April has worked for clubs

ASK any GAA person and they’ll tell you – the club is the bedrock of the association. They’ll tell you that we must do more for clubs. They’ll tell you that the club gets a raw deal.

They’ll tell you that more needs to be done for the club player. They’ll tell you that we need to create space for club competitions, where there can be certainty about fixtures. It stands to reason the players deserve a decent slate of games and that they deserve to know when those games will be played.

All that being the case you’d think more people would be satisfied with the gap in the calendar the GAA have created in the month of April to facilitate clubs and, yet, there seems to be an increasing level of disquiet this past couple of weeks as exemplified by Colm O’Rourke’s column in last weekend’s Sunday Independent.

“Good riddance to April, a barren month of fake breaks and unfairness,” the headline declared.

The primary thrust of O’Rourke’s argument is that club competitions aren’t nearly as high profile as inter-county fare and that the back pages have been surrendered to European Cup rugby and football, to the Premier League and to the denouement of the National Hunt season.

“The first own goal of April was to leave the field free for other sports to take over the national media – and local media too,” he wrote and that, we feel at least, spectacularly misses the point.

For one thing most local newspapers have been jam-packed with GAA coverage over the past month. In a lot of counties – Cork, Dublin and Kerry in particular – club competitions have been moving forward at pace and, besides, is the GAA’s hold over the sporting nation’s affections so weak that a couple of weeks of talk about Liverpool and Leinster is going to do it serious damage?

We think not. A couple of weeks out of the spotlight is a price well worth paying for what we’ve got and really, when you think about it, was it that much different in previous years? Kerry and Dublin played their National League final last year on April 9, the only difference between last year and this for inter-county football is a week.

It is fair to say – as O’Rourke does – that not every county has embraced April as a club month. Some for understandable reasons. It’s near impossible for counties to proceed on the same basis. When Kerry start their Munster championship campaign about three weeks after Galway and Mayo do you can see an obvious imbalance. Overall, however, it’s been a qualified success. Sure there are concerns here and there – a glut of games in a short space of time puts pressure on pitches and squads – but it really been an encouraging couple of weeks. We must not make the perfect the enemy of the good.