The best place to watch hurling now is on the RADIO
IHAVE a suggestion that might just kill two birds with one stone. There was a lot of anguish being expressed in horsey circles this week with regards to Willie Mullins’ absolute domination of the Irish racing scene after his stable won all eight grade one races over the weekend in Leopardstown.
There was a lot of talk about how one figure towering over the rest was bad for the sport which carried more than a faint echo of all the concerned chatter as to how Limerick’s dominance in hurling is undermining the game.
Perhaps the only way out of this is that we send John Kiely and Paul Kinnerk up to Carlow to train the horses and Willie comes down to the Gaelic Grounds to coach our hurlers.
And, you know what, even if that trading places fantasy played out for real, the likelihood is that Willie’s nags would still be first past the winning posts and Kiely’s hurlers would still be winning the All-Ireland. That is because you can’t beat class.
The reason Willie Mullins (below., right) is the most successful trainer in the country is because he has got the best horses and the reason Limerick are going for five-in-a-row is because they have the best hurlers. You might have thought that observation would be obvious to everyone, but you would be wrong.
The more successful Limerick have become, the more deranged their pursuers behave.
They train harder and longer, spend their time scanning nutrition sheets while digesting dumb bells and invest even more in complicating the most simple and beautiful game in the world to the point that the best place to watch a hurling game now is on the radio. Seriously.
I am in the middle of calving season at this time of the year so I don’t have as much time to sit down and watch a game, but I listened to Padraig Lodge’s radio commentary of the Dublin/Tipperary match last Saturday and I could scarcely believe my ears.
At one stage, as another Dublin attack petered out, Lodge made the observation that there were no corner-forwards in place to receive the ball and suggested that ‘old-fashioned people will be concerned at that’.
I kid you not. You are now so far behind the tactical curve as to be oldfashioned to want your corner-forwards to play as, well, forwards, which would mean that they would play in the proximity of the opposition’s goalposts where they might have a chance of scoring.
You might have heard your grandfather talk about how in olden times backs defended and forwards attacked, but that was long before clever coaches came along and decided that was too simple a way to play the game.
Instead, forwards now must run around until their GPS monitors start to smoke, and steer well clear of the full-forward line lest they run the shame of strutting down the catwalk in last year’s winter collection.
And now because the game is in a mess, there are calls for tribunals, task forces and whatever you are having yourself.
When all that is needed is a bit of common sense and some strong governance.
Common sense should dictate to those slaves of fashion that what they are doing is simply not working because they are not getting within an ass’s roar of Limerick.
Yet they still head out every weekend like the emperor with the invisible clothes, revealing things that we really do not have the stomach to look at.
But I have given up on common sense. That penny is not for dropping any day soon.
So that leaves governance, but the GAA leadership appears to have neither the wit nor the conviction to go and do something about this. I will accept that there are no easy answers, but there are a few things that could be done. A tighter cap should be put on both the number of training sessions held in a week and the maximum number of players on a panel should be cut to 30. No doubt this would be opposed by the GPA, which pretty much got its way by demanding extended ‘contact hours’ for its players in the association’s last stand-off with Croke Park, while out of the other corner of their mouth they continue to whinge about the pressure being put on their members.
AND a cap should be set on the maximum amount of money that can be spent on preparing intercounty teams. For pity’s sake, when there is a financial fair play system in place for the over-paid, over-sexed and over there, then we can surely manage to have one here.
Of course, any such caps would be marked by breaches rather than observation.
We saw what happened when the GAA introduced a closed season before and most likely the same would happen again when cutting back the amount of training time.
And the real amount of money that would be spent on preparing teams would not be declared anyhow – as is currently the case at any rate.
But just because you know that people are going to cheat the rules is no basis for not having rules in the first place.
The problem in the past is that GAA sanctions were too weak. Nominal fines and taking a home league game off a county that has breached the rules are barely irritants never mind deterrents.
But if proof emerged that a county team had breached training and budgetary rules, then the sanction should see that county kicked out of the Championship for the year. There should be zero tolerance to cheating.
No doubt, that will also be seen as an old-fashioned view.