Burnout fears over long GAA season
Rebel forward is itching to play again
CORK hurling star Shane Kingston warned yesterday that a wraparound GAA season would present a ‘burnout’ threat to players. The GAA may finish this year’s Championship at the end of February next year, but Kingston is not a fan of such a prospect. ‘You are looking at October 19 to February 2021 and that is like a 16-month season. The amount of people that will be getting burned out, picking up injuries they would not normally pick up has to taken into consideration as well,’ said Kingston yesterday. ‘That epitomises player burnout. If things are going as far as February, it will probably mean the Fitzgibbon Cup wiped. And if you are playing an All-Ireland semifinal or final in February, are you really going to be looking at the league a week later,’ added Kingston. The 22-year-old is hoping that whatever Championship format is decided at the end of the month, a second chance is built into it for teams. He said: ‘The fact there is so little preparation for it, it is probably right that teams should only have a second chance.’
ANEW roadmap presents new questions and no definite answers, but Shane Kingston is just happy with the direction of the GAA’s latest conversation.
‘No matter what way you look at it, people are going to be giving out. If you look at it positively, at least we have something.
‘If you were told a month ago you would have club championship in July and August and an inter-county Championship in October, you would have just laughed and said “no chance”.
‘The way you were feeling that time you would have taken anything and I am just happy to have something to look forward to it. I don’t mind what format it is,’ said Kingston yesterday, as he picked up the Electric Ireland Higher Education Rising Star hurler of the year award in recognition of his key role in UCC’s Fitzgibbon Cup success.
In one way, that relief speaks volumes.
After five months of a coronavirus shutdown, getting back is the bottom line but the details of how that will be achieved still needs to be ironed out.
The 11-week club window, starting from July 31, is generous enough to ensure most counties will have the space to go with an extended competition format — either through round-robin or losers rounds — but in a strong dual county like Cork, which also has to accommodate divisional teams, time, as ever, will be at a premium.
But is the 11-day window, from the resumption of contact training on July 20 to the scheduled resumption of competition, which may prove to be the most challenging and dangerous to players.
Apart from suffering a broken leg when he was a minor in 2015, Kingston has had a relatively free run with injuries but believes that the nature of this season will be challenging on that front.
‘Eleven days of contact so you will be picking up a lot of niggles. It’s not ideal but it’s better than not having anything. Hopefully, it’s only for one year and this thing won’t be coming back. ‘But a muscle injury now and you’d be like, “that’s only two or three weeks” but that could be your whole Championship gone,’ he added. It is not that players are not aerobically fit, but nothing can prepare going from five months without being exposed to contact sport to straight into helter-skelter high intensity Championship hurling.
‘At the start, I was training flat out but then I realised after a while, this is for the long-haul, not a few weeks, so I toned it down a bit,’ admitted Kingston.
‘I had my exams as well, so I said I’d take a break for a while. At the moment, you’re not matchfit. You can be as fit as you want, but when you are getting belts, trying to get the ball, trying to take someone on, it is completely different. I’d say nobody is match fit really, no matter how fit you are. It is a different fitness.’
And, by the time his business with his club Douglas is done, he will also be facing into an intercounty game unrecognisable in timing, atmosphere and format.
Conventional wisdom declares that Cork are a top-of-the ground summer hurling team.
It is perhaps a lazy theory but one which can lean on Cork’s woeful lack of consistency in the League — they last won the spring title in 1998 — for hard evidence.
Even if that is the case, Kingston
believes that, when the ball is thrown in come October, they will not be playing on bogs, and the players won’t mind either way.
‘Number one, it’ll be the same for everyone. Number two, the pitches will be unbelievable. I don’t think it will make that much of a difference.
‘You’ll be playing in the likes of Páirc Uí Chaoimh and Croke Park, they’ll be like a carpet.
‘For a lot of the Cork lads, we have won two Fitzgibbons in
January/February, so I think everyone is used to playing at that time of year,’ he pointed out.
‘They might not be the most favourable conditions, but you are going to go out and play anyway.’
What shape the Championship will take will not be known until the end of the month, but there is an acceptance that the roundrobin provincial format of the last two seasons will be shelved.
‘I actually haven’t really thought about that. I assume with what’s going on, would it be a roundrobin format? A straight knockout is probably the safest option, less games and less chance of spreading the risk I suppose.
‘Obviously I’d love to have it (round robin), if we were allowed to have it, but I don’t know.
‘It’s not up to me to decide anyway. It is the unknown really.
‘As I said we have something to look forward to which is better than nothing, so we will take what we get.’
‘Everyone is used to playing at that time of year’