Time still on the GAA’s side to get all games played
If there’s a will there’s a way to get competitions finished, including U-20
CLARITY is a very difficult thing to provide in an era of such uncertainty. The Government can plan for administering first vaccines to 80pc of the adult population by the end of June but when a directive comes that one of the vaccines, one that this country, as part of the EU block, has placed one of its biggest bets on, can only be administered to over-60s, then that end of June target begins to veer off course.
Fixture planning for the GAA, in that context, is a lot less serious. Sport is sport after all and slightly lower down on the priority list.
But its importance to a certain age cohort was well articulated in these pages last week by the former Meath footballer and the county’s current U-20 manager Bernard Flynn, who bemoaned the absence of any provisional dates for the 2021 competitions in this age group when the national masters fixture calendar was unveiled.
Flynn’s point was that there was something for everyone else to aspire to in the weeks and months ahead but not for the one group which has, arguably, missed out on more life landmarks than any other. Flynn described them as a “vulnerable” group, a conclusion he says he would not have been able to draw prior to his experience of talking to them one-toone over the last few months.
Even minors will have an opportunity to get together and train, non-contact, in groups of 15, in less than two weeks’ time, even if the GAA has yet to signal clearance as to whether that includes inter-county teams. The presumption is it will.
Opportunity
While senior inter-county and club players got clear windows for competition, those at U-20 were left in limbo. Many players eligible for U-20 inter-county teams will already have missed out on a final day at secondary school, a Leaving Cert, a graduation day, a first year at college and all that goes with that, including an opportunity to play a freshers’ competition. Things they will never have again.
Like anything in this Covid age, uncertainty abounds. How could a plan, even a provisional one, be rolled out when there is no line of sight as to what date clearance is likely to be given to this group to return? But at the least, they will be back at around the same time that clubs get the green light.
The danger is that the U-20 competitions could get squeezed between the time required to finish last year’s minor competitions – some are only at provincial final stage so that’s a minimum of three weeks – and the acceleration of club championships through August.
Fitting everything into such a compressed schedule – the intercounty window has had to be clipped back from 27 to 20 weeks – is an onerous, if not impossible task. No one group is going to get everything they want.
Naturally, there will be disappointment that there is no qualifier element to the football championships while there is some simmering disgruntlement that clubs have been pushed to the back end of the summer to allow inter-county competitions to run their course, thus pushing completion of their competitions into later in the year with the inevitable consequence of darker evenings and heavier pitches. But with no definite starting date confirmed, what other option was there really?
And anyway, 26 counties will be free from inter-county senior activity after the second weekend in August when All-Ireland hurling semi-finals and an NHL Division 1 relegation play-off is played.
Many counties were only beginning their club championships on that very weekend last year and still managed to get them finished with plenty of time to spare when the league resumed on
the third weekend in October.
It’s not as if the club season can only start when the All-Ireland football final is finished at the end of August. In expectation of a competitive start in June, counties will have had two to two-and-a-half months to have played around with by then.
There is ample time for a meaningful season with no onus on competitions to be trimmed back and concluded by a certain date, with the exception of those that lead into provincial championships.
The last thing any club player needs now as they head towards a seventh month of inactivity, on top of threeand-a-half months last year, is another closed season. There’s no reason why club competition can’t follow the national lead and extend through winter and into 2022.
But for the current group of U-20s, the window of opportunity is small and getting squeezed.
For some, it could well be their only opportunity to represent their county at any level. It takes six weeks to run off at most, with a probable three-week lead in.
There is a way to run off everything that has been delayed and deferred in some shape or form if there is a will and some patience. The end of the year shouldn’t mean the requirement to bring competitions to an end. For once, the clock shouldn’t tick and the games should just be played.