Next stop for this crazy train? A town called Professional
IT is peak calving season on the farm and my cows are the obliging kind. I spent most of last weekend in the calving maternity ward and the cows seemed to realise that it was a football only weekend in the Allianz League, they decided to give birth early and often because they knew that their owner had nothing else to be at.
It was much appreciated. As indeed was the neighbour who popped in to see me as I was ushering newly-born suckler whiteheads to their mothers.
‘Tom, you missed your profession, you would have made a great midwife,’ he declared.
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘If I was born into this world 50 years later, they would all have to be on contraceptives because I would not have the time to be a professional midwife and a professional hurler.’
The same man would be a Gael to his core, a great Limerick supporter and an advocate of the GAA’s amateur ethos, and it was as if I committed blasphemy.
“Whatever else,’ he sighed “don’t ever call hurling that.’
Indeed, so what are we supposed to call it?
What are we supposed to call a game where the country’s top manager, John Kiely, has openly declared that his players spend 30 hours a week training.
A pastime? A hobby? A wellbalanced life?
There was a time when I would have shared the same world view as my friend but then I had reason to because I had lived it as a player, as a coach and as a manager.
I had hurling, my farm and a career which led to me managing a large electrical engineering firm and yet I managed all three because I was able to put distance between each.
If farming was my vocation, the company my profession, hurling was my release.
I wonder how many players in the modern era, slaves to GPS units and nutrition sheets, can actually say that hurling is their release? Can any county player really say that?
Instead, they are pawns in an industry, driven by the egos and the lure of under-the-counter payments that drive management teams, who push and push to the point that the game is no longer a labour of love, just a labour.
When I played, I trained twice a week and maybe played twice a weekend. It was fun.
When I managed Limerick, my contact with players would never have gone beyond two training sessions a week. Outside of that, I never contacted them, they never contacted me. I had a life to live, they had lives to live and what connected us was the fun of hurling.
That was a different world. Players might not have had sculpted bodies, low body fat counts and high GPS readings, but they played hurling and they loved playing hurling.
People will read this and say that I am harking back to the past, but how bad can it be when the past was fun and our game was played with warrior intent? Now players’ lives are micromanaged off the pitch and are controlled on it by joyless game plans.
I am not a dinosaur, I expect the game to evolve and fitness standards with them, but only to a point where it did not diminish the experience of playing the game.
Now the GAA has got two options – cut contact hours and cap the amount of money that can be spent preparing teams. But let’s be honest the GAA leadership does not possess the courage or the conviction to do that. If they did, it would have happened by now. The other option is to simply make the game professional. Do not recoil in horror at that suggestion, because that is a future that was already being planned for when the GAA provided a report Looking Towards 2034 – the 150th anniversary of the Association – where the suggestion was that by then players and managers would be recompensed.
NATURALLY, rather than face up to the path they had allowed the Association to wander down, the GAA leadership chose to bury that report, but the one thing they cannot bury is reality.
So that is why if I was offered the choice of sticking my head in the sand or facing up to an unpalatable truth, I would choose the latter.
The truth is that the intercounty game is in such a crisis now that stopping the pretence of it being amateur and going professional would be an improvement.
After all, if you are asking players to train 30 hours a week is it not better for their mental and physical well-being that it becomes their job.
It would also mean that the GPA could no longer justify seeking money from the GAA to treat its members for the damage inflicted by an intercounty culture which the players body has happily supported. This, after all, is the union that was outraged when the GAA sought to minimise the amount of collective hours players were being asked to train.
Truly, you could not make that crowd up.
It would also mean that the under-the-counter payment culture to managers and coaches, which we all know exists, would wither and die.
Of course, it would be flawed. It would mean that money that is supposed to drift down to the grassroots would be absorbed almost completely by the game at an elite level.
It would mean that only certain counties could afford to go professional, Munster’s five counties, Kilkenny, Wexford and Dublin in Leinster as well as Galway.
But there is no point making a song and dance about that.
After all, who are we kidding? In this supposedly amateur game is that not the reality anyhow? Weaker counties have been underfunded and underdeveloped.
If hurling went professional, all we would be doing is exposing the warts that we all know exist but which currently are camouflaged by a mere dusting of amateur powder. It is not the way I want the game to go, but what is the other alternative?
If the GAA does not have the will – and for pity’s sake the runaway train that is the intercounty game has been coming down the tracks for almost two decades – where else do we turn? Where does this train stop? That’s right, in a town called Professional.
All aboard now.