O’Shea has gone viral and the GPA have gone missing
LATEST news as reported by the Gaelic Players Association is a malleable notion. On its website, the freshest story reports that Galway hurler David Collins has been elected president of the GPA. The story is dated March 9.
Given its enthusiasm for generating funds, the millions it receives from Croke Park and its success in revitalising the undeserved grants scheme for its members, it is surprising to find the association’s point of contact with the wider world so behind the times.
Dermot Earley, the GPA chief executive, could argue that their concern is the membership, rather than updating a news feed now 11-and-a-half weeks out of date.
That contention would be more plausible were the players’ body doing as they surely must and publicly engaging in the controversy still chuntering around Aidan O’Shea.
Now this is not to suggest the Mayo footballer needs anyone else to defend him. The supporters of his county mobilise quickly on social media in defence of their team, with little mercy shown to those deemed hostile to the cause.
He also has a manager who spoke out for him in the last two days.
There is, though, a more general issue for discussion here and the GPA should be central to it. In the space of a week, O’Shea’s motivation for playing football was questioned twice.
First, Bernard Flynn worked himself into a lather about O’Shea signing autographs after a challenge match while his team-mates huddled nearby. This was read by Flynn as the player deliberately distinguishing himself from the collective effort.
A few days later, a trainer called Fergus Connolly lambasted O’Shea in a newspaper interview for taking part in a TV documentary. Connolly has worked with, among other teams, the Dublin footballers under Jim Gavin.
O’Shea has an enormous profile, but Connolly said he should wait until he has won an All-Ireland before committing so willingly to publicity events.
Given the lack of insight in their contributions, the comments of Flynn and Connolly seemed more like attempts at getting noticed than analysis worth taking seriously. The latter also told a story about some Mayo replacements laughing during an Allianz League match when one of the Dublin statisticians dropped his notes.
From that, Connolly deduced that the county won’t win the All-Ireland in his lifetime. Given there is never long to wait for the next Connolly interview, perhaps he will expand on this in future pronouncements.
Silly as these outbursts were, it introduces a topic on which the GPA must have an opinion. O’Shea is one of their best-known members, and the body that counts in its number Ireland’s most famous footballers and hurlers should explore the implications of a footballer becoming an easy target for pundits or people pushing their books.
But there hasn’t been a word from them, and in their silence they ape the players they represent, who are shut off from the outside world for the summer as the stars become further removed from the people whose county colours they wear.
Their refusal to engage means teams and their management are leaving the stage free for others, and one of the consequences of that is pundits imputing motivations to players that seem absurd but that go unrefuted.
This has happened without public intervention from the GPA, and so one can only assume they are content to see their membership retreat into silence and become more remote within their communities.
However, in making themselves more exclusive, footballers and hurlers have become targets. It is common to hear, for instance, that O’Shea is too big for his boots, a player who has struggled on the biggest days and whose status is undermined because he has not won an All-Ireland.
No player should be protected from criticism, but as they back further into environments that have little in common with the lives of most of us, the space they are vacating is filled by pundits desperate to be noticed, with some of them willing to sound ridiculous in exchange for attention.
The growing estrangement between GAA players and the public has been tolerated by the GPA, but one consequence is the nonsense O’Shea has had to deal with.
In tirelessly pushing an agenda that has resulted in an explicitly defined elite within the games, the players’ body has inadvertently contributed to a culture where these sportsmen are seen as pampered, complacent and so worthy of often illogical criticism.
That should concern Dermot Earley, and it should also encourage the GPA to help hurlers and footballers rediscover their long-lost voices.