County encroachment on club time hardens case for split season

WHEN the GAA’s Fixture Calendar Review Task Force unveiled its body of work after six months of meetings and consultations last December, it provided three options. One of the options was to play provincial championships in spring and move the leagues to summer.

Another option the task force looked at, without formally presenting, was multiple windows for such a structure. Built into the calendar were five distinct windows, four lasting three weeks, one just two weeks, in which there would be no inter-county games.

The first came in the last week of March and the first two weeks of April, with further three-week windows in May, June and July before a two-week stretch at the end of August.

The idea was that clubs would have their players for training and games for the first two weeks of the three-week window with counties having access for the final week in the lead-up to a game.

The task force mapped it out to show what it would look like in 2021 and, in theory, it looked like the best solution. Counties could conceivably play club championship games in May, June, July and August, all the time concurrent with the inter-county game.

Schedule

The schedule didn’t make the cut, though, because the task force, recognising the potential pitfalls of dividing the calendar in this manner, wanted to see how the implementation of a number of governance measures, also recommended, worked out first.

A new oversight unit – with four full-time fixtures analysts with responsibility for ensuring that clubs had sufficient access to their players during club-designated periods, with power to impose sanctions on counties who breach the rules regarding training – was proposed.

Such a schedule and such a unit operating effectively sounds better in theory than it would work in practice. The last week, as anecdotal evidence of county teams returning to training and issuing schedules as to when they would be training over the next few weeks, is evidence of that.

The ‘club-first’ decision, built on the primacy of community gain after lockdown and the fear that if a second surge did come later in the year and club championships had to be abandoned after inter-county games had been prioritised, the fallout for the GAA would have been enormous, was well-founded.

But, inevitably, it has placed clubs and counties in a scramble for players that will, in some cases, see only one winner. Maybe it was naive to think otherwise.

Some have been resistant. One county manager took it upon himself to seek compromise with clubs by engaging with club managers in his county this week but didn’t get the response he was looking for.

But, by and large, when players commit to a county team, it is very hard to deviate from the manager’s plans at the clubs’ loss.

In some cases compromise will work but the idea that county teams – without no competitive game in sight for 16 weeks from this weekend and, in some cases, no meaningful game for up to 19 weeks – are putting the foot to the floor so early is rooted largely in the belief that when players do return to their clubs they lose some of the gains made.

The Club Players Association pressed the GAA’s leadership last week on what it would do to “ensure inter-county players are not asked, or coerced, into training with the intercounty team before they finish their club championships?”

But how governable really is it? Boards can deny access to facilities but there are always alternatives.

What club is going to produce evidence that jeopardises their county player? How many county officials are going to admit knowledge of county-training sessions and risk being accused of not having the team’s best interests at heart.

The Gaelic Players Association’s call for the injury-benefit fund to be restored for inter-county training prior to September 14 has drawn inevitable criticism, because training up to that point is prohibited.

Restoring

By restoring the injury fund – the absence of which is one of the safeguards the GAA has tried to put in place to protect clubs – before then would be an acknowledgment that inter-county training is taking place and would be self-defeating.

But the call by the GPA is based on the reality that these training sessions are happening anyway. And, irrespective of what anyone says, they’re going to happen. If there is an injury picked up, it will be discreetly documented on the club’s watch.

Making any charge that there was a breach of rules is impossible without evidence or admission. The GAA found that out two years ago when it pursued 17 counties for alleged breaches of the training-camp ban. Only three received the penalty of the loss of a home league match.

More and more the solution may lie in separate club and county windows, something which the task force looked at, but didn’t recommend last year. It is unpalatable, in one respect, because it would require an even earlier conclusion to the All-Ireland championships; possibly early August, that would further compress the ‘shop window’ for the game to the wider public.

But it may be the only resolution to continued conflict in that everstrained Venn diagram.