Just don’t blame the WEATHER
Unless you put the whole of the island of Ireland under a Connacht GAA-style Air Dome, the fixtures schedule is going to be impacted by weather conditions. At some point, that penny is going to have to drop…
IT took Patrick Kielty to capture the viewing experience of TG4’s prime Sunday afternoon football fixture: ‘Huge congrats to Glen and Kilmacud for an absolute thriller in Newry. One of the most exciting games I’ve never seen.’
Like so many of those tuning in at home, Kielty’s comment was accompanied by a screen covered by a shroud of freezing fog that descended on Páirc Esler for the All-Ireland Club SFC semi-final, one of the most eagerly awaited club games in a long time.
Shane Dooley also had his say with a similar snapshot. ‘It’s a day for corner-backs... you could have a lad in a headlock and the ref wouldn’t see it!’
Spoken like a true corner-forward, the recently retired Offaly hurler having spent a career dealing with corner-backs — some of whom no doubt liked to dabble in the game’s darker arts.
Around the country, there were different versions of the same wintry conditions being played out, just not always on live TV.
Racing at Naas went, as did Galway’s Walsh Cup hurling game against Offaly, the latter abandoned just before the hour mark. Now whatever about trying to keep track of a size five O’Neills in Newry, the idea of trying to play hurling in the January murk was a whole other story. That’s why Cork v All-Ireland champions Limerick in the Munster Hurling League was pulled at the last minute, to the dismay of all who turned up in Mallow.
Back in Newry, Crokes manager Robbie Brennan was typically gracious in his post-match remarks, putting any beef from last year’s All-Ireland final fallout aside to express his desire that the team they edged out in that controversial final would go on and win it this time.
Now he did question the whole scheduling of the All-Ireland series at the same time. ‘I thought it was bananas to be honest, but the same for Glen, you have to say hats off to them. But if that was round two of a local championship, it wouldn’t go ahead. You couldn’t see what was happening in the far corner, we could have turned it over and won the ball and you wouldn’t have known.
‘It is not an excuse because we were beaten all over the park but it was a bit of a joke that it was played.’
The first semi-final between Castlehaven of Cork and St Brigid’s of Roscommon, screened on TG4 also, drew comment with the shadow of the stand meaning one half of the pitch had thawed in the sunshine and looked borrowed from summer while the other was frost-covered and straight from darkest winter.
‘You look at Thurles and half the pitch is frozen looking at it today on the telly and the other half is fine,’ added Brennan. ‘It’s a calendar thing again. It should be finished in the calendar year. This game even is getting lost between O’Byrne Cup and stuff like that.
‘It’s ridiculous it’s on this time of the year. You literally couldn’t see from the bench into this top corner so the ball could have been turned over. We could have won it. We didn’t know.
‘No issue, but if it was a Division 2 League game or Championship match it wouldn’t have gone ahead.’
However bad it looked on TV, pitch side, the players were able to see the distance of any play in front of them and just got on with it. Bar a Paul Mannion free that one umpire waved wide before referee Conor Lane overruled and allowed the point to stand — and that Shane Walsh kick at the end which sailed straight to the net — both sets of players adapted to the conditions.
The whole calendar year argument, though, is worth tackling.
Unless you put the whole of the island of Ireland under a Connacht GAA-style Air Dome, the fixtures schedule will be impacted by weather conditions.
At some point, that penny is going to have to drop.
The logic of playing off the club championships within the calendar year is almost a separate argument — because the idea that it would help the schedule doesn’t really stand up on weather-related grounds.
You just have to think back to the Munster club final involving Castlehaven and Dingle. That was played on Sunday, December 10, one possible date if the competition was ever finished in the same calendar year.
On the same day Storm Fergus blew across Ireland. The Munster final at the Gaelic Grounds was so disrupted that it was as much, if not more of a lottery for the players, than Newry.
It’s Ireland. The weather is always going to be a factor when it comes to scheduling. Especially when climate change is leading to increasing rates of extreme weather conditions.
The real issue is the failure to make hard choices when it comes to the number of competitions, especially all the issues thrown up by overlapping competitions. Instead of clashing with the likes of the O’Byrne Cup, there is a logic to removing those pre-season competitions altogether. Allow the concluding stages of the All-Ireland club competitions have this January window, along with the third-level colleges competitions.
That would allow a bit of wriggle room in the event that a match such as Glen versus Kilmacud Crokes had to be postponed for a week.
The Gaelic Players Association is fully behind such a move, pointing to how the preparation of inter-county players would benefit from a longer pre-season block that would ultimately aid preparation and injury prevention.
But the GAA continue to put the bottom line of extra revenue first, along with pandering to the wishes of inter-county managers who don’t care whether players have an enriching third-level experience if it impacts on their own squad preparations.
Watch how messy the annual tug-of-war gets in the following weeks over the multi-eligibility of those star college players who are also wanted for county duty.
It’s becoming abundantly clear that there aren’t enough months in the year to fairly and properly accommodate all of the competitions that are slated. Not if you want to be fair to the club, college and inter-county player.
The National Leagues and AllIreland Championships are now suffering from their compressed scheduling because there isn’t room in the split season to allow them to breathe — and also squash in the provincial football championships that have less relevance with a tiered round-robin All-Ireland series now in place.
The tough decision is ditching the provincial championships and re-enhance the status and value of the National League and All-Ireland round-robin competitions.
Hurling was the first to show the value of a round-robin championship
“There is logic to removing the O’Byrne Cup”
“There aren’t enough months in the year”
model where the games are brought to the people and to local venues. But it, too, needs another couple of weeks to breathe and allow teams rest and recovery — not to mention the space to better promote it and perhaps even show more on terrestrial television without the need for the GAAGO live streaming back-up.
Space would have been found with the removal of the preliminary quarter-finals and the slot for the finalists from the Joe McDonagh Cup. The tough decision would have been to ditch those. Last year’s vote though opted not to take a decision that would have reduced a round of games, allow extra space for the round-robin provincial championships to be even better, as well as reducing the gap of inaction for the provincial winners.
When it comes to the weather, the lesson from out west is that every province should have a Connacht GAA-style dome. The vision of provincial secretary John Prenty and others has really paid off in that respect.
Railing against the weather gods isn’t the answer.
Making the tough decisions over competitions is.