managers believe that they are best served by players playing as little as possible.
And it is not just the man in the bainisteoir bib who is calling the tune, but the hired help in backroom teams who confuse the inter-county dressing room for a professional environment.
They make the rules under the assumption that players in their care have signed a professional contract with only the page stating their remuneration missing.
If I was granted one wish, I would deport the inter-county game’s professional hired help back to the colleges they came from because I truly believe we had a better game, and a more sustainable organisation, before they darkened our doorstep.
But that is only wishful thinking, so what really needs to happen is for the GAA to legislate to ensure their influence is curbed.
And if Croke Park is to deliver then hard and painful decisions have to be taken, rather than just tokenistic gestures.
The designation of April as a club-only month is every bit as tokenistic as the nonsense of a ‘manifesto’, which the GAA published last week.
Then again, at least it will give people something to look at because God knows there is likely to be little enough going on out on the field.
Tomorrow, Limerick’s club hurlers will play their second Championship match inside seven days and after that they will be left to kick their heels for around five months.
It is little short of a farce which underlines the futility of having a club window this early in the year, and some counties, like our neighbours in Clare, will not play any Championship this month.
It is hard to blame them as this is only a box-ticking exercise to give the impression that something is being done to address the crisis rather than a move to implement real change. What this means is that a lot of young club players will now hop on a plane and spend the peak season playing on the summer fields of Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York or wherever else.
How ironic it is that they will have to travel to the other side of the world to play Championship this summer.
But it is not really ironic — it is nothing short of a disgrace. So what can be done about it? The answer is plenty.
But it will take conviction and courage, which I am not sure are qualities in rich supply at the top of the GAA right now.
To fix the fixtures, the current model has to be ripped apart and we need to start again.
I am not going to pretend that coming up with a new schedule which meets the needs of the club and county game is an easy thing to do, but just because it is difficult is no excuse for not trying.
And for it to be achieved then Croke Park will have to be willing to lose something to gain a properly balanced fixture programme which will deliver for all its members in peak season and not just the elite few.
In short that will mean taking a wrecking ball to the inter-county Championships, getting rid of the round-robin format in the Munster and Leinster Championships and Gaelic football’s Super 8s, which, on first tasting, were anything but super.
And that is only the half of it. Getting rid of the round robin in Leinster and Munster should not be viewed as an opportunity to reopen the hurling Championship’s back door. The football qualifiers should also be binned.
That means less games and less revenue from the inter-county game, but it will buy the GAA time in peak season to ensure that the club game can thrive again and what price can you put on that?
It would also mean that less equals more when it comes to quality. And if you stripped away the media hype that confused high-scoring games for high-quality ones, you were left with very little to get excited about last summer.
If you reverted to a straight knock-out Championship, counties would not just exit the summer earlier but there would also be larger windows to play club games during the inter-county Championship.
Of course, that would not stop county managers holding onto their players but their cough can be softened if the GAA have the courage to do so.
The GAA should designate a number of weekends — and I accept this is tampering with the autonomy of county boards — that club championships (providing it obviously does not clash with the county team) are played.
And a significant amount of central funds should be withheld from those who do not comply.
Now that is a manifesto a lot of clubs would be happy to sign up to.