GAA majority just don’t want it any other way
DEPENDING on where you’re coming from or where you’re going to, last week’s latest missive from GAA Director General Pariac Duffy is either wholly timely and appropriate or uncomfortably inconvenient.
Last week Duffy laid out 11 recommendations that he hopes would help better streamline the GAA fixtures calendar, alleviate some of the fixtures congestion that is a perennial problem and that would, in theory at least, help lessen the potential of player burn-out through over-training and match congestion.
Given what has transpired in Kerry last weekend and Waterford the previous weekend - where county championship fixtures have come so thick and fast as to create a whole set of headaches for games administrators and players - it seems Duffy’s proposals couldn’t have been come at a better time.
When better to get his message of concern across to people - players, mentors, officials - other than at the exact time several counties are mired in a fixtures fiasco?
Over the last decade some eight separate sets of similar recommendations have come from Duffy and his predecessor Liam Mulvihill and yet we still find ourselves talking about the very same set of problems that were there 10 years ago and more. Not only that, but the problems are getting worse.
But would GAA people have it any other way? I’m fast coming to the conclusion that the present situation is actually the way GAA people of all hues and persuasions want it.
They want the scenario we had in Kerry last Sunday when Kerry officials were making late night calls to their Munster Council counterparts to try to unravel a mess of their own making.
They want young players serving three, four and five teams and managers so they can say such and such won a county minor, a senior colleges and a district board medal in the one year while also training with the county U-21 and playing Fresher football in college. We love our supermen in the GAA so to hell with the threat
Dylan Mehigan, Nemo Rangers, in action against John Coffey, Stradbally in the Munster Club SFC quarter-final in Dungarvan last Saturday evening, just 24 hours after Stradbally had won the Waterford SFC title against Ballinacourty. Unsurprisingly, a tired Stradbally team lost to Nemo, who now play Legion of Kerry this Sunday in the semi-final even though Legion haven’t yet won the Kerry County Championship after last Sunday’s Kerry decider ended in a controversial draw between Legion and South Kerry
of burn-out.
They want to keep our inter-county players cocooned for the summer playing four or five matches over four months, while leaving the average club player swinging his arms from April to October with just a handful of league games to play.
They want our best footballers, our county men, to come back from inter-county duty and then play seven, eight, nine consecutive weekends for club and district team on increasingly heavy pitches.
They want to leave club footballers and hurlers head abroad for the summer months but miss no significant action in that time, so that they can have the best of both worlds: a summer away and a winter of football.
They don’t want extra-time played at the end of any or all matches; rather they want to have another day out and see the coffers get another chunk of change thrown in them.
They don’t want an end to the All-Ireland junior football and intermediate hurling championships, or the abolishment of the U-21 football championship because, well, they’re there now and we just don’t want to give up anything.
They don’t want to increase the number of two-code league weekends because if a fella wants to play football and play hurling then he should be accommodated, even if that means one hurler holding up an entire football competition or vice-versa.
They don’t want to establish in rule, as Duffy proposes, that players not selected in 26-man league and championship match-day panels must be available to their clubs. Why? Because to hell with it, if the manager says he needs six other lads sitting at home on their hands that weekend then fair enough.
The GAA - from top to bottom, especially at the bottom - don’t want any of these thing so let’s stop pretending to ourselves that we do and stop codding ourselves that it will happen.
We’d have assumed that the busiest people last Sunday evening and these week would be the club officials around the country formulating motions for the annual county conventions to help alleviate the fixtures mess that is rampant in the GAA and getting worse.
You’d expect some pretty well thought out motions to be appearing on clárs next month, and some fairly strong arguments being put forward to get those motions through county conventions and all the way to Congress to be passed.
Instead, what we’ll get is silence and inaction on the important issues. There will be the odd illthought out and badly worded motion of self-interest from some club or other that will probably be ruled out of order, or some aspirational motion calling on the GAA to solve world poverty or fill potholes.
We won’t get any imagination or courage. Why? Because deep down, if we’re being really honest with ourselves, we want the mess we find ourselves in year in year out.
We want the status quo, we want the controversy, we want the sense of persecution complex when others give it to us in the neck about shoddy planning and losing disinterested players and the growing chasm between the elite player and the grassroots.
Maybe it’s an Irish thing. Maybe it’s a GAA thing. Whatever is behind it it’s just the way it is.
One, maybe two, of Duffy’s less revolutionary proposals will be implemented next year or the year after but nothing to upset the status quo.
Future Directors General will come back with new (or the same) proposals and we will all wring our hands every October and November at the fixtures farrago and the flogging of players in deep winter.
‘Awful stuff’ we’ll opine ruefully suggesting that something must be done. Our ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ moment. But we won’t think about them because in truth we wouldn’t have it any other way.